The True Cost of Hot Tub Ownership
Purchasing a hot tub can be both an exciting and frustrating process. There is so much to learn and consider.
That said, owning a hot tub can be one of life’s finer experiences. Benefits of owning a hot tub are numerous. It may help the body heal itself, improve circulation, enhance your quality of sleep and improve the quality of your time spent with family and friends.
Often people purchasing a hot tub focus solely on the price to purchase their spa. While the initial price is certainly an important factor to consider in your investment, people often overlook the other key factor, which is the Total Cost of Ownership over time.
In my series of blogs, I am going to help you with the big picture of things to consider when purchasing a spa.
Pre-Delivery Considerations
There are several factors that you have to consider prior to purchasing/taking delivery of your spa. They are as follows:
- Site Preparation – No requirement for cement pad with our Forever Floor ( Except AWP)
- Electrical Service – Hook-up
- Special Delivery Considerations
- Access to the property
- Possibility of requiring a crane (Standard for a Swim Spa)
- Supplies required to start up your spa when it arrives
- Water Truck ( Standard for a Swim Spas/recommended for sites with poor water quality)
- A concrete pad ( Not required for all manufacturers – be sure to read the warrant fine print)
Water Care Considerations
Many people fail to recognize the amount of time and money spent associated with taking care of their hot tub water. Many chlorine and bromine based spas require a significant investment of both your time and money in relation to water care. You often end up being a part -time chemist in order to keep your chemicals balanced and at optimum levels.
Depending on the manufacturer and design of your spa, you can require anywhere from as little as 4 hours of filtration a day to having your filtration run 24 hours a day. It goes without saying that a spa that requires 24/7 filtration versus 4-6 hours of filtration a day will add significantly to the cost of energy over the lifetime of your spa.
Many people also fail to plan for the costs of water changes. Unless you are on a well, you have to pay for water changes through your utility bill. Every water change comes with the additional cost of introducing all the chemicals and products that you have to use to make your water hot tub safe.
Breaking Down The Arctic Advantage
There are several factors that contribute to our spas being more energy efficient and dependable in our harsh environment.
The right type of insulation in the right place saves you money each and every day!
The design of our self-supporting shell allows us to insulate diffently than our competitors. We insulate our spas in a similar fashion to a tried-and-true example – our homes! We insulate the exterior walls, the floors and the top of our homes. We do the same with our hot tubs. Our polyurethane foam is applied to the cabinet walls and up inside the lips of the hot tub. Keeping all of the essential components of our spas inside this well insulated cabinet just makes sense.
In addition to freeze protection that lasts anywhere from 5-7 days, the ambient heat that is produced by the pumps when being used is able to penetrate the fibreglass spa shell and helps heat the water!. This means that your heater does not have to work as often or as hard to maintain or recover heat.
Check out this link to explain further this unique and trademarked feature – Free Heat
Fewer heater cycles means you save money each and every day that your spa is running!
The math is pretty simple- even if the savings was $15/month on power, over the lifetime of ownership period of 20 years, that is $3600. Choose where you want your money to go – the ability to invest in a better-quality spa or give your hard-earned money to a power company that offers you absolutely no return on your money.
“It’s unwise to pay too much…. BUT ITS WORSE TO PAY TOO LITTLE. When you pay too much, you lose a little money…. That is all! When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business prohibits paying a little and getting a lot. It can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better.” John Ruskin
Mylovac Cover
Much like our homes, it is essential to have the proper amount of insulation in the attic or in the cover of your hot tub. Our Mylovac cover is designed to provide you years of energy efficiency that compliments the high energy efficiency offered by our uniquely designed and engineered hot tubs.
The Mylovac cover is 5 inches thick and features a full-length baffle across the width of the cover. This baffle prevents heat loss from below where the hot tub cover folds when it is resting on your spa.
We wrap the insulation in a mylar/poly bag and the vac seal the cover and heat seal the seam. This keeps the moisture out of your cover. Wet covers are difficult to manage and most importantly are not as energy efficient.
High Efficiency Aqua-flow Pumps
There are two key aspects to sourcing the ultimate motor for a hot tub. Water flow and efficiency.
We want to have optimum water flow and pressure for the massage aspect while using our spas. The same is true when it comes to filtration. Higher rates of flow during filtration are essential to water quality and maintenance of our hot tub water.
Our high efficiency pumps draw minimal amperage when operating in a filtration cycle yet still move 50 gallons (227 litres) per minute. Our filtration system is designed to achieve maximum filtration benefits at 4-6 hours a day. If a spa has a circulation pump, you will be looking at 24/7/365 days a year power costs associated with this pump running. Ironically, it has nothing to do with the quality of filtration, rather in place to ensure that the water keeps moving to prevent freeze up. Again, it comes back to design and engineering.
We can operate the smaller horsepower motors in our spas and still achieve the same great massage that our customers have come to appreciate. As part of our engineering design, we utilize reflex torsion hose for our plumbing. On the supply side of this engineering, reflex torsion hose offers us about 40% more water volume readily available to our pumps.
With this added volume, we require less pressure at the pump. Most people can quickly figure out for themselves that a lower horsepower motor will consume less electricity to run. Higher horsepower does not equate to better performance. It always comes back to engineering and design.
The excitement of a great sale price will be long forgotten when the quality of your spa and subsequent operating, maintenance and repairs costs starts to add up and far exceed what the price of a better quality spa would have cost initially. Not all spas are built equal.
Quality does not cost more, it’s worth more!
