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TubShark

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  1. New to spa water care and to this site, I have a pretty specific situation that I'm struggling with and am kind of at my wits end. I've read through a bunch of existing threads and tried a number of things to resolve, but have not yet found a solution to my problem. I'll try to provide as much detail as possible and hopefully someone more knowledgeable than me about this stuff can help or even point me to an existing thread that could help! In general, my issue is that balancing my PH the way I'm doing it now is nearly a full time job. At initial fill, my water started out with the following attributes: PH: 8.0+, initial acid demand test showed that .75oz of PH down should bring it to 7.5 TA: 100 ppm Upon adding Sodium Bisulfate in .75oz increments to lower PH and waiting 6-12 hours in between, the PH did not change at all until roughly 6oz total was added over several days. TA did decrease incrementally with each addition and eventually got to 50-60 ppm and the PH finally lowered to 7.6. The tub then stayed relatively stable for a couple of weeks at which point the PH started to dive. I was then forced to add Sodium Bicarbonate to bring it back up and essentially ended up adding back about as much Sodium Bicarbonate over the following week as I did Sodium Bisulfate to begin with until it stabilized again. All during the process, I was careful to maintain Chlorine levels (using Dichlor) between 3-5ppm to avoid any false PH readings. To make things more complicated, after about a total of 10 weeks of constant maintenance, adjustment, and use, I shocked the spa (to 10+ppm chlorine) and the PH crashed and never recovered, even after chlorine levels dropped back to normal levels. At this point, no matter how much Sodium Bicarbonate I added, I could not get the PH to increase. Given that situation and given all the chemicals I had added along the way, I finally decided to just drain and start again hoping that my error was not waiting long enough for things to stabilize between adding chemicals. Unfortunately, after re-filling, I am now a week into the same exact cycle as before, now waiting 24 hours between chemical additions with exactly the same results as the first fill so far. As more context, I have a 3 month old 340 gallon Hot Spring Relay spa with Ozonator. When I originally filled the tub after installation, I had to decide whether to use water from my whole house softener or not. Before filling, the calcium hardness of unsoftened water was very high and would have required a lot of expensive hardness decreaser to bring down, so I chose the cheaper route of using the softened water and then increasing the calcium hardness with inexpensive hardness increaser. Given some of the recommendations I've read in other threads, I've ordered some boric acid hoping that it may help stabilize the PH and will add as soon as it arrives, but given the huge swings in PH I'm seeing I'm not confident that will resolve my issues. What am I doing wrong?
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