Spa and Hot Tub Covers

Since mankind decided that hot tubs would be fun we have had to face the challenge of keeping that water clear and safe. Chlorine and Bromine have been in use since almost day one. Both have their advantages. They kill everything. The down side is also that they kill everything. By that I mean that Chlorine and Bromine are both caustic chemicals. That is both how they function and what makes them less desirable. Not only do they kill germs and bacteria but they are harmful to your skin, hair, bathing suits, spa jets, pump impellers, pets and environment. With the heightened awareness of the environment and our own physical health, there has been a wide variety of alternatives to the old standards.

Minerals can be used to treat the spa water with less harmful effects. First, Copper can be used to treat your water and keeps stuff from growing in your water. It is a lot safer for your skin, hair and health, and won’t cause premature break down of your pump and jet components. Still, because it does a good job of killing things you need to use care when you empty your spa. Some areas have banned using copper to treat water because if it does end up in the water shed it will kill fish and algae.

Another popular choice is Silver and zinc. I would just recommend sticking with the liquid based versions. You should never use anything directly in the filter area of the spa because you do not want the risk of anything being sucked into the water pump.

Ozone can also be effective in water treatment. It works by exposing ultra violet light to air which forms an energetic oxidizer. It destroys algae, viruses and bacteria. Again you should know how to use your system properly. Avoid over exposure to ozone while using the spa. No ozone bubbles should be entering the spa during occupancy. Also you should not be able to smell ozone while you are in the spa.

One thing that a lot of spa owners forget about is checking your spa water pH. Maintaining the proper pH level can greatly improve the effectiveness of the water treatment. Spa water that is not properly balanced can cause irritation to eyes, and mucous membranes. Just because you keep a handle on your chemical treatment, do not get lazy about checking the pH.

Finally, circulation of the water. Stagnant water, especially warm stagnant water is a breeding ground for life. Regular circulation of the water for significant periods of time will reduce the need for chemicals and increases the effectiveness of the spas filtration. It is better overall for your spa pump to run for three to four hours at a time for two to three times per day as opposed to running for thirty minutes at a time ten times per day. If your spa only runs for thirty minutes it does no have enough time to properly filter all the spa water.

The bottom line is that yo want to be able to enjoy your spa for years to come. However like your car, regular maintenance can have a profound influence on that. If you maintain your car, change the oil, replace the filters, rotate the tires, you stand a much better choice of enjoying your vehicle with fewer unpleasant surprises. The same goes for your spa.

All this talk about going green, a big part of saving the environment is to not create more waste that will just end up clogging our land fills. Follow me on this for a minute… There are 10 million spa owners in the USA, and each one of them uses a typical rigid foam spa cover on their hot tub. For the sake of this demonstration each foam cover is only two inches thick and every spa is eight feet by eight feet. That would mean each spa cover contained about 10.666 cubic feet of foam per spa cover. For the rest of this example we will use 10.5 cubic feet per cover.

If each cover on every spa becomes saturated within two years and needs to be replaced that would mean that we would be adding 52.5 million cubic feet of waste to our landfills in just spa covers every year.
If it takes two and a half covers worth of foam to make up one cubic yard that translates to 4 million cubic yards of waste added to our land fills every two years just in spa covers.

If there are 11 million Cubic yards of stone in the Great Pyramid at Giza, we are adding enough foam to build a duplicate of it to our landfills just from used spa covers every six years conservatively. There are four and a half million cubic yards of concrete in Hoover Dam. We could build a two lane highway of discarded foam filled spa covers from Seattle Washington to Miami Florida every two years.

In case you have not noticed most foam filled spa covers are not two inches thick anymore. If all those old foam covers were four inches thick all these calculations would be double.
But we are just being conservative so we want to stick with two inches thick. If we ripped the covers in half and laid those pieces end to end we could circle the earth at the equator on used spa covers every two years.

Heck with parking lots, in a few years we could pave the entire planet with foam just from saturated foam spa covers from the USA alone.

So what is the solution? Well shop for a better spa cover. There are options available on the internet that your local spa dealer probably does not offer. You do not have to quit using your spa to save us. You just need to get a Spa Cover that does not use foam to insulate. There would be two major advantages to doing so. First the spa cover that did not use rigid foam to insulate would last longer. Since what always fails in the typical spa cover is the foam, either breaking or getting so saturated that you cannot lift it, a spa cover that did not use foam would tend to last longer.

Second, if the new type of spa cover does not use rigid foam it will also be a lot more friendly to the environment when it does come time to discard it. Less trash, less waste, less land fill, not that is what going green is all about.

You may not think of your next spa cover purchase as critical to the environment, but you should. Think of it this way… If there are over 10 million spa owners in the USA alone and each one of them uses a rigid foam cover on their spa. Say each foam cover is two inches thick and every spa is eight feet by eight feet. That would equal about 10.666 cubic feet of foam per spa cover. We’ll say 10.5 cubic feet per cover. If each cover on every spa becomes saturated within two years and needs to be replaced that would mean that we would be adding 52.5 million cubic feet of waste to our landfills in just spa covers every year. If there are two and a half covers worth of foam to make up one cubic yard that translates to 4 million cubic yards of waste added to our land fills every two years just in spa covers. If there are 11 million Cubic yards of stone in the Great Pyramid at Giza, we are adding enough foam to build a duplicate of it to our landfills just from used spa covers every six years conservatively. There are four and a half million cubic yards of concrete in Hoover Dam. Imagine the Hoover Dam, 726 feet tall, 1,244 feet wide, 660 feet thick at the base and forty five feet wide at the top. We could build a two lane highway of discarded foam filled spa covers from Seattle Washington to Miami Florida every two years. If all those old foam covers were four inches thick we could make it a four lane highway. And we could do it every couple years. But let’s be conservative and say two inches thick. If we ripped the covers in half and laid those pieces end to end we could circle the earth at the equator on used spa covers every two years. Remember we are using two inch foam covers, if you use a four inch foam cover these numbers double. Heck with parking lots, in a few years we could pave the entire planet with foam just from saturated foam spa covers from the USA alone. In the immortal words of Robin the Boy Wonder, “Holy garbage nightmares, Batman!” Is there any hope out there? Well yes there is actually and you don’t have to quit using your spa to save us. You just need to get a SpaCap and tell every other spa owner you know to buy a SpaCap instead of a rigid foam filled spa cover. Why? Well first of all the SpaCap does a better job than any foam cover and they last years longer on average. But at the end of that long and useful life discarding of an old SpaCap is considerably less impact on the environment. A typical SpaCap for an eight foot by eight foot spa can be compacted into one cubic foot of space. That’s one tenth the size required for a foam cover. So then if a SpaCap were on every spa in America and every SpaCap lasted seven years (we have some out there that are still in use after ten) we would be creating one point four million cubic feet of waste per year. That’s about fifty three thousand cubic yards per year. Still significant but it would take seventy five years to make a pile as big as the Great Pyramid. This doesn’t address the environmental cost of transportation. If a good size semi truck trailer can haul 2000 cubic feet and you could stuff every nook and cranny with a foam filled spa cover the best you could get would be about 188 covers per semi trailer. (Again, these numbers are based on two inch foam. If every spa owner in America is using a tapered cover, or a three or four inch cover these figures could easily double) That means transporting the before mentioned foam filled covers would take around fifty five thousand semi truck trailers. Compare this to a mere five thousand to haul the same amount of SpaCap spa covers. Imagine fifty thousand fewer truck trailers on the road. Talk about a savings in transportation cost. Incidentally that same number of truck trailers would be needed to haul those covers to dealers so you could by your next one. That would be about one hundred ten thousand semi trailers on the road verses ten thousand total to haul the SpaCap to market and land fill. Of course if the SpaCap lasts longer that would mean about 714 semi truck trailers per year compared to 55,000 loaded trailers per year of foam covers to cover the same number of spas. So a stack of wasted foam covers as large as the Great Pyramid every two years or a pile of SpaCap spa covers the same size in seventy five years. 54,286 fewer semi truck trailers on the road per year. Using a spa cover that requires one tenth the energy to keep the spa water warm… Personally I would prefer a SpaCap pile that big. I’d have my picture taken in front of it. I’ll only be in my mid one hundred twenties in seventy five years so I may require a few replacement parts myself by then. 10,000,000 spas using one tenth the energy to keep the water warm. If it cost $50 per year (I wish) to heat those 10,000,000 spas and the SpaCap saved 90 percent of that by being ten times better than a foam filled cover that would be an energy savings of 450,000,000 dollars per year. (your actual saving may vary) Heck with the Energy Star, the Department of Energy will probably want to give me a medal or some token of appreciation like Australia.