Been lurking here for a while as I have had concerns about a friend's spa that I delivered and wired in for him bout a year ago. I'm house sitting for them watching their dogs, chickens, cats ect, and wanted to do a fresh fill of water in his spa. To be blunt, he has never filled this thing up right and started with a bromine reserve, even after I have told him numerous times how simple it is. He usually would end up using tons of defoamer, and almost every time I'd be out here the water would test out at nearly 0ppm of bromine. His answer was throw a shock in it and call it good, and refill the water every 2 months or so when it would start to smell odd even after a shock. His wife finally agreed with me to pickup the stuff needed to set this up right, and she's ordering the Taylor K-2106 kit when they get back, so for now I have to rely on test strips.
They are on well water, and I couldn't find a "spa stick" attachment locally, so I am pretty sure their water is quite high on the CH scale, unfortunately the strips I have don't measure the CH, but I have to believe it is pretty high. They do have a chlorine-filter injector system on their well, that injects a bit of chlorine water into the incoming stream and runs it thru a large blue filter unit, which I believe is there to reduce/remove sulfur and possibly iron, though again he never maintains that system either. I wonder how hard it really is to add a gallon of bleach to the 15gallons of water every 3 weeks, but obviously it's too much work for him. So I have that system setup right and I don't taste any chlorine or off flavors in their water, but even with that working I added 2.5oz of metal/anti scale stuff to the fresh fill of the spa.
I spent 3 hours draining, cleaning, rinsing, and scrubbing the scale from the inside of the tub, and rinsing again (yeah they had scaly buildup from what they believed was a blocked filter, but I tried to explain it was their hard water, course I had no idea what I was talking about).
Spa is 385 gallons, and I was following the bromine for beginners thread exactly except for the metal/anti-scale stuff and that I filled the tub from his hot water washing machine connection. He's got a great natural gas furnace that was giving 95F water to fill the tub all the way up to the "full level". I tested the TA and the PH after running the jets for 5 min just to make sure the water was mixed at an even temp, and that the metal/anti scale stuff was well mixed in. I got TA of over 360 (the highest the strips I have go), and a PH of 8-8.2. So following what I read I picked up 1qt of muriatic acid (31.45% 20 Baume), and hoped to bring the TA down to the reasonable 80-130ppm and the PH down to around 7.4 or so.
I have now added 3oz of acid and ran the jets for 1 hour. I got TONS of foam, and not the kind that goes away when the jets are off, I tested the water, still had TA of 360+ and the PH was right at 8. Recalculated my desired TA and PH in the pool calc with 385g water, shooting for 80ppm TA and 7.2 PH, added 4oz of acid, and let the spa run for 10 min, then did a test. The ph dropped to about 7.6 and the TA might have come down to 240ppm, but it was hard to tell for sure. I really wish i had the drops kit. Tested an hour later with running all the jets and the PH was back up a bit at 7.8, and the TA appeared to be at 360 again. 4 more oz of acid, and this time the PH dropped down to 7.2 after about 5 min of running, but the TA still seemed to be really high. Still getting some good amounts of foam, but I am hoping that once the water is balanced a bit and I shock it, that won't be an issue. Spa setup introduces ALOT of aeration to the water so I am pretty sure that part of the TA thing is on track.
Got another 20 min of running before I test the TA and PH again, but at this point I am concerned that I may be getting nowhere with fighting the TA, and that I am gonna need a lot more acid and time to get the TA down. I really want to use this thing as it's been killing me having it sit there and not jumping in for the past few days. My friend is due back in a few days and I wanted to have the perfect spa water setup before they got home. Anything I am doing wrong or obsessing over?