Bromine Spa treatment recipe

Is there a recipe that uses Bromine treatment numbers? I noticed I can select Bromine as a water type but I don’t see any sliders for bromine readings?

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Hey @dantman, welcome to the forum, thanks for asking!

We did not have a bromine recipe until a few mins ago, but I just created one here: https://recipes.pooldash.com/recipe/moist_western_543/edit

You should now be able to select it in the app on the “Change Recipe” screen.

I have a few questions that perhaps you can help with:

  • What is the target range for bromine in a spa? According to this, it’s from 4-6 ppm, so the recipe currently shoots for “5”.
  • Are the other target ranges correct? I will probably need to update the recipe soon if there are any issues (do you still take a cyanuric acid reading?)

This is also bringing to light some other features that I should probably build soon:

  • PoolDash should probably be smarter about filtering or recommending recipes that are actually compatible with your pool.
  • PoolDash should probably distinguish between “official” recipes and “community” recipes (there are a few recipes in this list that I’m not really familiar with… this is great that people are actually building recipes, but likely confusing for new users).
  • PoolDash should let pools be specified as a “pool” or “spa”… right?
  • PoolDash should proooobably provide an easy way to adjust the target-ranges without forking a whole recipe. Pool Doctor was good at this, hopefully I can bring that back eventually.

Hi Thanks for the Bromine recipe. I usually only measure Alkalinity, pH & Bromine. The Bromine target is usually 3-5ppm. We use Spa Marvel, and as a result our Bromine targets are much lower, so a range of 0-7 should cover anyone. Our target Alkalinity range is 80-150. The pH range looks right.

Awesome, thanks for the info. I went ahead & tailored the recipe to what you described, and called it “Spa Marvel + Bromine” (you should be able to select it in pooldash as well, and in-fact the old recipe might disappear soon).

I might add a more generic spa recipe later – anyways, let me know if it works out!

Is there a way to allow an individual user to adjust their own targets and enter their own chemical usages to track those as well?

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Sorry, there’s not great support for either of those, but I’ll build it in the coming months. Here is what I’m thinking, let me know if you have any improvements (it’s always better to get feedback upfront so I can build it right the first time):

Enter your own chemical usages
Currently, you can only edit the amount used of recommended chemicals. I should let users enter their own chemicals as well. I think it should work like this:

  • There’s a plus-button in the top-right of the treatments screen
  • Pressing it will bring up a list of all chemical treatments that the recipe can recommend but didn’t, as well as the ability to type in your own custom chemicals.
  • If you ever add your own custom chemical, that one will also appear in the list in the future.

Adjusting target levels as an individual user:
Right now, this requires a new recipe, which is waaaaaay overkill. I need to modify the recipe engine so that it allows for custom targets, and there are essentially 2 ways to do it:

  1. Always shoot for the middle of the idealMin and idealMax values, and make those configurable.
  2. Add a separate target field to each reading, and make that configurable.

I actually prefer method #1 here, mostly because I already have idealMin and idealMax fields on each reading, so it won’t involve adding yet another parameter to each reading. However, I’m sure that the target value won’t always be in the exact center of the ideal range… but it probably usually will, right?

As an aside, this target value won’t always be a static number – for instance, the target level for free-chlorine will be different if the total chlorine is too high, in which case we’ll probably need to calculate breakpoint chlorination. But, in these exceptional cases, it’s ok if the target value doesn’t reflect the actual target, as long as the formula knows this & will return the correct dosage.

We’re working on the target-levels now – here’s the design, let us know if you have any feedback @dantman

We shipped the target levels in the latest app update, so now they’re easier to change – check it out!