Okay-please be patient with me-I know little to nothing on hot tubs and desperatly need some help. Also keep in mind i live in Canada...and it's getting cold...-26 today. Though the hot tub is designed for our wonderful winters,

Coles notes background...

Bought a house that came with a hottub. There is no model number, just the brand of Moose Mountain hot tubs. I've been trying to deal with them to resolve my problem-but they are short staffed and have no techs right now-or for the last month. (http://www.moosemountainhottubs.com/)

So here it goes-hopefully i'm giving you enough information and not just a bunch of fluff

The hot tub was working-only used it twice. Everything seemed normal to me-hot water, jets etc... Then somehow me and my husband put it into sleep mode-thus causing the temperature to drop, jets to be sleeping, and pretty much no action happening. So we decided "we're smart people, we can figure this out" (though we didn't know we put it in sleep mode) so after some serious button pushing...nothing changed, so i called the company and they gave me the steps to take it out of sleep mode. Pretty simple. On the display there is a Temp button (up and down) a Jet button, and a light button...that's it. So if you hold down the light button and push the jet button-BLAMO it goes out of sleep mode and into standard mode. Well-no. I went to the hot tub all happy that i had specific instructions as to how to make this work again...and the display shows a set of 3 lines, 3 down/3 across, and the strobe light at the bottom of the hot tub it's flashing away like crazy. I can push the buttons on the display, and it does recognize that i'm pushing on the buttons as it just flashes or dimms a bit....but nothing changes on the display. I've turned off all the breakers to the hot tub, left it for 30 minutes....an hour...nothing-still comes up with these lines. So I do know it's safe right now for freezing pipes as i put a space heater in the bottom part of the hottub\skirt thingy, which the hot tub company says even in our bitter winter will keep the hot tub from freezing up. The water itself of course is icing up.

Does anyone out there have any ideas on this? Anything i can do? the company says that they don't think we caused this-i beg to differ...we pushed the buttons alot and think we may have just locked it up or confused it. As well, we filled it up with water because it was making a really bad sound trying to suck water in-so we figured it was low on water...could this have caused anything? The hot tub company has never heard of this problem before, and have no ideas as to what to do to fix it. They can't send a tech out, because right now they have 1 tech that is local-and if i even can get him, it won't be until Feb.

Any information-any ideas....pretty much anything-would be greatly appreciated as i have no idea what to do with this.

Found some more info while searching...

It's a Balboa and i found that (---) =Unknown water temperature. (Displays when first powered up after refill).

So i'm really happy i found this info-but i don't know what to do with it

I've read through a bunch of the other posts here and found similar problems posted, talking about temperature sensors and high\low sensors...could this be it? We only filled the tub about 3 inches....but i'm now leaning towards this being the culprit and not our massive button pushing.

Where are the sensors actually located? What do you normally do when you fill up your tub if it's low...and do you normally have to do this or is it an automatic thing? Forgive my ignorance-but really...i truly have never owned or operated any...in my life...so this is a bit of a learning curve.

Well-I'll just reply to my own post-so that if someone out there has a similar problem they know what happened with me.

Got frustrated-opened up the side panel and started poking around. The cable going from the display panel-into the Balboa brain...it appears that there is/was a minor leak-as there are water marks on it-which dripped down the side-and into the port that the cable plugs into for the display. The end of the cable was damaged. Cut off the end, re-crimped it...and now the display is functioning again and life is good. How much damage was actually done INSIDE the port i'm not sure, but it's working for now so until it blows up it'll stay the way it is. Add to that-yes i sealed the area where the water looked like it came from.

in response to your 3rd installment on this post, I was going to suggest checking for loose or corroded contacts at the plugs of the topside control. What was happening is the spa pack was getting many random signals from what it thought was the topside control. I would suggest getting some dielectric grease and fill the contact points on those plugs... will help prevent further corrosion...which will happen now that it has started.