Have you ever had one of those days where your muscles ache, your cold, or maybe the kids are kicking your butt? You think to yourself, “maybe I’ll go for a soak in the hot tub”. After putting on your suit, and grabbing a beverage, you open the spa cover, turn on the jets and all of a sudden the water is full of little white “floaters”. They look a lot like someone tore up tissue paper and threw it in the spa. The first thing most people think is “Look at all of those calcium chunks floating around in my spa.”. Well my friends, you are not alone. This is a very common occurrence. We see this all to often and usually it isn’tcalcium. This is called “biofilm”, or “white mold”.
Biofilm is a microorganism which has the ability to attach itself to things that bacteria will use as a shelter (so to speak). Biofilm is also soft and squishy, where calcium will crumble if you squish it between your fingers. Also, calcium makes the spa walls feel rough or like sand paper to the touch. Biofilm has become more prevalent with spas now a days because spas tend to have a minimum of 20 jets. The most common place we see this form of biofilm is in the plumbing. There are a few things that usually cause this stuff to grow in your pipes:
- The sanitizer levels are too low.
- The flow to the jets is turned off.
- The air controls are turned off and/or never used.
If you don’t like to use the jets and just want to sit in the hot water, there are a few simple things you need to do to help eliminate biofilm from occurring:
- You need to maintain a consistent 3.0 – 6.0 Bromine, or a 1.5 – 3.0 if you use Chlorine. In order to do this you need to test the spa water. There is simply no way around it, remember a neutral pH 7.4 – 7.6 will make your sanitizer more efficient.
- Make sure when you get out of the spa all of your jets have “full flow”. Turn the jets on and inspect them, open the jets individually.
- Turn the diverter valves to the middle setting so all jets plumbed to that valve are flowing.
- Turn on the air controls, this will insure that when the spa filter cycle comes on, the air line will clear to the main body of water. Then, when the jets turn off the air line will fill with sanitized water.
- You could also add sodium bromide to the water at a ratio of 2 oz. per 100 gals of water. This seems to work well to combat the bacteria.
- If you have an ozonator you should check the function to make sure it is working.If it is, then you might need to adjust the timer. You should have 6 – 8 hrs of total run time.
When dealing with water temperatures of 100º – 104º, bacteria grows rapidly. When the sanitizer levels are low, bacteria has plenty of food in the form of organics to feed on.
- The best thing you can do for your spa to help eliminate organics is shower before you get in. This eliminates all of the daily grime, lotions, body oils, make up and hair products.
- Test the water on a regular basis with a good quality test kit.
- Clean your filters with a filter cleaner and rinse them out with a high pressure nozzle on the garden hose. Never use a pressure washer to clean your filter as it will destroy the filter.
I hope this information will help you identify and maybe even prevent this nasty stuff from growing in you spa.
Be sure to check back, a follow up blog will be posted in the near future regarding how to eliminate thebiofilm once it has established itself in your spa. Happy soaking.
