Hot Tub Water: Test Like a Boss
Testing hot tub water regularly is important to avoid peaks and valleys of sanitation and water balance. Testing every day is not necessary unless your spa is used on a daily basis. Instead, test the water 2-3 times per week - more often if the spa is used frequently.
When you are only working with 300-500 gallons of water, it's crucial to be accurate. Otherwise, it's easy to underdose or overdose your hot tub when adding chemicals. Here, we'll show you the good, the better, and the best of the business when it comes to testing your spa water.
GOOD Hot Tub Water Test
Spa test strips are made to work with hot water, and are "calibrated" especially for use with spas. They are inexpensive, easy to use, and several options are available depending on your needs. You can use test strips that for a single aspect like bromine levels, or you can use a multi-test strip that looks at six (or more) components of your spa water.
Test strips are both useful and economical, and many people use them to keep their hot tub water balanced. However, the wide range of results and hard-to-determine color matching scale can make them less accurate and less reliable when compared to other types of hot tub water tests.
BETTER Hot Tub Water Test
A better way to test spa water is to not abandon test strips, but to simply remove human error from the equation. The AquaChek TruTest Spa digital test strip reader analyzes the test strip from 16 million colors, which improves accuracy of test strip use immensely.
Replacement TruTest strips cost as much (or less) than other multi-test strips, so it doesn't take much to keep a constant supply handy. The AquaChek digital reader measures free and total chlorine or bromine, pH and total alkalinity with excellent precision in just seconds.
BEST Hot Tub Water Test
The best way to test hot tub or spa water is to use a "liquid drop style" titration test kit. Titration test kits are different, and here's why. First, you take a water sample in a test vial and add the reagent. Next, you'll add an indicator solution drop by drop, counting the drops until you achieve a solid color change (from red to blue for example). Multiply the number of drops x 10, and you have your calcium and alkalinity reading, accurate to within 5 ppm. When testing for sanitizer levels, accuracy falls within 0.5 ppm.
Yes it takes longer to do a titration test, but not much longer. You can do a full battery of tests (bromine, pH, alkalinity and hardness) in less than 5 minutes. If your balance is off, the charts in the booklet will tell you exactly how much adjustment chemical to add. There are more options available for the type of test you'd like to perform on your hot tub, but the more inclusive tests usually come with a higher price tag.
When choosing a hot tub water test, it really comes down to what is most important to you. If you're looking for unparalleled accuracy, a titration kit or digital strip reader are the both a good way to go. If you check the water often and don't want to spend a lot of money on testing supplies, regular test strips are a solid option. The digital test strip readers have become quite popular in recent years because they offer a good balance between test strips and titration kits when it comes to cost, accuracy and ease of use.