DOH!

I’m almost afraid to admit it. I wasn’t taking care of my business.

For the longest time there’s been water around the spa. It seemed to coincide with colder weather so I was figuring that it was simply the water cooking off condensing on the top falling to the pavement. It vexed me something awful trying to find if there was an actual leak. I’ve taken off every side, and found nothing.

Then the other day I was looking to see if there was a leak again in the main side where everything hooks up. This is when the circulation pumps kicked on and I could actually see water flowing. Turned out to be a chlorine infuser. I think that’s what it’s called. I’d been looking for this thing since I bought the spa.

The spot itself has a salt water purification system. And in that we have an ozone generator, which generates ozone and injects it into the water stream. This device also supplies power to a electrolysis cell that converts the salt to chlorine. There’s a circle of life going on their between sodium chloride and chlorine. The documentation when I first bought this thing wasn’t really clear, other than I needed to look at it once in a while to make sure it wasn’t calcified. The main unit itself is bolted in backwards from the main panel, up in the far corner. I had no idea what the salt/chlorine cell looked like and sure as hell couldn’t find it.

Turns out it was bolted on an upright obscured from vision unless you stuck your head in and looked up. That’s what was leaking. And it was leaking because it was completely plugged with calcium because I’ve never looked at it before, let alone maintained it.

It was pretty much ruined. Somehow it got a crack in it. So I waddled to Home Depot to buy some barrel connectors for 3/4″ line that I could use to simply bypass the thing while I figured out what to do.

It was at this point that I bothered to read the directions which I had to download. They weren’t included. Turns out there’s a process to clean it. Also turns out that I’m not supposed be using non-chlorine oxidizers, which I’ve been using. Interestingly this process raises the pH of the water. So I should have known something was wrong when I started having problems keeping the proper pH level. Also, I should’ve known something was off when the cycle finished when using the tub I’d hear the glug glug glug of water and air escaping.

So now it’s fixed and acting properly.

It took forever to find the damn part since the manufacturers website has zero support links and when you search for the part you find a pretty rudimentary site that seems like a scammer, which is actually the manufacturer’s site. They said wait 5 to 10 days for the part, that ended up showing up in a few days. Luckily I bought some extra line so they could rebuild the thing properly. I also made a happy discovery that the 3/4″ line used in a spa can be plugged by a wine cork. Something I have tons of. It enabled me to fix this thing with a minimum amount of water getting on my clothes.

In the middle of the process I looked down and noticed my barrel connector was missing. This isn’t unusual for dudes my age. Just ask any of us how hard it is to keep track of a 10 mm socket. I figured I just simply put it somewhere until I stood up and saw the doofus munching on something.

He took one look at my eyes and knew fury was building and he had better run like hell. Then it was game on! I chased his ass around the yard for about 10 minutes before deciding that if I needed the damn thing I’d go get the spare I bought. Good thing too because it was useless.

Now that the spa is functioning properly, it’s time to clean it up and get ready for the spring season. That’ll have to wait until construction is finished on the sunroom that will be next to it.

That is a story of pain and misery in and of itself which I will be blogging, thoughtfully leaving out the name of the idiot company I hired to do it until discounts are discussed.