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Is it possible that you are allergic to bromine, the MPS or whatever else you put into the water? Or maybe the hot water is drying out your skin.
As far as taking your spa apart ... I think you will be undertaking a massive and fruitless project. If your spa is full foamed I would think it is impossible, if it is thermopane you may be able to physically clean some of the water ways but I think you'll never get into a water feature successfully.
Things like this make me very leary of buying a spa...I expect a spa to require some work, but what your going through sounds like spa hell...wish I had advise to help you...
Quote from: Vinny on May 26, 2014, 01:19:08 pmIs it possible that you are allergic to bromine, the MPS or whatever else you put into the water? Or maybe the hot water is drying out your skin.It's possible. Here are my reasons for believing it is bacterial: I have gone in many other hot tubs and pools over the years and never had any sort of reaction. Long ago I switched from bromine to bleach, and I'm not using any of the chemicals that I used in the spa when I first got it (when I got the severe rash and flu-like symptoms that went away after I started antibiotics.). The doc reported my rash was consistent with hot tub folliculitis. The white flakes/white snotty stuff I see in the spa is consistent with descriptions of pseudomonas contamination.I'm the only one who has ever had symptoms. However, I'm pretty much the only person who goes in the spa. For some reason, my friends aren't crazy about going in . Even before problems started, friends who did go in only stayed in for maybe 15 minutes, and nobody went in more than once in a month. I've been told some people are more susceptible to pseudomonas than others and I may be one of those people. So my hypothesis is that others are not showing symptoms because they have far less exposure to the bacteria, and are somewhat less vulnerable to it than me.QuoteAs far as taking your spa apart ... I think you will be undertaking a massive and fruitless project. If your spa is full foamed I would think it is impossible, if it is thermopane you may be able to physically clean some of the water ways but I think you'll never get into a water feature successfully.Thanks for the advice. The spa is a Catalina Stealth Samoa. I don't know the difference between full foamed and thermopane, but there is definitely a lot of foam inside it and it sure does seem massive and fruitless so far. I may abort, unfortunately I'm out of ideas so I'll probably just blow all the water out of the lines and leave it empty.
What you are describing seems like you may be more susceptible to the rash than others and since you've had success going into other tubs then I agree it is something about your tub. Sounds like your problem was the scenario with my son's friend. Sounds reasonable that the white flakes are the biofilm breaking apart unless you have hard water and it's the calcium flaking off.
Some questions I have to ask - when you add chlorine (added after you go in) how long does it last? It would seem that at this point if you stripped some of the biofilm layer off the chlorine would attack the exposed bacteria and would dissipate quickly. So if you added 3 PPM chlorine and it lasted with some residue for 2 or 3 hours you tub is chemically "safe" vs it being gone in 20 minutes or less. What is your combined chlorine reading when chlorine is dissipated?
Do you soak with some chlorine in the tub?