Convenience goes completely out the window when you inevitably end up with a an issue and don't actually have any water chemistry baseline with your tub or know how to diagnose. You'll chase you tail for days or just end up needing to drain and refill often. I'll take a little more up front learning over struggling constantly with cloudy water or drains.So back to guts of post... this is instance TFP agrees with pool store. Avoid the Frog ease system...
Will the addition of borax (up to 50ppm) and the ozonator ease some of the pain? I need to accept reality... as much as I could be disciplined to maintain the hot tub, I have to accept reality that what I'm supposed to do will not match the frequency with I would like to do it.
A few friends over, mixing between pool and hot tub... I guarantee the last thing on my mind after some shots and a few beers at end of late night is what the person-hours in the hot tub calculates so I can dump in chlorine. Reality sucks.
It's a little bit of a steep learning curve at first, but if you devote 10 mins a day for the first 2 months to testing with a kit, reading the guides here and understanding the balance, then it becomes second nature. I almost never test anything other than PH and CL a 2-3 times a week. My PH almost never moves with Bortates on fill and Aqua Clarity maintenance once a week. I rarely test TA oR CH. One you have learned the amount of chlorine your tub likes on a regular basis or after light to heavy uses, it just becomes a simple calculation in your head that you do without thinking. I rarely use the app for calculation anymore because I know how much different amounts of chlorine are going to affect my levels and how long they are going to last.
The best part of this is that I know what my levels are or what they should be, so when I have an issue I can easily triage and fix without running to a store to run tests or blindly chasing issues with unnecessary chemicals.
Just my 2 cents but I think having a tub that is always clean and usable is way more convenient than the tradeoff of a floater that you can't accurately test or diagnose issues with. And either way you go, you still need to add chemicals after use, so you are going to have to make that calculation either way. At least with the BBB method, you know what your starting baseline is so you aren't just guessing how much to add.
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