All hot tub owners know that the quality of your water will define the quality of your soak. When it’s clean, clear, soft and fresh, you can spend as long as you want soaking in it without any feeling of irritation or concern for your health and wellness.
This makes hot tub water testing a critical aspect of hot tub ownership. To get full value from your spa investment, you need to ensure that your water is perfectly safe, perfectly luxurious and ready for a soak whenever you want one.
But hot tub water testing technology has changed a lot over the years. In this guide we’ll track that evolution to see where we’ve come from, and to discover the best testing solutions on the market today.
How was hot tub water previously tested?
From the beginning of hot tub time right up to the modern day, the most popular way to test the water of your backyard spa has been with analogue methods.
At first it’s almost fun – you get to travel back to high school chemistry class, playing with test strips and test kits that change colour when they come into contact with your spa water: measuring different chemicals like chlorine/bromine, pH, total alkalinity and calcium hardness.
But the teenage nostalgia can quickly evaporate. The problem with manual methods is exactly that: they’re manual. They require work, and that work is repetitive and somewhat boring. But that’s just the price of clean, clear and luxurious spa water, right?
Not necessarily. Welcome to the world of FreshWater IQ.
How has hot tub water testing evolved over time?
Over the years hot tubs have gone from simple timber barrels heated by fire to the most luxurious and feature-rich machines you can put in your backyard. Hot tub water testing has followed a similar evolutionary trajectory, going from almost non-existent to systems featuring seriously innovative and fully automated tech.
1. Minimal testing
Depending on how you define hot tubs, their history could stretch back millennia, from ancient civilisations soaking in naturally occurring hot springs, to the tubs found in Roman, Greek and Japanese bathhouses. During pre-modern times testing was more or less non-existent – water was more commonly changed when it started to smell.
2.Traditional testing
After the first modern hot tubs hit the market in the 1960s, water testing began to be taken more seriously. This led to the development of chemical test kits which used liquid reagents and colour comparison charts to check levels of sanitiser, pH, calcium and total alkalinity.
3. Test strips
Traditional testing was soon overtaken by test strips: a simpler, cheaper and more convenient testing method that is still in common use today. Test strips embed the chemical reagents in paper strips, which change colour when dipped in the hot tub water. Like test kits, the levels are then measured via a colour comparison chart.
4. Digital water testing
The next step, and a relatively recent one, was to switch from analogue to digital testing. Accurate and easy to use, digital devices use sensors or probes to test the water, and can either display the results on the device, or send the data to a smartphone app.
5. Automation integration
The most recent revolution in water testing is perhaps the most impactful and impressive of all, as it largely takes the owner out of the equation. FreshWater® IQ is an automated system that conducts a digital test of your spa pool every single hour, and if improvements can be made, it uses a digital display to tell you the whats, hows and whens of water care.
FreshWater® IQ: the future of hot tub water testing
Test strips are yesterday’s news. The discerning hot tub owner of today prefers a hot tub that takes care of them, not the other way around.
A patented, first-in-world spa automation technology, FreshWater® IQ represents the future of spa water testing—and that future is now. This revolutionary system automatically tests your water hourly and provides clear instructions if adjustments are ever needed.
Say goodbye to those old, analogue testing methods, and say hello to serious savings: spend less money on water and chemicals, and over 90% less time on water maintenance.
What does your future hold? If you choose a hot tub fitted with the FreshWater® IQ system, you’ll enjoy more time soaking in the world’s most luxurious hot tub water.
