Maintenance

Yesterday was one of several beautiful days we seem to be having in what is supposed to be the middle of winter. It was in the low 70's and sunny out. We are supposed to have 4 of these days this week and I am taking this opportunity to try to get some our yard stuff out of the way...by Saturday it is supposed to be back down in the 20's at night....yuck!!!

Anyhow, so on my list for yesterday was hot tub maintenance...according to the instructions you are supposed to drain the entire thing 4 times a year and refill it with new water. Apparently at some point the chemicals stop working and you have to change the water out. I don't know if that happened to us our not but I figure I better stick with the instructions to keep our warranty good.

So in the afternoon, after I got some exercise in, I started the process to drain the 375 gallons of hot water out of our tub. I actually thought the draining part would be fast, but I was wrong. It took over three hours to drain that thing. I am not sure why but I guess that small amount of change in elevation is just not enough gravity to really get it going. I even sucked on the hose to see if could get a better flow by siphon than by just using gravity alone and that didn't help either.

While I waited for it, I managed to clean up a bunch of beds around the house, put a new azeala in the ground, and cleaned up a ton of oak leaves from all over our property. It was getting dark by the time I was able to start filling the tub again and when I did the water temperature was only 53 degrees. It only heats about 6 degrees an hour so we had no hot tub last night. I checked it this morning and it is back up to 104 but I bet that baby ran almost all night long.

I still have plenty of yard work to do even though I feel I made head way. Besides the small things I want to do this week while it is warm, we have a few bigger projects on the books and we really need to get them done during the winter so the plants will have the spring to recover....oh well, one thing at a time, I guess. At least I'll have a warm hot tub for my aching muscles, right????