Welcome to our forum.
This is our first tub and we have really enjoyed it this summer. The tub is located at a summer cabin, and come the end of September it will be time for us to go home. We still plan on coming up to the cabin every couple of weeks during the winter, so we would like to keep the tub running during the time we are away, so we can use it when we get back, as I said every couple of weeks. I don’t know what to do however, about the PH and TA. Out of the tap the PH is about 7.5, but of course this shoots up as soon as I aerate the tub. The problem is that I need to take my TA down very low before my PH stabilizes with aeration (when I say stabilize here, I really mean that the PH does not shoot up, as it really is not that stable). My PH will only stabilize (not shoot up with aeration) when my TA is down to 30. I will then add my 50 ppm borates, but the problem I’m having is that with my TA down at 30, even with the borates, if we don’t use the tub for a while, the PH starts to drift down. That’s not a problem when we’re here, as I can either run the jets or add a little bit of borax to boost the PH. The problem is if we are away for a couple of weeks at a time, I don’t know what to do about this???Should I just dump the water and then not balance the refill, and have the PH at 7.5 initially, and then skyrocket when we use the tub, or should I keep the balanced water and risk having the PH drop down when we’re not here. I’m running some experiments right now, and over the last three days, with us not using the tub and no aeration in the tub, the PH has dropped from 7.9 to 7.4. I hate to see what it would drop to over 2 weeks. What I don’t know, and really don’t have any way to find out without dumping the water, is if we didn’t balance the water, how long it would take for the PH to drop back down to 7.5 after skyrocketing after aeration. I have just always balanced my water so I don’t have the answer to this.Does anyone have any ideas on what we should about this? It almost looks to me like I need to decide between either high or low PH. If this is the case, I’m thinking it is probably better to have high PH??? This would mean dumping the water I have and then not balancing the refill. I'm not opposed to this if it is the right thing to do??? Again, any and all thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.