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@castletonia, @TheWizardofSpas, Many thanks! This is all great information. One question: my dealer said to shock my tub once a month. Some sources say every two weeks, some say every week. Is there a reason for the discrepancies?
My Caldera Geneva came with the inline frog and it was right before @ease came out so I started with bromine and the minerals. I messed around with it for about a year never happy with how it worked. My dealer also told me all the virtues of the minerals and over time I began to think it was a bunch of malarkey. I switched over to the @ease when it came out and it worked better and I just left a dead mineral in to fill the space. The @ease still was hard to adjust for different bather loads and I was always correcting by adding some dichlor after taking a test strip reading. I have been using the Clorox test strips. They test the most things and are the best price. I finally came to the conclusion why buy the expensive @ease and then doctor it with dichlor if I’m adding a little why not just add enough and be done with it. so I left a dead @ease in as well and did something like a tablespoon of dichlor when we got out at night and by the next evening it had done its job and was mostly gone so I wasn’t soaking in more chlorine than needed. That method worked good except with prolonged dichlor that has CYA stabilizer as an additive the CYA would get to high making the water chemistry wonky. So I started watching the level and when I hit 50PPM I switched from dichlor to regular household bleach, unscented and not the thickened easy pour just old time bleach like Clorox. It is even cheaper than dichlor and roughly 1 tablespoon of dichlor = 1/3 cup of bleach. I now also pry off the top of my @ease cartridge and put the contents in a marked sealed plastic dichlor jar. When I go on vacation for a week I put one forth of the @ease in the cartridge and put it in the inline holder 2 weeks half etc. then I shock the tub with dichlor and when I come home it is perfect. There is no bulk product that I know of that is the same as @ease and using any pool or hot tub product as a refill would go into the water way too fast. If you were using bromine then you could refill them with bulk bromine. I wouldn’t recommend going to bromine though.
Quote from: bud16415 on December 18, 2019, 11:47:40 amMy Caldera Geneva came with the inline frog and it was right before @ease came out so I started with bromine and the minerals. I messed around with it for about a year never happy with how it worked. My dealer also told me all the virtues of the minerals and over time I began to think it was a bunch of malarkey. I switched over to the @ease when it came out and it worked better and I just left a dead mineral in to fill the space. The @ease still was hard to adjust for different bather loads and I was always correcting by adding some dichlor after taking a test strip reading. I have been using the Clorox test strips. They test the most things and are the best price. I finally came to the conclusion why buy the expensive @ease and then doctor it with dichlor if I’m adding a little why not just add enough and be done with it. so I left a dead @ease in as well and did something like a tablespoon of dichlor when we got out at night and by the next evening it had done its job and was mostly gone so I wasn’t soaking in more chlorine than needed. That method worked good except with prolonged dichlor that has CYA stabilizer as an additive the CYA would get to high making the water chemistry wonky. So I started watching the level and when I hit 50PPM I switched from dichlor to regular household bleach, unscented and not the thickened easy pour just old time bleach like Clorox. It is even cheaper than dichlor and roughly 1 tablespoon of dichlor = 1/3 cup of bleach. I now also pry off the top of my @ease cartridge and put the contents in a marked sealed plastic dichlor jar. When I go on vacation for a week I put one forth of the @ease in the cartridge and put it in the inline holder 2 weeks half etc. then I shock the tub with dichlor and when I come home it is perfect. There is no bulk product that I know of that is the same as @ease and using any pool or hot tub product as a refill would go into the water way too fast. If you were using bromine then you could refill them with bulk bromine. I wouldn’t recommend going to bromine though. What do you use to monitor the CYA levels? Would I still be able to use this bleach method with bromine? I still typically shock with dichlor.