dblcrona

Ok, my wife and I bought a Hot Springs Rhythm spa and it was installed 5 weeks ago. After installation one of the guys stayed around to fill it and do the start up and train me. He asked for a garden hose and didn’t think to ask me if we had a water softener. We do and it can be bypasssed easily. But he didn’t ask and me being a newbie didn’t know that it mattered. So. He. Filled my hot tub with soft water that was below 50ppm. This is where my troubles started. With the soft water the tub would not retain chlorine levels and the PH and alkalinity were like a yo-yo. So I kept having to put more products into the tub than I should have. After doing some research I learned about the water hardness and ordered product to raise the calcium hardness level. It was a powdered product and didn’t seem to help. I was told to get a liquid product and after adding that two times I got the hardness to where it should be. Keep in mind that during most of this mess the company I bought the tub from was closed for like a week and a half for the Holiday so I was on my own to figure out how to Co Trop my chemistry. And shortly afterward my tub began foaming and they had me putting in more products to stop the foaming. Now I’m at the 5-week point and last night I had to empty my tub and clean and refill it. Bottom line, IMO, the soft water issue started a chain of adding more and more products until the water was saturated with dissolved solids. Now I want to maintain it with as little product as possible to extend my water life at least to 4 months. All I have added so far is a startup amount of chlorine and right now all my chem levels are perfect, including hardness. I would love recommendations from the forum on what to use and what not to use moving forward to keep the dissolved solids to a minimum while maintaining my chem levels. ThNks a lot.