Onzen Salt Water Instructions

This is Christian Staples with Arctic Spas. We’ve come up with these instructional videos to review what we went over with you, as far as taking care of your hot tub and the operation of your hot tub when it was delivered. So, if you have any questions, you can use these videos to go back and reference once again and review.

I wanted to go over how you take care of your spa when you have an Onzen system. So, the very first thing that you do when you start up your tub, after doing a drain and refill, is add the Onzen salt. Most tubs are gonna take about three quarters of a bucket. If you have a Summit XL, you’re gonna do a full bucket. Or if you have the Arctic Fox, you’re gonna do a half a bucket. If you have one of the all-weather pools, you’re actually going to add four buckets of salt to the water.

After that, we wanna test the water. This is what you’ll do on a weekly basis. So, you take your test strip out, dip it in the water for one second, and then pull it out and compare the colors against the bottle. Okay, with the test strips, we wanna keep the top one which is called Free Chlorine. This is measuring the sanitizer that’s produced by the salt system. We wanna keep it in the level between one and three. And so, if it’s below one when you read it with your test strip, as it is right now, we’d actually wanna turn up the Onzen system by a couple of hours, which I’ll show you how to do in one second. If it’s above three, we’d actually want to turn down the Onzen system by a couple hours. So, we wanna keep it so it’s always in that range between one and three.

The next most important one is the pH. So, if we look at the color of the pH, we’re right around the 7.5 mark right now and we wanna keep it at that, between 7.2 and 7.5 range. We know that the pH is always gonna drift up over time, and so by keeping it at the bottom end of that range, it gives us the ability to have a bigger buffer before it’s too high. So, at 7.5 we wanna add a half a capful of the Adjust Down, and at 7.8 we’d wanna add one capful. If you’re using an all-weather pool, you wanna just times that by three. So, at 7.5 add a cap and a half of the Adjust Down, and at 7.8 you’d wanna add three capfuls. Those are the two main ones. If you can master keeping both of those in line, you’ll have great water all the time. The other one that we want to be concerned about, but not overly worried about, is the alkalinity. And the only time I really want you to worry about this is if it’s really low or if it’s really high. Then we’ll take a look at getting that back in line. But otherwise, if it’s in the middle range we’re totally good with that.

So additionally, on a monthly basis, we use the product called Scale Free. So, on all hot tubs you’d want to use one capful of the Scale Free and add it directly to the water. When you do an all-weather pool, you’ll use three capfuls. I also give you a bottle of Boost. This is granular chlorine. This is for emergency use only. So, typically what happens is if your water goes cloudy because all of a sudden you have a whole bunch of usage, or if there’s some reason that the water balance is incorrect, or if the Onzen system isn’t working, or whatever the reason that you have cloudy water, sometimes the fastest way to get the water back to clear is to add a capful of Boost to your tub. So, if you have a whole bunch of people use it, more than normal, you have a big Friday night party or something, just go ahead and add a capful after they get out, if you want, just to be on the proactive stance. But we give this to you just to keep your water clean and clear if you have something like that happen.

Every three months, we’ll wanna test the salt level. And if you ever have any problems with your water clarity or something, sometimes it’s a good idea to test your salt level. So, usually, what I do is I just use the cap from the Scale Free, and you’re gonna put about an inch of water into the cap. Take a test strip out. Now, this takes about three to four minutes, and you want to set it in so it doesn’t get the whole entire test strip wet, if I can get it to stay here. So it sticks out of the cap just like that. And once again, it’s gonna take about three to four minutes to react. And once it’s done, this yellow line at the top, if you can see that, will actually turn black. So, once it turns black we know that it’s done. So, now we’re done and we can see what the level is. So, what you do is you measure up here, and you can see that our salt is about three and a half. And then you look at the back of the bottle and you come to three and a half, and it tells us that our salt level is 850, kind of between 850 and 930. So, the salt level that we want on a regular hot tub like this would be 15 to 1800. So at this point, we would actually wanna add more salt to your water.

As far as our salt levels are concerned, we wanna keep them between 15 and 1800, and we can go as high as 2400. So, if you have a lot of usage or an all-weather pool, we can take that level up to 2400. Now, the higher the salt content, the faster the reaction is which creates that sanitizer. And so, if you’re having problems keeping your spa clean because of your usage, and you have that Onzen system running at a high rate, we can actually add a little bit more salt to it, speed up that reaction,and let the Onzen system run less hours per day.

So, to adjust your Onzen settings on a standard one-to-three pump spa that we offer, you’ll use the settings button. It’s the second one over on the bottom row. You press it once, and it will say “SETT,” and then you wanna scroll down until you see “O-N”, so “O-N” here. And then the number is the number of hours per day that the Onzen system is running. If our sanitizer is low, we’d wanna turn that number up by two hours. And if it’s high, if it’s above three, we’d actually wanna turn it down by two hours. So you just use the up and down arrows to set it where you need it to be. Once you’re done, you press the settings button again and scroll through the rest of the options until you get to the point where it reboots the system, and then it will start up the filtration cycle.

So, with an Epic five-pump system, it’s a little bit different. Same button, but you use the pump number five and you hold it down for five seconds. Once the word “SETT” comes up on the screen, you now have access to the settings and you scroll down until you hit the one that says “O-N” for “Onzen.” And then you just simply do the same thing. You turn it up or turn it down using the up and down arrows, based on your sanitizer reading. Then, once you’re done, press the settings button or the pump number five again, scroll through the rest of the options until you hit where it reboots and starts the filtration cycle.