Hot Tub Care Tips from Bob Lowry: Keep Your Spa Sparkling

0:00This episode is brought to you by Hasa. Liquid is clearly better. Liquid chlorine is the highest purity, works immediately, has no added signaric acid or calcium, and it will leave your pool safe, clean, and clear. And by the bottom feeder professional grade battery-powered vacuum system, it sucks to clean pools, so cleaning pools sucks less. Get $100 off with code DVB100. This episode is brought to you by Schimmer, the number one pool service software in North America. With Schimmer, you can streamline your schedule, grow your revenue, and keep your customers coming back with five-star service. Whether you're a one-person operation or an established team, Schimmer is your partner in success. Visit getschimmer.com slash pool guy to try Schimmer for free for 30 days. Welcome to the pool game podcast show. In this best of Bob Lowry, Bob Lowry talks about hot tub

1:07care above ground spa care, everything you need to know about taking care of hot tubs out on your pool route. And of course, there are a lot of differences between taking care of a hot tub or spa versus an in-ground pool. Are you a pool service for looking to take your business to the next level? Join the pool guy coaching program. Get expert advice, business tips, exclusive content, and get direct support. For me, I'm a 35-year veteran in the industry, whether you're starting out or scaling up, I've got the tools to help you succeed. Learn more at swimmingpoollearning.com. Let's finish up here. We'll talk about spa's and hot tubs, and so there's this big debate about bromine versus chlorine hot tubs, or a lot of times you have the frog sanitizer, things like that. There's so many different ways to sanitize a spa. The newer ones have UV and ozone built into them. So what would be the best sanitizer for a spa in your opinion? Bromine, chlorine, ozone, UV? Well, I think each of the available disinfectants have their own characteristics that you

2:17end up having to deal with. And for many years, a lot of people use sodium dichlor, or they use bromine tablets. And again, the bromine tablets were a convenient way to just put the thing in a feeder and let it feed the right amount of bromine to the spa. There was some advantages to using bromine, and the advantages are that it works at a higher temperature, it works at a higher pH, bromamines, which are bromine and ammonia, getting together, don't smell, and there are active sanitizers. So it had those advantages. The disadvantage to bromine is that it is not an oxidizer. So it will kill things, it will kill bacteria, and it will kill algae, and it's pretty

3:19handy at doing that. But it doesn't oxidize sunblock, sweat, urine, soap, deodorant, air spray, lotions, powders, those kinds of things that we have on our bodies. It doesn't oxidize those. We end up needing a separate oxidizer, but there isn't a test to determine when you need an oxidizer. So you have to guess at it. So you use the tablets, and then you guess at that often, you need to add an oxidizer, and that can be once or twice a week. One of the advice that I used to give people with a spa is every time you get out of the spa, add an oxidizer back to the spa, a non-chlorine shot, add an oxidizer to the spa when you get out, leave the spa for 10 minutes

4:20and turn it off. And that way you will take care of most of the contamination that you brought in with you. And if you don't, then a couple of days later your spa is going to get a smell and stuff, and it's because the bromine can't kill that stuff, it can't oxidize. So you need to add either a chlorine shock or a non-chlorine shock whenever you get out. And so you can use bromine, but as I said, with a spa in particular, the chlorine level, the sanitizer level goes to zero very quickly. And 265 gallons of water. One gram of chlorine is one part for a million. And so it's a very small amount of chlorine to get a part for a million. You're talking about a teaspoon providing 25 parts per million of chlorine.

5:20By the same token, a person has a chlorine demand of about four grams of chlorine. So when they get in the spa, I've often said two people in a 400 gallons spa will use up one part for a million of chlorine in 15 minutes. And use up two parts per million of bromine in 15 minutes. So the chlorine level can disappear 15 minutes after you put it in. So it's important that we have something that supplies that chlorine back or that the homeowner is supplementing it either with adding some dichlor or some oxidizer when they get out and then let the bromine do its job. I don't think it's an either over. It's a matter of which one works best for you.

6:21The frog system that they've just come out with is essentially the same as a bromine data, because they put chlorine with it. And so it is a tablet of chlorine, but it doesn't have any signer acid. So it's a pretty cool system because it's chlorine without adding signer acid to the spa. So it's a viable alternative to bromine or using dichlor in there. What about liquid chlorine? I know a lot of people use liquid chlorine in spa. You can use liquid chlorine in a spa. No problem. Again, the people that say you shouldn't are the people that still believe when you have liquid chlorine and it raises the pH. And we now know that liquid chlorine doesn't raise the pH. So there's less of a reason to not use it. What about the, I hear this all the time and I've heard it since I started the industry that you

7:23shouldn't mix in the spa bromine tablets and then you shouldn't use liquid chlorine to shock the spa. There's something kind of some kind of reaction with that or is that just something that's developed into one of those myths in the industry? It's a myth. It's a myth. But you know, you need, if you're using bromine tabs in a spa, you need to periodically shock it. And you can, it's your choice what you want to shock it with. You can shock it with liquid chlorine. You can shock it with dichlor. You can shock it with calico. You can shock it with monopersulfate or non-ploring shock or even hydrogen poranza. What about like the UV and ozone that are coming with a new response? You think those are good methods? I know people think that having the UV and ozone means they don't need chlorine in their spa, which is not true, right? That is absolutely not true. Okay. And, and part, the biggest reason, which I said earlier today,

8:25was from Vader to Vader transmission. And think about this. UV, the only thing that is, the only things that are being killed or changed are things that are passing within one inch of that UV bowl. So anything that's in the spa that's attached or too big to get into the system, it's not seeing the UV. So if you have a biofilm growing, if you're an algae growing or whatever, it's not going to where the UV is. So it only kills stuff going through it. And the UV system, the, the bulb is usually inside of a an optically clear sleeve. And if that sleeve gets dirty from soap, oil, calcium, magnesium, whatever, if it gets a deposit or against soap film or

9:31something on it, it changes the optics of that, that glass sleeve. And you no longer are putting out the proper wavelength to give rid of any of them. The, the proper wavelength to kill things with UV is 254 nanometers. And if you make that sleeve dirty, it's no longer out putting up 254 nanometers, which means it's not killing anything. So if it gets dirty, it's not killing anything. Ozone, ozone is very careful stuff. It can be up to 2,000 times more powerful than flour. But it only exists in water under good conditions, under great conditions for between three and 15 minutes. That's good. So three to 15 minutes. And most of the time, especially in a spa,

10:34the ozone lasts for seconds. So, and, and you can prove that by actually sticking your nose as close as you can to a return line. And if you can't smell ozone in that return, then you probably don't have any ozone getting into the spa. An oxidation is being done within literally a few inches of the ozone layer. And the smell of that? What is that, Bob? When you smell it, you say? Yeah. People have, have likened the smell of ozone to either wet hay. Some people never get near hay. Around a, when there is a thunderstorm, you can kind of smell the ionization and the air a little bit. The other place that most people might remember it is if they've ever stood by a photocopy machine and made 50 copies.

11:40That smell that comes out of there is not a, not the toner smell, you're smelling ozone. Huh, interesting. I never thought about smelling it, but that's, that's a good point. And the Pool Guy podcast show has teamed up with UPA to bring you affordable, reliable liability insurance starting at just $64 a month, get up to $2 million in coverage, and the members of my coaching group get an even lower rate. Protect your business and your piece of mind. Sign up with UPA today by clicking the link in the podcast description. And all my hot tabs, I keep a submersible pump behind it. I tell the customer, I'm leaving this pump here because I'm going to be draining your spot every three or four months. And I think, that's one thing that a lot of people neglect is, this water is in here. It's like a bathtub kind of, and you're just chemicalizing it. It needs to be drained often, right? Yes. Yes. I,

12:41I recommended for years that you drain your spot every 90 days. I was on the committee to create a, a drain routine for, at the time, in SPI, for commercial spots. And you take one third of the gallons in the spot divided by the bathroom. And the resulting answer is, how many days you can use the water? And it actually works in a, for a homeowner's spot, if you think about it, you've got one, 250 gallons, 350 gallons, 350 gallons, 350 gallons, a third of that's 110. If you divide two people into 110, you can use the water for 55 days. Yes, smart. I think that's one equation that a lot of people are struggling with when they have their hot tub and they're, and they're doing pool service and they can't clear it up or they can't feel it was wrong with it. The simple answer is, you have to, you have to drain it. Well, you do. And it's, it's a lot easier, especially if you've got a, you know, a 50 gallon

13:45a minute pump or something like that to drain it, you can probably drain it in five minutes. You know, maybe 10 minutes, show it back up in half an hour and you're done. Yeah. And just start using some dye floor to start to start and you get some cyanoric acid, don't it? It's a lot easier with a spa to just drain it. The more you can drain it, the better of the spa. That's one reason why I leave a sub pump at every hot tub that I do in my service route, the way I'm not carrying it back there. And I also tell the homeowner, if you feel like draining it any time, here's how you used to pump. And I show them how to use it with your garden hose, and they can drain it whenever they want to themselves. And I always have let me know they drain it. I can make sure that it's had chemicals in it. But one of the things I think is important with a hot tub care is that draining is something that should be part of your service. You shouldn't neglect that aspect of it. And you, of course, you charge for that too. You charge for draining the spa for them. I would set it up on, you know, 90, 140 days. Yeah. Just put it on your calendar and do it.

14:45Yep. Exactly. Well, if you're looking for more podcasts, you could find those by going to my website, swimmingpoollearning.com. On the banner, click on the podcast site on W a drop down menu with 1900 podcasts for you there. And if you're interested in the coaching program that now, if you're going to learn more at pull guy coaching.com, thanks for listening to this podcast. Have a great rest of your week. God bless. This episode is brought to you by Hasa, providing products that deliver clean, healthy water for every aspect of every day life. The bottom feeder battery powered vacuum system, portable, powerful, and only weighs 12 pounds. And skimmer gets skimmer America's number one pool service software. Podcast listeners can try skimmer for free at get skimmer.com backslash pool guy.