What Are Enzymes?
It sounds simple, you empty a bottle filled with a liquid enzyme solution in your hot tub and the water should be free of slime-forming bacteria, cloudy water, and odor free. Unfortunately, it is not that simple as the manufacturers want you to believe.
Enzymes are chemicals and, what’s known as, biological macromolecular catalysts. Enzymes, like all catalysts, activate and accelerate specific chemical reactions. Enzymes are produced by all living creatures, plants and animals alike. There are more than 4,000 biochemical reactions catalyzed by enzymes. They are essential for life.
What Do Enzymes Do?
Many of today’s detergents contain enzymes because they break-down oils and other biological contaminates in dirty clothes. They do the same in spas, breaking down body oils, dead skin cells (those high-power, rotating jets scrub lots of dead skin cells from your body), dead bacteria & viruses, etc. that are in your spa water. Technically, enzymes will remove these by breaking down “polysaccharides”, present in all of them, into much smaller fragments of carbon molecules, nitrogen, water, etc. In doing so, enzymes can somewhat reduce the “food source” for pathogens. However, all of these contaminants are continuously being added back into your spa water by your use.
One of the more visible uses of enzymes is to remove and prevent the scum line that can appear at the water line in your spa.
What Enzymes Do Not Do
Enzymes do not kill anything. They are in no way a sanitizer! Bacteria, etc. must already be dead for enzymes to do anything in a spa.
Enzymes are also rather short-lived and can be destroyed by other chemicals in your spa including chlorine, bromine, and ozone.
