Calcium Buildup

This is Christian Staples with Arctic Spas. We’ve come up with these instructional videos to review what we went over with you as far as taking care of your hot tub and the operation of your hot tub when it was delivered. So if you have any questions, you can use these videos to go back and reference once again and review.

Every once in a while, we get customers that ask us, “What’s the sandpaper feel on the surface of the tub?” And what that is is actually calcium build up. So sometimes you can actually see a white layer, and sometimes you just get a feel like it is a sandpaper. And the way to get rid of it is just the opposite of the way that it built up. So the way that it built up is because the pH was high. And anytime the pH gets high, the calcium precipitates out of the water and then it sticks to everything. And everywhere where there’s water, there’s gonna be that calcium buildup. So in all the lines, and then everything that you can see, you’re gonna have that calcium build up. So what we want to do to get rid of it is exactly opposite. We wanna take and lower down the pH so it’s really low and we’re gonna dissolve that calcium and put it back into a solution.

So the way that we do that is we’re gonna take a whole entire bottle of the Adjust Down. So it’s two pounds. You’re gonna add the whole entire thing to your tub. Now you’re not gonna wanna use your tub at this point. The water is gonna be very acidic. It’s gonna bother your skin and your eyes. You just definitely do not wanna get into the tub at that point.

Then what you wanna do is you wanna let the tub run for 24 hours. But we also wanna make sure that all the air controls are open. Those are the small [inaudible 00:01:37] that you see. And then if you have a diverter valve that that is in the middle position so that water can be flowing through all the different jets.

The other thing you wanna do is, pump one is gonna run automatically through its filtration cycles. We don’t have to worry about that. But all the rest of the pumps, you’ll want to actually turn them on. They’ll run for 20 minutes, and then they’ll shut themselves off. And you wanna do this three or four times during the 24-hour period. So once you’ve done all that, you’ve waited the 24 hours, we wanna come back and make sure that calcium is completely dissolved. If it’s not, you’d want to add another bottle, whole entire bottle to the tub again. And once again, this is gonna be very acidic water. You’re not gonna wanna use your tub, but we need to get that pH even lower to dissolve all that calcium. And then go through the same process. Make sure your air controls are open, make sure your diverter’s in the middle, and then turn your pumps on three or four times during that 24-hour period.

So once the calcium is done, that you can’t see it anymore, you can’t feel it, then most likely the easiest way to get the tub back to normal is just to drain your water and then refill it. When you drain it though, you wanna make sure that you realize that this is gonna be acidic water, so you wanna drain it down into a drain, or you can actually raise the pH back up, which is probably the preferred method to get that pH back to normal. But just be careful where you drain it to.

Then once you fill it and get it back up and going, the first thing that you wanna do is test your water and get your pH back in line. Because remember the high pH is what caused the calcium to build up in the first place. So what you wanna do is make sure that you keep that pH just right at the bottom end of that okay range, usually, we say 7.2 to 7.5.