Beyond swimming and having fun, keeping the swim spa water clean and safe is often high on the minds of swim spa owners. Water that smells bad, appears murky or is overrun with foam is not only unpleasant, but it may also pose a danger to a swimmer’s health. For this reason, it’s important to keep up with a regular maintenance schedule and ensure the water remains fresh. Questions such as, “How often do I need to test the swim spa water?”, “What do I need to do to keep the water filters operating properly?” and “How often should I drain my swim spa?” will be answered in this post.
How Often Do I Need to Test Swim Spa Water?
When your water chemistry remains properly balanced, the water will feel and smell fresh and clean. Balanced water chemistry means you won’t need to add any chemicals to adjust the levels. The frequency of your water chemistry testing will depend on how much use your swim spa is getting. The number of swimmers that use the swim spa will have an effect on the water chemistry. A swim spa that gets used multiple times a day by several different swimmers should be tested more often than a swim spa that gets used once a week by the same person. You should be testing the water chemistry at least once a week or as often as every day depending on the swim spa’s users and usage.
What Do I Need to Do With Swim Spa Filter Cartridges?
Filter cartridges help remove solids from the water that could lead to scaling, cloudy water, clogging of the pipes or mechanical damage. To do their jobs properly, water filters should be removed from their housings and sprayed down with a garden hose every week or two. They’ll also need a deep cleaning every three to four months. This entails spraying the cartridges down with a cleaning solution and allowing it to sit for the manufacturer’s recommended time. Whenever the filter cartridges are serviced, they should be visually inspected for holes, tears and other damage. They should be replaced when they begin to show wear or once a year, whichever comes first.
How Often Should I Drain My Swim Spa?
Swim spas are simply recirculating the same volume of water over and over, eventually you’ll need to drain the swim spa and fill it up again with fresh water from the tap. Regardless of how much use the swim spa gets, you should do this at least once a year. You can also rely on your senses to tell you if it needs doing more often. Identify swim spa water that’s smelly, cloudy, foamy or irritates the skin. If it isn’t responding to water chemistry-balancing additives or the addition of sanitizers and shocks, the swim spa, and its users, will very likely benefit from a draining. Once emptied, the shell should be thoroughly cleaned before being refilled with fresh water.
What Do I Need to Know About Draining My Swim Spa?
Although relatively compact, swim spas still contain a lot of water. A large swim spa can hold almost 3,000 gallons of water. For this reason, it’s important to monitor where all that water is going when you’re draining a swim spa. You don’t want to flood your basement, your vegetable patch or your neighbor’s property. Even though the water might initially be directed into a storm sewer, it’s important to pay attention and ensure that it continues to do so. Many floods have been caused by inattentive swim spa draining.
Now that you know how often you should drain your swim spa, download a free buyer’s guide for more information.