Surprised how fast the tub water clouded up after guests used it

Started by Rick Dominguez · · 3 replies
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#1
Feet in the tub right now, so figured I'd type this while it's fresh. Had six people in here Saturday night for a couple hours, more than usual, and by Sunday morning the water had this hazy look I don't normally get. Sanitizer level was fine when I checked it, so it wasn't that. Ended up being body oils and lotion residue, apparently that's a real thing once you load the tub up past what it usually sees. Ran the jets on high for a while and it cleared some, but I hit it with a little extra sanitizer too and that finished the job. Didn't expect a few extra bodies to matter that much, amigo. Been running the FROG @ease system for a couple years and it usually just handles itself, first time I noticed it get outpaced like that.

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#2
Yeah I'd push back a little on chasing that with extra sanitizer as the fix, that's treating the symptom not the load. Six people is basically triple your normal bather count and body oils/lotion don't oxidize away clean, a lot of that is just suspended organic junk that sanitizer alone struggles to keep up with in real time. The jets on high probably did more actual work there than the sanitizer bump did, agitation plus your filter pulling it out is what clears it.

I don't run a hot tub anymore but when I had one this was the one spot where I'd throw in a capful of clarifier or just skip a day and let the filter catch up instead of dosing more. FROG systems are great at steady state but they're tuned for your normal load, not a Saturday night party, so it outpacing itself isn't really a system failure. There's a decent writeup on the water change side of this on the hot tub library here if you want to read into when a partial or full drain makes more sense than just dosing through it, /hot-tub-care/.
#3
Vic's right about the load but I'd still shock it after a party like that, not just lean on jets and filter, the oils and lotion are organic bather waste and that's exactly what an oxidizer shock is for, sanitizer alone chasing a 3x bather load is the mistake not the shock dose itself. Cleared mine the same way after my grandkids had friends over, ran it hot and high for an hour then hit it with shock before bed and it was glass clear by morning.
#4
What shock were you using, Rick, non chlorine or actual chlorine based. That matters more than the clarifier debate honestly. If you hit it with a dichlor or chlorine granule shock that's doing real oxidizing on the oils, if it's one of those oxygen only non chlorine shocks it's not touching organic lotion residue the same way, just boosting ORP a little. Had a customer last week swear shock fixed his cloudy tub after a party and turns out he was dosing MPS the whole time, got lucky the jets and filter did the heavy lifting not the shock.

Vic's not wrong that six bodies is a different animal than your normal two or three, FROG systems are dialed in for steady low bather load, that's the whole design. But clarifier on a hot tub is a band aid at best and with cartridge filters that small it can gunk things up fast if you're using it more than a one time thing. Figure out what you actually dosed and we can tell you if it was the shock or just the agitation doing the work.