Every hot tub owner’s nightmare: you move the cover lifter to your hot tub and discover a water colour other than clear blue. Whatever the colour, ranging from any shade between the colours of the rainbow, can only mean trouble if it’s not clear blue.

Fortunately, you can educate yourself on what each colour of tub water means, and how to properly diagnose and fix them. It doesn’t matter what make your tub is, how many it seats, or how many jets it has; the below tips will work for all types of hot tubs regardless of colour.

Green Hot Tub Water

When your hot tub water is in a shade of green, the immediate relation you may think of is algae. If the sanitizer you’ve been using has been running low, chances are, it indeed is algae. Scrape the sides of the hot tub with your finger, and if it feels slimy, you may have a mini algae bloom on your hands. This may come as a surprise, but algae can grow even under a spa cover, within dark, warm water. To fix a algae bloom, check the pH balance and alkaline levels and administer shock treatment to the tub. After that, filter out the dead algae, and consider replacing the spa cartridge with a new one.

Yellow Hot Tub Water

Much like green water, yellow water is usually also caused by algae blooms. However, unlike green algae, yellow algae is a particularly resistant type of algae that can exist in a dark heated hot tub, even in the presence of normal bromine or chlorine levels. These algae seek out for small crevices and tend to deposit itself in sheets across spa surfaces when in full bloom.

Use very high levels of chlorine spa shock to treat yellow algae blooms. Balance the water first then turn off the heater before shocking the spa. Remove the hot tub cover and let the water circulate for several hours. Drain and scrub the spa after this procedure, then bleach wash the spa cover and replace the spa filter with a new cartridge.

Brown Hot Tub Water

If you hot tub water has turned brown to the colour of tea, it’s safe to assume the problem to be imbalance in the level of minerals, specifically iron dioxide. Conditions of such may occur within hours after shocking the spa or making big pH adjustments. Usually the filler cartridge can remove some of the brownness overtime, but you can also speed up the process with a sequestering agent.

White Hot Tub Water

Cloudy hot tub water in the shade of white unfortunately can come from many causes. There’s usually not one straightforward diagnosis for waters of this colour. High calcium or alkalinity, ineffective filtering or pumping, or air in the system causing micro-bubbles are all potential problems that can cause your water to turn white. Additionally, contaminants from cosmetics, as well as body and hair products can also change the water color from clear blue to white.

Pink Hot Tub Water

Pink water, though can look like algae, is actually a very different type of bacteria. Pink water is not a very common color to be found in hot tubs, and pink bacteria generally won’t colour the tub water pink except in very mature colonies. Fortunately, treatment for pink water is not too hard to eradicate – it can be removed by hard-shocking the tub (over 30 ppm) and by using a purge product to clean the lines and crevices.

Given all the above guidelines, it may still be hard to figure out how to rid your tub of weird colours. Thankfully, there’s many trusted manufactures within the industry who offer premium hot tub water care products. If you’re still having trouble, contact a BC Home Leisure water care specialist today for a free consultation.