Spa and Hot Tub Covers

It is pretty standard practice to have a Privacy Policy posted on websites these days. If you haven’t ever read them we would encourage you to read a couple especially on the websites that are selling you things. Some can be very confusing with clauses that say things like, “…information about you may be transferred but we will notify you if it becomes subject to a different privacy policy.” Or that the Privacy Policy applies in the United States. Some basically tell you how they disseminate the information they gather from you which doesn’t seem to be very private at all. Think of your information like you do your house. If You give us information about yourself, you are for the sake of demonstration, giving us permission to have limited access to your “house”. If we tell you we are taking that privilege seriously and then share that access with everyone I know it would be equal to having a guest over and have them invite people you don’t know to your house. Sound far fetched? We sell a custom made spa cover. We have been selling them for years by way of the internet and as such sell thousands every year all over the country. Since we sell direct from our factory we don’t have showrooms. Almost every day we get at least one person who asks us to give them the name of a customer in their area so they can go by and look at the cover. This sounds innocent enough and they tend to get upset that we don’t share that information with them. First, and foremost our customers are extremely important to us. They are the best unpaid sales force in the world. But as unpaid sales people we don’t pester them too much if they just sell a few covers by telling a few of their friends about us. We don’t ask them to move their spas out in the front yard so more people can see our wonderful product. No, we have to be content that most people have their spas in a more secluded area of their home. Maybe someday we’ll work out some kind of incentive program for people willing to mount their spas out front and stay home from work to demonstrate their spa cover to whomever happens by but right now we have nothing like that in the works. In regard to the interruptions, we know we may be a little over the top on it but consider this… Say you buy a spa cover from me and you think it would be fine if we send people by every now and then to check it out. For the first couple of months it might not be too bad, three to five couples coming by after work, not that big of a deal. Then a few people want to come by when your at work because thats the only time they have available, that would get old. The first time you came home and found your ten year old showing strangers that arrived unannounced, around the backyard because they were just in the neighborhood and you had just run to the store we think you would want to be done. This sounds crazy but it has happened. You are kind enough to show someone and then they decide to just stop by with their friend and you seemed not to mind so…. People have an innate tendency to see things only from their own perspective. They judge their own actions based on some special level because they know themselves. They don’t stop to think how their actions might be interpreted by others that don’t know their motives.
The next important point is related to the first in that our customers use our product in their homes. In the world we live in, the majority are busy chasing dollars around all day, when we get home the last thing most of us want to do is answer one more unsolicited phone call with the added bonus of maybe inviting a total stranger over to our home, into our private area of the home to let them poke and prod, and ask a few questions about some purchase we made over the internet. Talk about mystery shopper. What if the stranger happens to injure themselves at our customers home? Who would be liable? What if, and we know this sounds out there but what if the person we gave customer information to was really just a bad person and meant to do harm to a customer or steal from them. We don’t know these people. We have no personal knowledge that they are who they say. If this only happened once in thirty years it would be too much. So we tend to take your privacy very seriously.
Unfortunately it is the world we live in. Everything we do has to be done with a certain amount of respect to security. If you become a customer, you can rest assured that your information is considered privileged and private. If you are not yet a customer thank you for taking the time to read this. If you still require that we share customer information before you buy our product we’re sorry but we can’t help you.

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.

I have seen a posting on a competitors website regarding a comparison of outside temperature of a rigid foam spa cover verses the outside surface temperature of a SpaCap. The information given there is an opinion of how well the cover works based on pointing a heat sensing gun at both covers while in use. Although the person doing the test may have performed the test accurately and may have used a very sophisticated testing device, they did not actually address the function of a spa cover, keeping the water in the spa warm while using the least amount of energy doing so. Let me start with a brief description of the difference between the two methods of covering the hot tub. First the traditional foam spa cover. A rigid foam cover lays across the surface of the spa on top of the Acrylic, like a bridge over the spa water. In most cases this rigid piece of foam is several inches off the water it is supposed to be keeping warm. Ten to twelve inches of gap between the hot tub water surface and the bottom of the spa cover is not unusual.

The SpaCap hot tub cover by comparison lays right on the waters surface and uses closed air chambers to insulate the spa water, similar to how the layers of glass on your storm windows insulate your house. The big difference to note in these two styles is the gap between the spa water and the cover being used to insulate it. The dirty little secret behind rigid foam spa covers is they can Never effectively insulate the spa water. Instead it just covers the spa, reducing, but not eliminating the steam that would otherwise rise off the water’s surface into the atmosphere. A rigid foam cover twelve inches thick would still allow the warm spa water to evaporate into steam, rise up, cool, and condense on the bottom of the cover (if you own one you have seen the droplets on the bottom). The condensation then falls back into the spa cooling the water causing the spa to work harder to keep the water warm.

Another thing that happens in rigid foam covers is saturation. You may notice this, as it takes more muscle to lift your cover off your hot tub. Because of the spa environment the steam from the spa water eventually seeps into the foam and condenses in the little air spaces inside. This begins to happen almost as soon as you put it in service. Since those little air spaces in the foam represent insulation, the little value it might have is gone rapidly long before you notice the cover gaining weight. Once the ambient air temperature gets down to freezing the moisture trapped in the foam freezes so in fact you are now trying to insulate your spa with a block of ice. If you were to point a heat sensing device at that frozen block of ice would read the same temperature as the ambient air. Does that mean it is perfect insulation? Unfortunately, no.

Herein lies the problem in the heat gun test. Since no rigid foam cover is actually in contact with the water it is supposedly keeping warm and it is in fact in contact with the ambient air above the spa, it is only natural that it would be more relative to the outside temperature. By comparison the SpaCap laying right on the water surface insulates the water in two ways. First, it severely reduces the open water surface by coming in direct contact with it. The spa water consequently cannot evaporate as it does under the foam cover. A side benefit of the reduced evaporation is that the spa chemicals will also stay more consistent and you will be able to use less to get the same results which aside from saving frustration also saves you money. The second way the SpaCap insulates is by using closed air chambers stacked one on top of the other to create barriers of air between the outside ambient air and the water in the hot tub. Think of it like layering your clothes. If you have one layer of clothing on you stay slightly warmer than you would walking around naked. Two layers of clothing on you trap another layer of air around your body and stay warmer. More layers of air equal more insulation so you put on a coat over your shirt, over your underwear. The same is true in the animal kingdom. An animal that has to keep warm traps air around its body with feathers or fur. As long as that system is in good condition the animal stays warm. If the feathers or fur looses their ability to trap air, say it gets covered in oil, then the animal quickly looses heat and dies. Why? Because saturated fur, feathers or foam does not insulate. Trapped air insulates consistently. A twelve year old SpaCap still insulates as well as the first day it was put in service as long as it is still holding air. If you were to point a heat sensing device at the outside of a SpaCap while it is in use it would read some measure of heat, higher than the ambient air. Does that mean it is not insulating? No, it simply means that it is not perfect insulation. A better test would be to place the heat sensor in the water since after all, this is the focus of the insulation. Reading the temperature of the water and how fast it lost heat under a rigid foam cover verses how fast it lost heat while covered with a SpaCap would be a more useful test. This test we have done a number of times over the years. The SpaCap beats every foam cover ever made in this test. There is no other rigid foam filled cover that even comes close enough to call it competition. In fact a saturated foam filled cover tests the same as a piece of wet plywood.
The SpaCap is several times better at keeping spa water warm than its nearest competitor. If energy efficiency is what you want get yours with all the insulation options and your SpaCap will pay for itself with the energy you save.

The Energy Star program is run by the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Energy. It is a great idea and has helped manufacturers move toward more energy efficient products in many different areas. Unfortunately though since it is a program paid for with tax dollars it has to be limited in scope or targeted so that the products it covers would be something that the majority of tax payers could see a benefit in.

It would be really great if Every product or innovation that reduced the energy required could be considered however such is not the case. Understandably the program is focused on general energy consumption of household products, washing machines, refrigerators, and materials used in home construction that reduce energy needs. Some products used in the home, for example computers are included, others in particular pools and spas are not.

Unfortunate considering the information we get from utility companies around the country regarding the cost of energy and the percentage of it that goes into a pool or spa. We have even seen the Energy Star logo used in advertising spas even though the Department of Energy has clearly stated that it will not consider such a product for inclusion as an Energy Star Partner since the majority of taxpayers would not benefit from such a product. This is naturally something we would like to see changed.

Personally I would prefer that every tax payer would own at least one Hot tub. I can only see this as good for the country. If more people would spend more time in their spa they would be using less fuel running around and have a lot less stress. Some utility companies have reported that when a home owner adds a hot tub their utility bill will go up by a significant percentage.

According to the findings of a 2004 study conducted by the Davis Energy Group sponsored Pacific Gas & Electric Co., pool and spa pumps are almost always the largest single electrical end-use (appliance in a home), using more than three times the energy of a new refrigerator. This same study found that the average residential pool pump consumes 2,600 kilowatt hours (kWh) annually with portable spas not far behind at 2,500 kWh per year. With an estimated 1.2 million pools and about half a million spas the State of California by itself has to have the entire yearly output of one nuclear power plant plus one conventional power plant just to feed the consumption of pools and spas.

It’s no wonder the California Energy Commission has recently approved new appliance efficiency regulations that for the first time include portable spas and a maximum allowable watt per hour usage. As spa manufacturers struggle to meet these new requirements the bottom line for you the spa owner is how do you reduce the expense of operating your already purchased hot tub? Since most of the energy used in the spa is used keeping the water warm for the next time you want to dip into it, getting that water insulated is the key.

[Spa] Covers reduce most if not all of the evaporative losses from the pool when in use. With this component of heat loss being 70% a cover with a small R value can achieve as much as a 75% reduction in heating costs when used. (www.flasolar.com/heat_loss.htm)

If wrapping your water heater can make a difference in your energy bill, imagine what “wrapping” your other water heater (your spa) would do. Your hot tub uses the same type of heater your household water heater does only your household water heater may have twice as many elements to heat up about forty gallons of water while your spa is trying to heat four hundred gallons. Good insulation around the sides and bottom of your spa play a vital role in helping keep that spa water warm.

However that insulation is done when the spa is constructed. Any good hot tub manufacturer is going to put a good amount of insulation around the spa shell. Insulating the pipes the jets are fed from is important too and should be done by the manufacturer. Once you have purchased your spa insulating it after the construction can be done however it may be difficult and expensive. The last place most spa owners look for insulation is in the cover.

To begin with that spa dealer is going to send some sort of cover home with your new spa. The spa dealer may spend some time talking to you about the benefits of a cover but lets be honest you didn’t go there to buy a spa cover and as an after thought decided to get a spa to go under it. No, you wanted a spa. One with lots of features. Jets where you wanted them to ease your pain and tension. If the spa dealer talked to you about the cover you might have seen his lips moving but you were still concentrating on how good those jets of water were going to feel as they pummeled your aching body with soothing pulsing action of warm water. You may have not even thought of the cover when you got your first utility bill.

But you should think about the cover since heat rises. Most of the heat lost from your spa water is going straight up. Insulating the water from the water then makes the most sense. But rigid foam covers are trying to insulate your spa water from way up on top of the spa acrylic. In most cases this can be several inches off the water surface, ten or more is not uncommon. If you have a rigid foam cover twelve inches thick it still doesn’t insulate the water since it isn’t in contact with the water. You constantly loose heat under the rigid cover because warm water is evaporating, turning into steam.

The steam rises and either escapes from the crack between the halves of the cover or hits the bottom of the spa cover, cools and condenses back into liquid and falls (cooled) back into the spa water below. In your car you would call this a radiator and consider it good because it keeps your engine cool. In your spa this is bad because it causes your spa to work harder to keep your spa water up to temperature.

This is despite the fact that the outside of the rigid foam cover can be the same temperature as the ambient air outside, giving the impression that it must be insulating. The simple explanation for this is that the rigid foam spa cover is in contact with the ambient air outside the spa and NOT the water it is supposed to keep warm.

The SpaCap by comparison is laying right on the water surface. By doing so it severely limits the evaporation by taking away that open surface. The SpaCap spa cover insulates using enclosed air chamber like a storm window. These dead air chambers insulate consistently regardless of the temperature outside or the age of the cover. The SpaCap has no foam in it to saturate or break so a five year old hot tub cover can insulate as well as a brand new one.

We have had the SpaCap tested by an independent testing facility (information listed on our website) and have proven that our spa cover insulates several times better than any foam cover. That being said we would consider it a honor to be considered an Energy Star Partner. However unless the Department of Energy changes its scope to include Any consumer product that can save energy, that can’t happen.

We will continue to pursue that end but for the foreseeable future if you see any hot tub or spa or spa cover advertising that they are an Energy Star partner you should report it to the Department of Energy, Energy Star, enforcement division and consider any other sales claims they make questionable.

With the Title 20, Section 1605.3 amendments of the California Appliance Efficiency Regulations, that state is taking the lead in setting tougher standards for the energy consumption of portable spas. Other states will no doubt follow suit. With the biggest waste of warmth which equals energy spent going out the top, look for the best insulating spa cover to be the answer for the seriously energy conscious spa manufacturer. The Energy Star may never be offered to Spas or Spa Covers but it won’t be long before meeting the California Regulations for spa energy consumption will be equal to the best endorsement.