About Float & Filter

What this site is for

Float & Filter covers hot tub care exhaustively: the chemistry, the filters, the covers, and the routine that connects them. It is written for a specific reader — someone who wants the actual number, the actual dose and the actual part that fits, and who also wants to understand where that answer sits in the whole picture.

That reader is badly served at the moment. Search for cloudy hot tub water and you get five possible causes and four fixes in a fixed order, with nothing telling you which cause is yours. Search for a filter size and you get a bare lookup table with no buying path, or a shop with no lookup table. Search for how to measure a cover and the best answer available was published in 2019 and never touched again.

So the site is built around four things the incumbents mostly do not do: every problem page branches on something you can observe, every roundup has a comparison table, every number carries a citation to a primary source, and every date is real.

Who writes it

Scooter M. — an enthusiast who is genuinely into this. I read the manuals, compile the published specs, cite the standards, and do the arithmetic. I have not tested these products in a lab, and I am not going to tell you I have. What I will do is show my work.

There is no editorial team behind that byline making the operation look larger than it is, no advisory panel, and no expert reviewer. One person writes this, and the byline says so.

What we refuse to claim

• That we tested anything. No lab, no owned units, no "after six months of use", no hours-of-testing figure.
• Credentials. Nobody here is a certified pool operator, a chemist, a technician or a licensed trade. Borrowing an unrelated credential is exactly what makes the rest of this category hard to trust.
• Tenure. No "long-time", no "veteran", no "since 20XX". Interest is true and checkable; a claimed decade is neither.
• Reviews we did not collect. There are no testimonials on this site, no star ratings and no review counts, because we have no review corpus and inventing one would be indefensible.
• Prices we cannot verify. Live prices or "Check price". Never a remembered number.

The full version of what we do instead is on how we pick, which is the most important page on this site and the one every commercial page links to.

How the site is organized

Five sections, in the order a reader usually arrives rather than the order a shop would put them in:

• Water problems — cloudy, foaming, slimy, green. Diagnosed by symptom, then fixed.
• Chemicals — what to buy, what to skip, and the target ranges with citations.
• Filters — which cartridge fits, how to clean it, when it is finished.
• Covers — measuring, lifters, conditioning, and where custom covers are actually sold.
• Maintenance — the routine, the costs, and the water change interval.

That is 37 pages of content plus the trust pages, and every one of them is reachable from the site index.

Where the numbers come from

Water chemistry figures on this site cite the CDC, because its guidance covers hot tubs specifically and it is free to read, which means you can check us without buying anything. Product specifications cite the manufacturer and are attributed as manufacturer claims. Filter cross-reference data cites the published listing it was read from.

Where we could not verify something, the page says so. There are cells in our filter cross-reference table that read "not verified" for exactly that reason, and a shorter table that is right beats a longer one that is plausible.

How it is funded

Affiliate commission, disclosed above the first link on every commercial page and in the footer of every page. It costs you nothing extra and it does not change what we recommend. Where the better buy is somewhere we earn nothing — custom spa covers, most obviously — we say so and link it anyway. The full disclosure.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to know, and we fix errors in place with a dated note when the error was substantive. Get in touch, or email info@floatandfilter.com. Our sourcing and correction standards are on the editorial policy page.

Who publishes it

Float & Filter is published by Slate Mill Group. There is no physical premises, no phone number and no service area, because it is a publisher rather than a business that comes to your house. If you were looking for someone to service a hot tub, this is not that site, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.