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Or you can buy a controlomatic smarterspa salt water chlorine generator. I ran the bromine method here for years with great success but switched a couple years ago to the chlormaker and it's been great. almost completely set it and forget it (unless usage changes). You can still show with bleach once CYA is at 30 if needed. It only needs a couple cups of salt for a spa. x2 on the test kit with dpd chlorine test

For your next water change i'd think about going with Muratic acid since it's cheaper and you need a lot of dry acid to get it down.

Go over to the hot tub chemicals section of this forum and read all the sticky threads. that will give you enough info to make some informed choices and ask the right questions in that sub-forum. Water questions in this sub-forum don't usually get as much response.

get a taylor kit for bromine so you know what is actually going on. doesn't matter how you do it, as long as you keep bromine between 3-8 (my personal range) with a target of 4-5 and the ph at 7.6 (7.4-7.8 range). Use borax / borates it really does make things easier. Since you have the chemicals you can use them but i'd look to add a bromide bank and use a floater (if your usage goes down). With your current usage you could just use the dichlor / bleach method as described in the sticky thread which is basically what you are doing with the bromating granuales (which are mostly chlorine). Thier mehtod is not bad but you need to do a better job in knowing what's going on in the water.

Chlorine tabs are a bad idea in a spa. They are extremely acidic and will dissolve really fast in hot water. if you don't stay on top of the water you'll damage the spa. For your situation (which is very similar to mine, except i'm in 3-4 times a week) i'd recommend you go to the three step bromine method with 50 ppm borate. There is a sticky thread for this method in this forum. If you follow it you'll do fine with it. With the borax in my tub i rarely have PH issues (just bump up the TA to about 70-80) and as long as i don't run out of tabs all is good.

You are on the right track and the circ pump must run for the heat to come on. It could be as simple as a bad start/run capacitor or the pump could be siezed. I've found that capacitors on the pumps are often the best place to start if the pump will easily turn (use a screw driver or something to spin the motor on the cooling fins). I don't know the controls on the masters but if you can force on the heat or circ pump you should hear the pump try to run then it will likely give up. That's a bad starting cap and can be replaced for about $20 with a little looking around (i've found them on Grainger.com mostly). If this level of troubleshooting is beyond you then you could just replace the circ pump. be a couple hundred dollars and you have to wire it into the the control panel.

slightly over your budget but sundance optima or Marquis have great jet packages and features as well. Never been a fan of hot springs for powerful jets.

get a multimeter and start checking voltages. There are a lot of things that can be wrong in either the pumps or the control board. You have to narrow it down.

i don't see anywhere where you used a multimeter to see if you were getting power 110v to the heater. I am not familiar with how this tub works or it's error codes but there has to be moving water in order to heat it. Is there a circulation pump. are you getting flow? Is there an air lock in the heater that is not allowing water to flow through it? Use your multimeter to find out where there is no power when there should be. Follow the circuit.

if it's tripping immediately and won't stay on at all you most likely have it wired wrong assuming that there was no ground fault in it when you bought it. Did you see it operating? If the circuit was overloaded it would stay on at least for a couple seconds. You have a GF somewhere.

First things first, find the leak. sounds like it's very small since the water only went down 1" over a month. You could loose that from splash out if there were kids in there. if it doesn't leak then there is no reason to not then work on fixing it more. Since you used it for a month you know it works as far as heating, pumps and electronics. To replace the ply just tip it up on it's side (you may have to un wire it do that) (motor and control side down since that is the heaviest) and go at it. You can buy replacement spray foam in a can for spas and re insulate (after you verify it's not leaking). Replace the wood supports, any minimal amount of carpentry skills can handle that.

for decontamination follow this thread: http://www.poolspaforum.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=19115 start with a spa flush to make sure you get rid of that bio film which everyone here agrees you have. Then follow that up with a super-chlorination before dumping the water. I agree with chem geeks recommendation of an aftermarket salt water system like technichlor. you get the benefits of a chlorine system with the ease of a bromine floater tub. However, you said you used the same method before and you didn't have problems. You may find that after decontamination that your problems go away.

http://www.poolspaforum.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=19149 more info that you could ever want if you didn't notice this thread hiding up in the pinned topics separated by the ads.

make sure the cover lift they are selling you will work in your space. Most require at least 2 feet of clearance on the side it's lifting too so make sure you plan for that. Where i put my spa i had clearance issues with a deck railing so i needed the covermate III style that doesn't drop down. it also provides i nice privacy wall to the neighbors

N1oty is the best poster on this board when it comes to technical support. without the pros here this turns into people like me who don't really know what we are doing trying to help people who really don't know what they are doing which is no good.