Let’s Get Serious About Keeping Your Hot Tub Clean!

To say there is a fair bit of marketing hype in the hot tub industry would be an understatement – and a lot of it is focused on water quality & keeping your spa clean. Let’s start with some actual facts.

• Only 4 chemicals are EPA Registered to kill bacteria and other spa pathogens in hot tubs. These are chlorine, bromine, biguanide, and Serum Total Maintenance. That’s it.
• Enzymes do not kill bacteria.
• Metal ions, notably silver, have a mild biocide effect but are not powerful enough to be registered by the EPA to kill bacteria, by themselves, in hot tubs or pools.
• Unless you are very fastidious in maintaining the water in your spa, you will develop biofilm in your spa’s plumbing and filter(s). This is primarily because spa sanitizers kill only free-swimming bacteria – and most of us will have times when the spa sanitizer level is too low to properly kill bacteria.
• With chlorine a minimum of 2 ppm is required at all times. With bromine this is 3 ppm.
• Once started, biofilms will continue to grow because the mucous layer protects the bacteria colony from spa sanitizers.
• Mold, fungus, and mildew spores are present in the air. They can be a problem wherever it’s warm & moist, and there is no sanitizer in direct contact, notably the underside of your spa cover.

All of this may make it seem like quite a challenge to keep your spa clean. The trick is to maintain a proper spa sanitation regimen with redundancy. It also means focusing on these three areas of your spa:

1. Your spa’s plumbing
2. Your spa water
3. Your spa cover

Let’s take each one at a time.

In order to keep your spa’s plumbing clean, you should purge your spa at least annually. As noted above, unless you always (and I do mean always) keep your sanitizer levels above the minimums, you will have biofilm in your spa’s plumbing. This biofilm will make it difficult to maintain proper sanitation levels and, though rare, can contain quite dangerous bacteria and virus strains. Hence, a regular, annual purge is needed.

Most spa purges are based on enzymes, hence they are quite ineffective. Additionally, they will often say they require 24 hours, or longer, when used. A major problem with most spa purges is they do produce some “gunk” floating in your spa water, so you think your spa is clean when, in fact, the biofilm is still hiding in your spa plumbing.

The most effective spa purge is our Total Cleanse because it acts in two ways to remove biofilm:

1. It contains salts to strip away the mucous layer protecting the biofilm.
2. It contains an even higher concentration of the same active ingredient we use in our EPA Registered Total Maintenance to kill bacteria.

It also requires only 20 – 30 minutes to purge your spa.

If you want to prove the power of Total Cleanse, I will suggest purging your spa with your current product and then purge again with Total Cleanse to see what your current purge left behind in your spa plumbing.

People often think of a hot tub as a small pool, but in fact they are quite different. The water is warmer by 20 – 30 degrees, hence promoting bacteria growth. The massaging jets are scrubbing millions of dead skin cells from your skin. You are also sweating in a spa. Dead skin cells and sweat are food for bacteria. And there is only 2 – 3% the amount of water in a pool, yet there are still 2 – 5 people in the spa. In other words, the concentration of contaminants in your spa is far higher than in a pool. For these reasons, keeping spa water clear, clean, and inviting is a much larger challenge in a hot tub.

On top of this challenge, primary sanitizers have various weaknesses and are not reliable in always keeping spa water clean. The solution is redundancy – or including a secondary sanitizer in your spa regimen. Only one EPA Registered secondary sanitizer exists. That is our Total Maintenance. It is your insurance policy to keep your spa water pure and pristine.

The space under your spa cover and above the spa water is bacteria nirvana. It’s warm and moist – the perfect environment for growing bacteria, molds, & other pathogens. This leads to two potential issues to keeping your spa clean:

1. The odor you may notice when you open your spa after a few days.
2. Black mold growing on the underside of your spa cover.

Two of our Serum products solve these two problems. The weekly use of our Total Maintenance will prevent black mold. And, our Triple Action Spray both cleans your spa cover of this black mold and will prevent that musty odor when it is sprayed just above the water line when you exit your spa.

As you can see, our Serum products are designed to enhance your spa enjoyment!