How To Reduce Your Hot Tub Maintenance

People buy hot tubs to relax and enjoy themselves, not to feel like they’re spending their whole life looking after them. Today, we will go over a few ways that you can reduce the amount of time you spend maintaining your hot tub and increase the amount of time you spend enjoying your hot tub!

REGULARLY TEST YOUR WATER

While this might sound as though we’re increasing your hot tub maintenance time, testing your hot tub water every few days will actually save you a ton of time in the long run. By regularly testing your water you can ensure that your water stays properly balanced. Balanced water is easy to maintain water. Unbalanced water can turn your hot tub water cloudy or green, cause scale to build up in the plumbing and jets and shorten the lifespan of the hot tub.

To make sure that your hot tub water stays in balance, test the water at home 2-3 times per week, making small adjustments as needed. Once per month (or if you notice something is really wrong) you should also take a sample of your hot tub water into your local retailer to have it professionally tested.

KEEP YOUR FILTERS WORKING PROPERLY

Clearing cloudy water can take a lot of time and effort. To ensure that your water stays clear, you’ll need to regularly clean your hot tub’s filters. To keep your filters clean and running at peak efficiency, take them out every 1-2 weeks and rinse them off to remove any built-up dirt and debris.

While rinsing will remove debris from the filters, built up oils and lotions will mostly stay trapped. To remove oils and lotions, you will need to chemically clean the filters every 3-4 months using a special hot tub filter cleaner.

Once your filters have been chemically cleaned, leave them out to fully dry. Over time, the mesh layers that the filters are made of begin to loosen, letting more debris through the filter. By allowing them to fully dry, these layers will tighten back up, increasing the efficiency of the filter.

REPLACE YOUR FILTERS

Even well looked after hot tub filters don’t last forever. Even if you properly clean them and allow them to dry, over time the filters will begin to break down and become less effective. In order to make sure that the water is properly filtered, you should replace your filter every 12-18 months, depending on how often you use the hot tub.

CHECK YOUR FILTRATION CYCLES

As you can probably tell by now, your filtration system is key to reducing the maintenance of your hot tub. While making sure that your filters are working at peak efficiency is important, equally as important is making sure that the filtration system runs long enough to let them do their job properly.

With energy rates continuing to increase, many hot tub owners are looking for ways to reduce the running costs of their hot tub. One seemingly easy way to do that is to reduce the run time of the filtration system. While this will lower energy costs slightly, it can cost you time and money in increased maintenance and chemical costs.

If the filtration system isn’t given enough time to properly clean the water you can quickly run into water clarity issues that greatly increase your maintenance time. Not only that, you will also likely need to purchase chemicals to solve the issue, negating the reason for reducing the filtering time in the first place.

To make sure that your hot tub filtration system can properly clean the water, we recommend that you let it run for at least 12 hours per day. If you’re looking to lower your energy costs, you can program the filter cycles to run during off-peak hours whenever possible.

Note: For hot tubs that use circulation pumps, the filter cycles should run 24 hours per day.

CLEAN THE PLUMBING WHEN DRAINING THE HOT TUB

Another way to reduce your hot tub maintenance is to make sure that the plumbing is clean. Over time, bacteria and other micro-organisms known as “biofilm” will build up on the inner walls of your hot tub plumbing and cause water quality issues.

Biofilm greatly decreases your sanitizer’s (chlorine/bromine) effectiveness in keeping your water bacteria-free, leading to water that can easily turn from clear to cloudy or green overnight. Biofilm can also cause an oily feeling ring to form at the waterline that can be difficult to remove.

To effectively remove any biofilm that has built up in your hot tub, add a plumbing cleaner such as Ahh-Some to the water before you drain your hot tub. Once added, allow the hot tub to circulate for an hour or so to give the Ahh-Some a chance to break down and remove the biofilm. You will know that it is working when you see a brownish green foam start to form on the surface of the water. Once this foam begins to turn white, you can drain, clean and refill the hot tub as normal.

SELF-CLEANING FILTRATION

As we previously mentioned, a good filtration system is the best way to reduce your hot tub maintenance. The better that system is, the less maintenance the hot tub will require. There is no better hot tub filtration system in the world than Hydropool’s Self Cleaning filtration system. If you’re looking to buy a hot tub that is as low maintenance as humanely possible, Self-Cleaning hot tubs are what you want!

Their industry-exclusive pressurized filtration system is able to filter all of the water in the hot tub in 15 minutes or less! This means cleaner, clearer, easier to maintain water, in less time. With Self-Cleaning hot tubs, you no longer need to decide between low maintenance and low energy costs. Because they filter the water so quickly, Self-Cleaning hot tubs only have to run for 6-8 hours per day!

Tired of vacuuming out your hot tub? Every Self-Cleaning hot tub also comes standard with a floor vacuum that automatically filters out dirt and debris that has sunk to the floor of the hot tub, further reducing your maintenance time.

All of this adds up to a hot tub that can have cleaner, clearer water with only minutes of maintenance per week; giving you more time for what matters in your life!