Hey Brandin and Welcome !! Some things to consider : First things first is an accurate test kit as said above. The ‘guess strips’ as they’re known around here aren’t worth the paper they’re attached to. They will let you know there IS chlorine in the water, but how MUCH chlorine is anybody’s guess. So you can’t possibly know what you have, to know what you should do about it. The PH and TA part of the strips are only even close if you decipher the right shade at exactly 15 seconds later. Any more or less and the color changed again. Or there’s an extra drop of water on the pad so it doesn’t read right (not that it would be right in the first place).
A hot tub can swing so much faster than a large pool that proper testing is even more critical.
Also consider the proportions. One person in a 500 gallon hot tub is the same as 75 people would have been in my 35k gallon pool. Imagine how fast my pool would have clouded up from the body oils, sweat and other organic nasties. If you have 3 people in your hot tub, that’s literally the same gallons per people as 225 people in my pool. Let that sink in for a minute.
I had no idea how much gunk we carried before my hot tub. Suits fresh from the washer would foam from residual laundry sauces and hair fresh from the shower would leech shampoo and conditioner. and then we were all sweating in 104 degree water which was exfoliating our dead skin.
Case and point is that although a few uses per week is considered 'normal usage' for hot tubbing, it is a ridiculously high amount of usage from a chemistry standpoint compared to a pool. As such it requires far more treating to maintain the balanced water. smaller doses like 1/4 cup of bleach compared to gallons of bleach in a pool, but you may need to add them every 45 mins if you're having a long evening in the tub.
And yup, you guessed it, without a reliable testing method, its a random guess of where you are and how to get to where you should be.
