We had our morning soak then it was time to drain the tub. It had built up calcium scale and needed to be cleaned so after removing the headrests I tossed in a cleaner and let it foam for half an hour with the every jet on.
It was pretty gnarly and I scooped all the foam off and kept the sides rinsed off. A lot of gunk came out with the bubbles and the dark color of them showed how much was removed.
In went my 1/3 hp submersible pump and I drained as much water as I could with it. The drain on the tub is super slow so to have the pump really speeds it up.
Once the water drained for the first time I removed all the jets to clean them. They got tossed in the container and taken to the bath tub in the house where I added descaler and degreaser which did a pretty good job of removing the gunk. We also went to every jet and scraped the scale off, which took a good while.
We needed to remove all the remaining water that the pump couldn't reach and I thought of the boys water toys. They have a flat nose that allows for the water to be sucked up to just a tiny amount on the bottom. It was pretty cool since the water guns ended up being solids handling and picked up all the calcium flakes left in the bottom.
The tub got filled again. It is a 400 gallon tub and I am using water from inside the house that is on the softener. The outside water has way too much iron.
I put more of the solution in and let it foam away for another half hour to try and clean out the pipes and the rest of the scale in the tub. It foamed really well and there was a good amount of dark colored foam showing that it was removing even more gunk. I scooped the foam off and once the half hour jets cycle finished I got the pump in it again and drained it out.
When the second foam was going on the pipes had shot out a bunch of scale from the lines that ended up in the tub and we had to clean it all out again.
Finally we got it started on the final fill and after washing off the jets in the house they got reinstalled. The jets had been okay to get out but some did not want to budge, it took some serious wrenching on some to get them to come out. They all went back in so much smoother without all the scale on them.
With the tub filling it was time to get to the tomatoes. While @stryeyz set about working on blanching the medium sized tomatoes I dumped all the cherries into the medium kettle, smashed a bunch, and got them heating.
Once it was all heated for a while and all the tomatoes mooshed I put them through the strainer to remove the skins and seeds. I set the juice back to heat on the stove for the evening.
It took until almost 5pm before the tub was filled and we could turn the heater back on. I covered it and let it sit for he night.
After I got the cherry tomatoes dealt with I went to work on the grapes. I got most of the Sommerset grapes run and we had enough to fill a gallon jug plus more in a bowl. Today I am going to be canning the tomatoes and the grape juice. The juice needs to be refrigerated to deal with the crystals that form and can cause cloudiness.
The cherry tomatoes had reduced a lot over the evening and was about a 1/4 of it's original volume. I am going to have it keep heating today to reduce it even more and try to get it to a paste. Likely I will end up with only a handful of pints one it is fully reduced.
This morning I had to get up early to add the chemicals to the tub since I didn't last night. The calcium level is the big one that I have to get right since I am filling the tub with soft water. I will be checking it often today to try and get the levels right. School for the boys and I will be spending the bulk of my day canning.
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