Chemistry drop-out with Questions on water chemistry

[scorpionc53]

Good morning,

I just fired up my tub for the first time and have some chemistry questions. I failed chemistry in school so I am by no means a water chemist. However, I'm really good at following directions and finding the correct information and am having a little trouble finding a clear answer for my specific question. Details below.

I received a couple items with the purchase of my new Hot Springs spa. I received the inline cartridges for the Frog system. I also received a startup kit for pro team spa. Talking to my dealer, they instructed me to follow the instructions for startup on the Pro team spa package, and then start the Frog system. So that's what I did, up until the Frog.

I figured I'll want to get this down and understand it fully since I'll be doing this every 3 or 4 months with a water change. Here's the steps I took.

Added Gentle Spa and let jets run for 20 minutes. According to description, Gentle Spa improves water condition and adds fragrance and moisturizers.

Then I added Metal Magic which is supposed to remove iron, copper, silver, and excessive hardness. I let jets run for 20 minutes before moving on.

The next couple steps is where I'm confused.

I added a sanitizer as instructed(Di-Chlor) to my tub and waited 30 minutes. After that, it instructs me to shock the water using Multi Magic. A quick google search told me that Multi Magic is their shock treatment, but my bottle says oxidizing shock, so I added that as instructed and waited 20 minutes.

After all this and before starting frog, I wanted to check my chemistry, so using a test strip, I found that my hardness, alkalinity, and ph were all good, although on the high side. My total chlorine was showing 10+ ppm and my free chlorine was showing 20+ppm.

Does it sound correct that I added chlorine then right after that, shocked it? The bottle for the oxidizing shock says it's a non-chlorine shock, but I was certain that the Di-chlor I added was the correct amount. Should my chlorine numbers have jumped so high? How long does it take for those numbers to come down to a safe level?

Once they're at a safe level, I'm assuming that I can put the frog system in and that will maintain my chlorine levels? Thanks in advance for the help!

 

Short Side-bar: While the color strips are easy, I'm more of an exact number type of person. Are there any good digital testers for hottubs/pools that someone could recommend? I've seen a couple on Amazon but it looks like they get bad reviews and the readings are not consistent.