Water Care FAQ | Lifestyles Hot Tubs

Maintaining proper total alkalinity prevents wild swings in pH, reduces corrosion of pipes and fixtures, and reduces the scale forming potential of your water. Think of alkalinity as the buffer that keeps pH steady rather than something you need to chase on its own.

Adjust alkalinity before you adjust pH, because alkalinity is what holds pH steady. Chasing pH while alkalinity is out of range is the most common reason people feel like they are fighting their water.

To raise it, use an alkalinity increaser. To lower it, use pH decreaser. That sounds backwards, and it is worth explaining: pH decreaser is an acid, and acid lowers both alkalinity and pH. The technique is to add it in small amounts with the jets running, wait, retest, and repeat rather than trying to correct everything in one dose.

Bring us a sample if you are not making progress. Nine times out of ten the fix is simpler than the owner expects.

Maintaining proper pH is essential no matter what sanitizing method you use. If pH falls too low, water becomes acidic, sanitizer dissipates rapidly, pipes and motor seals corrode, and bathers notice eye discomfort. If pH climbs too high, water becomes basic, scale can form, water may cloud, and eye discomfort can happen at that end too.

Your target range is 7.2 to 7.8. To raise pH, use a pH increaser. To lower it, use a pH decreaser. As with alkalinity, small doses with the jets running and a retest before adding more will get you there without overshooting.

Calcium hardness is the amount of dissolved calcium in your water, and it matters in both directions. Too little promotes corrosion and causes persistent foaming. Too much causes scale, which builds up on heaters, jets and salt cells and eventually shows up as white flakes in the water.

Most spas do best between 75 and 150 ppm. If you have a salt system, aim lower, between 25 and 75 ppm, since scale shortens the life of the salt cartridge.

In Michigan the problem is almost always too much. Water in our area runs hard, whether it comes from a municipal supply or a well, so most local owners are managing calcium down rather than up. If your fill water is hard, treating it before or at fill is much easier than correcting it afterward. Vanishing Act calcium remover is what we recommend and stock, and it is available at all our locations and through our e-store.

Test your fill water before you fill. It takes a few minutes at any showroom and it changes what you need to do for the next several months.

Sometimes, and it depends on why your water is softened.

If your well water is high in iron or manganese, which is common in parts of Livingston, Genesee, Oakland and Shiawassee counties, softened water is usually the better choice, because those metals will stain your shell and discolor the water.

The tradeoff is that fully softened water can be too low in calcium, which causes foaming and can be corrosive. The usual approach is to fill with a mix of softened and unsoftened water, or fill with softened water and then bring calcium up to range with a calcium increaser. Either way, test after filling using strips that measure total hardness, not just pH and alkalinity.

If you are on a well, the simplest thing you can do is bring us a sample of your fill water once. We will tell you what it contains and what your fill routine should be, and you will not have to think about it again.

Two or three times a week for a chlorine or bromine spa, and weekly for a salt system, with an extra test after heavy use. Testing takes under a minute and it is the difference between managing your water and reacting to it. Most water problems people call us about started as a number that drifted for two weeks without anyone looking.

Test strips are fast and good enough for routine checks between visits. A liquid test kit is more precise, particularly for calcium hardness. If you want the most accurate read, showroom testing is free and takes a few minutes, and it is worth doing whenever your numbers do not match what your strips are telling you.

No soap or detergent should go into a hot tub. Bubbles sound appealing until they are spilling over the side and blowing across the yard, and the residue is unpleasant to sit in.

Most soap in spa water does not come from anyone adding it deliberately. It comes in on skin, hair and swimsuits. A quick rinse before getting in makes a real difference, and it is worth asking guests to do the same.

If you do end up with foam, a few drops of anti foam product will clear the surface. That treats the symptom rather than the cause, so if it keeps happening, see our foaming answer below.

No, and this is worth being firm about. Spa water is a much smaller volume at a much higher temperature, and pool products are formulated for the opposite. Pool chlorine in particular is often stabilized in ways that cause problems in a spa, and dosing designed for thousands of gallons is easy to badly overshoot in four hundred.

Using pool products in a spa is one of the more common causes of damage we see, and it is generally not covered by warranty. Spa specific products cost a little more per bottle and cost far less than a new heater.

We carry spa specific lines including Hot Spring water care, SpaGuard, Baqua Spa, Baquacil and SilkBalance. Our autoship program can deliver them on a schedule so you never run out.

Alkalinity first, then pH, then calcium hardness if needed, then sanitizer. Add one product at a time, run the jets for a few minutes to circulate it, and wait before you test again rather than layering several adjustments on top of each other. Chasing multiple numbers at once is the most common reason owners feel like they can never get their water right, when really they just need to slow down and go one step at a time.

If you shocked with a non chlorine shock, ten minutes is generally enough for it to mix in. If you used chlorine granules, wait until the chlorine level has returned to a safe reading (5 ppm or below), which can take up to 24 hours. Testing is more reliable than timing it, so check your level rather than guessing based on the clock.

Keep free chlorine between 1 and 5 ppm. 5 ppm is the safe maximum for bathing, so if you have gone above that, wait until the reading drops back into range before using the spa. Running the jets with the cover open helps it dissipate a little faster, though depending on how far over you went, it may take a while either way.

A few usual suspects. Heavy bather load burns through sanitizer quickly, as does hot weather and direct sun exposure. High pH also reduces how effective chlorine is at the same dose, so a pH problem can look like a chlorine problem.

One cause owners rarely suspect: biofilm inside the plumbing lines, out of sight, quietly consuming sanitizer before it ever reaches the water you can test. If your chlorine demand has crept up over time and nothing else has changed, a plumbing purge is worth doing at your next water change. See our Maintenance FAQ for more on that.

Work through this in order, since it is usually the first thing on this list rather than the last. Check your filter first, since a dirty filter is the most common cause. Then check pH and alkalinity, since either one out of range can cloud water. Then calcium hardness, since high calcium can cause a hazy look before it turns into visible scale. Finally check your sanitizer level, since water with too little sanitizer will not stay clear no matter what else is right.

For a deeper walkthrough, see our guide: Why Is My Hot Tub Water Cloudy, and How Do I Fix It?

Here is the part that surprises most people: a strong chlorine smell almost always means you have too little free chlorine, not too much. That smell comes from chloramines, which form when chlorine has already reacted with contaminants in the water and needs to be shocked to break the cycle. Well balanced water with proper sanitizer levels does not smell like a public pool.

A musty or stale smell, on the other hand, usually points to biofilm in the plumbing rather than anything happening in the water itself. If shocking does not resolve a smell, a plumbing purge at your next drain is worth doing.

Most colored water problems come from metallic impurities such as iron, which shows up rusty, copper, which shows up green, or other minerals. These can come in with your source water or can result from low pH acting on metal parts of your equipment over time.

If this happened on a fresh fill, the metals almost certainly came in with your fill water rather than out of your equipment, and that is very common on well water in our area. The fix is a metal sequestering product, plus a pre filter on your fill hose for future fills so the metals never get in.

If it happened to water that had been fine, low pH acting on metal components is the more likely cause. Test and correct your pH first, then treat the metals.

Check for symptoms of hot tub folliculitis, a bacterial skin reaction typically caused by inconsistent sanitizer levels. Contact your health care provider if you have these symptoms. Going forward, the best prevention is keeping sanitizer consistently in range rather than letting it swing low between tests, which is what allows the bacteria behind this to take hold.

These are almost always calcium scale deposits that formed on heater parts and flaked off. A SpaVac, available at any of our showrooms, is the easiest way to remove them. The real fix is upstream of this though: keep your calcium hardness in range using the guidance above, and you will see this a lot less often.

Foam usually comes from products people bring in on their bodies, things like lotions, makeup, hair products and perfume, but two causes stand out above the rest.

Unbalanced water is one, especially low calcium hardness, so staying on top of your water chemistry matters here too.

Swimsuits are the other, and it is not really the swimsuit itself but the laundry detergent left in the fabric. Clothes often do not get fully rinsed of detergent in the wash, and once that suit goes back into the spa with the jets running, the leftover detergent spreads through the water and foams at the surface. The fix a lot of our customers land on is a suit dedicated just for the hot tub, hung to dry rather than machine washed most of the time, and run through an extra rinse cycle on the rare occasions it is washed.

Test your fill water before anything else, especially if you are on a well. Fill through the filter housing rather than over the top, since that pushes air out ahead of the water and avoids an air lock in the plumbing.

Once filled, balance in order: alkalinity, then pH, then calcium hardness if needed, then sanitizer. Give the water a day to circulate and stabilize before you judge how it looks or smells, since a fresh fill often needs a day or two to settle in. Expect to test more frequently in the first week than you will once things are dialed in.

A salt water hot tub uses a small amount of salt in the water and a built-in system, like the FreshWater® Salt System available on select Hot Spring® models, to generate sanitizer automatically. That means you are not adding chlorine or bromine by hand as often.

For most owners it is easier day to day. The system does the sanitizing for you, the water feels softer, and you can go longer between water changes. There is still some upkeep: you will test and balance your water, keep calcium hardness in the lower salt system range, and replace the salt system cartridge on schedule. Salt levels stay low, well below the point where you can taste it. Our FreshWater Salt System guide covers the details, or stop by any showroom and we will walk you through how it compares to a traditional system.

Quite a bit, and this is the most useful thing well owners can know before they fill.

Michigan well water frequently carries iron and manganese, and it is usually hard. Iron will tint your water and stain the shell. Manganese can turn it brown or black. Hardness leads to scale on your heater and, if you have a salt system, on the cell or cartridge, which shortens its life.

The routine that works: use a pre filter on your fill hose, treat for metals as you fill, and test and correct calcium hardness before you do anything else. Do this once and you will spend far less time on water care all year.

Bring us a sample of your well water. We will tell you exactly what is in it and build you a fill routine around it, and after that it becomes a fifteen minute job at each water change instead of a running battle.

Yes. Bring a sample to any of our seven Michigan locations and we will test it while you wait and tell you exactly what your water needs. Fill a clean bottle from elbow depth with the jets off, cap it, and bring it in the same day for the most accurate reading.

This is worth doing at every water change and any time your water is behaving in a way you cannot explain.

These videos cover the ACE Salt System found on Hot Spring spas built before 2017. If you have a newer spa with the FreshWater Salt System, see our FreshWater Salt System guide instead.

Using SilkBalance? Watch our SilkBalance how-to videos or read the SilkBalance FAQ.