Charlton:
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Hoping desperately to find some Ammonium Hydroxide locally tomorrow
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While not ideal, household ammonia cleaner (eg Parsons Ammonia) is mostly aqueous ammonium hydroxide. It usually contains small quantities of surfactants (detergent) and "perfumes", and I don't know what effect those would have on the electrolyte. You might check in a good hardware store for more pure forms.
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how many times can you "Top-Off" the solution with distilled water until the solution is too weak to plate? How do you know when you need to change out the solution / bath entirely?
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The only answer I've ever seen to this question is "when it stops plating effectively". Most commercial platers either just change it out at regular intervals, or perform chemical analyses to determine depletion, which simply isn't practical for us.
Since last spring when I started out, I've added about a gallon of water to a 4-gallon tank, to make up for evaporation, and it's still working fine. Not being at all familiar with chemistry, I don't know the characteristics of the actual chemicals in the mix, but I don't believe they are volatile. ie, they don't evaporate off with the water.
I keep my tank tightly closed when not in use to minimize evaporation, but in use, it's inevitable.
Sean