Stabalizer Issues

[wbryce]

Hello Guys,

I'm new to hot tubs, we bought a house that had a hotspring summit 2006 model and I've been fighting with the chemicals for the past 6 months and finally when you think you have it sussed, something goes wrong... previously I had to replace the water due high stabalizer reading when I was wrongly treating the water but I sought advice from a hottub company.

The past few days I noticed the PH and AK dropped, the stabalizer was in the ideal range on the ppm chart prior to be adding any chemicals to increase the ak/ph, I sorted the ak first and got that back into the ideal range, then I added 10 tea spoons of PH increaser, this brought the PH upto around 6.2ppm, still in the low range but the stabalizer went up 2-3 fold from in the ideal range, to around 150ppm in the high range.

Is there a simple explanation for this? am I doing something stupidly wrong?

p.s. I add chlorine granules daily and treat the water with non-chlorine shock once a week.

[chem geek]

Changes to the TA or pH will not affect the level of stabilizer, if by that you mean Cyanuric Acid (CYA). I suspect you are using test strips which are pretty much useless for measuring CYA and they can't measure Calcium Hardness (CH) at all (they measure Total Hardness instead which includes Magnesium) and they are only so-so for other readings such as pH and TA. Please get yourself a good test kit -- either the Taylor K-2006 or the TFTestkits TF-100. You can see a comparison of these test kits in this post.

You can read more about a method that won't increase the CYA level over time called Dichlor-then-bleach in Nitro's Approach to Water Maintenance and Dichlor/bleach Method in a Nutshell.

[wbryce]

Thanks Chem Geek, I will have a read of these methods, get myself a test kit, then take it from there!