I own a pool, along with a stand-alone hot tub. I follow the methods here over the last several years, and have been successful at keeping things within spec.
The problem is my hot tub (1.5 years old), around 500 gallons. We only use it on the weekends at our cabin, and not even that much now since it is so hot out here in South Carolina.
It was coming up on our quarterly drain/clean/refill, and I always have a scumball floating around while we are gone during the week. It has really helped keep the spa water lines clean while we are gone each week. This week I came back, and our scumball was 100% saturated and bright red/orange. Like a rust color. I've never seen that before usually it just has a ring around it or hardly anything. I threw it away, and threw another scumball in it. It immediatly turned the same color. I decided to just do my quarterly scrubdown, drain, refill, etc...
Upon refilling, I threw in some bleach and baking soda since I knew I need to start with that each time. I also threw the scumball in there to see, and low and behold it was bright red/orange again. We are on well water, so I thought maybe I have an issue there. I filled up one of our bathtubs, threw a fresh scumball in it, and it isn't getting orange at all. I'm going to test the water coming out of the hose I use to refill just to be 100% sure I can cross that off the list.
I'm still balancing the chemicals for the refill, so I'll post those numbers here in a couple hours, but I can say that everything was in balance before the drain.
If I didn't have a scumball turning orange, I wouldn't even be looking for a problem right now.... so not sure how big of a deal this is. Image of the scumballs attached. They are completely saturated.
The problem is my hot tub (1.5 years old), around 500 gallons. We only use it on the weekends at our cabin, and not even that much now since it is so hot out here in South Carolina.
It was coming up on our quarterly drain/clean/refill, and I always have a scumball floating around while we are gone during the week. It has really helped keep the spa water lines clean while we are gone each week. This week I came back, and our scumball was 100% saturated and bright red/orange. Like a rust color. I've never seen that before usually it just has a ring around it or hardly anything. I threw it away, and threw another scumball in it. It immediatly turned the same color. I decided to just do my quarterly scrubdown, drain, refill, etc...
Upon refilling, I threw in some bleach and baking soda since I knew I need to start with that each time. I also threw the scumball in there to see, and low and behold it was bright red/orange again. We are on well water, so I thought maybe I have an issue there. I filled up one of our bathtubs, threw a fresh scumball in it, and it isn't getting orange at all. I'm going to test the water coming out of the hose I use to refill just to be 100% sure I can cross that off the list.
I'm still balancing the chemicals for the refill, so I'll post those numbers here in a couple hours, but I can say that everything was in balance before the drain.
If I didn't have a scumball turning orange, I wouldn't even be looking for a problem right now.... so not sure how big of a deal this is. Image of the scumballs attached. They are completely saturated.
