Spa and Hot Tub Covers

Most spa dealers offer a cover with a taper. They promote this type of cover as though the ability to shed rain and moisture will keep it from getting saturated.

If this worked would there ever be another heavy spa cover? True, it does help the spa cover shed rain. True, rain running off the spa is a good thing. Unfortunately this does not have anything to do with why a cover gets heavy.

Here is a simple test you can do yourself to test what I just said. Go and purchase a new spa cover with as big a taper as you can find. Bring it home but before you put it on your spa weigh it. A hanging weight will probably be most accurate and simple to read. Record the weight and date it. Put the new cover on your spa only to be positively sure that no rain or outside moisture gets into your new hot tub cover, put a tarp over the whole spa, cover and all.

Weigh the cover once a week and record it with the date. When the cover begins to get heavy you will know how long it took and that it was not due to outside moisture. If you are keeping all the rain water totally away from the spa, why is it getting heavy?

The fact is outside moisture is Never what causes the foam in a spa cover to get heavy. Foam covers get heavy because they are in use over steam from your spa water. Here is a way you can prove this to yourself. Purchase two new spa covers. Weigh them both and record and date it. Put one cover on your spa and use it as normal. Store the other one in you garage or some other place out of the moisture. If you weigh them each every week, before long you will find the one in use on the spa will begin to get heavy. The one in storage in a dry place will not get heavy.

Now we come to the reason why. What gets into the foam is the steam from underneath the spa cover. The steam particles are much smaller than water molecules like rain. Steam can get through the smallest hole. Since there is no lack of steam above spa water, it will always eventually work its way into the spaces in the foam. So in fact, the only way to avoid having any rigid foam spa cover saturate is to never put it on your spa or never put water in your spa.

So what is so bad about a spa cover getting heavy? Aside from making the spa cover more difficult to use, is saturation bad? The insulation in a foam cover comes from the air in the foam. If those air spaces are filled with water then that insulation value is gone. Worse yet, when the weather gets cold the moisture in that foam freezes. This is what fools a lot of people in to thinking that their foam cover is doing a great job of insulating. When snow falls on a frozen block of ice, it sits there and piles up.

Meanwhile the spa is working harder to keep the water warm. As steam hits the bottom of the frozen foam, it cools and condenses, falling back into the spa. Snow will sit just fine on a frozen lake but that does not mean that the ice is insulating anything.

So what is the solution? Well, you could buy two or three hot tub covers and rotate them as you notice them getting heavy. Always have one or two drying out in your garage. Once the saturated spa cover is off the spa, it will begin to dry out. You can rotate it back on to the hot tub when the next one gets heavy. Since all vinyl is rated by hours outdoors, you will still need to be buying new covers to replace the ones that fall apart.

The other choice would be to find a spa cover that does not use foam. If you shop online there are alternative spa covers that your local spa dealer does not have to offer. Be sure to check out the Spa Covers from SpaCap.com.

So you have owned your spa for a while and replaced the cover when it got heavy. Now your wondering if you should get a lifter. Well if you want to get one for ease of use they work great. If you are getting one so you can avoid replacing your spa cover then save your money. A cover lifter only works with a spa cover that is not saturated or heavy.

The spa cover lifter was invented as a means to assist in the removal and storage of a hot tub cover while the spa is in use. The mechanism and idea work great and can make the process fairly quick and easy. The trouble is that most spa owners are sold a lifter as a means to remove a heavy cover. Unfortunately no lifter is designed to work with a saturated cover.

The way a typical lifter works is by means of a bar that extends from one side of the spa to the other along the fold in the spa cover. The operator still has to fold the cover back over the bar to begin the opening process. If the cover is already heavy it will not assist this first phase at all.

The second part of the process is to push the lifter back toward the way you want the cover to go. Once again if your cover is saturated and heavy this is where the real damage is done. Since the spa cover was never designed to hang by the material hinge and most are some grade of marine vinyl the heavy cover will pull itself apart merely due to its own weight. In this case that would be the best thing that could happen.

Most spa cover lifters attach to the sides of the spa. If the weight of a heavy cover puts too much strain of these pivot points it could rip the screws out of the sides of the spa or worse tear the sides of the spa off. This might sound impossible but it does happen

The bar lifter does make a nice place to store the spa cover while you are using the hot tub. Again it is important to note it requires a light weight spa cover to work easily. That means, if the reason you bought the cover lifter was to avoid having to replace your heavy spa cover, it is not going to be the answer. You will still need to replace your typical rigid foam filled hot tub cover every couple of years to make that lifter effective. In most cases this would be a lot more frequently then you replace it now.

If you already own a spa cover lifter, you probably know all this. Do not despair. You just need to be prepared to replace that cover every one to two years. When you buy the new cover, store the old one under cover in a dry place somewhere. When the new one spa cover is about a year old you can rotate the old one back onto the spa. When it is stored in a dry place away from the warm steam of your spa the foam will dry and be easy to lift again. You should be able to get some extra life out of your covers this way. Eventually all vinyl will crack and fall apart so this is not a permanent fix. If you get used to rotating covers you can get more life out of them. Think of it like being a football coach. If you have a key player that is essential to your game plan it just makes sense to give him a break now and then.

If you plan on using this rotation method of replacing covers do not bother buying the most expensive foam spa cover you can find because they all fall victim to the same thing eventually and the cheap covers will last just as long with rotation.

Another option would be to purchase a different type of cover that would not saturate, get heavy or pull apart at the seams. It could still be used with a lifter mechanism. If you shop online I know there are options that your local spa dealer does not have to offer. Look for something that will not weigh more that a typical foam Spa Cover and that can work in a similar way to lay over the bar. Keep in mind the goal is to use your spa, not your lifter. You may have to make adjustments on how or where your lifter pivots from to accommodate a different kind of cover, but if it makes getting in and out of your spa easy that is the real bottom line.

Is your spa cover keeping you out of your spa?  If you have had your hot tub for a while you probably have gone through a few Spa Covers. Before you buy your next one maybe it would be a good idea to figure out why they keep having a problem.

When you went in and told the salesman that your cover got heavy. More than likely he told you that now they have developed a better foam cover. One wrapped, glued, dipped, sealed in multiple layers of special stuff. But  that one got heavy eventually.

The next logical step was to buy a cover lifter.  You bought another cover and started using the cover lifter.  Unfortunately every foam spa cover will always eventually become moisture saturated and heavy. Regardless of what wrapping is around the foam it is doomed to get heavy because when the warm spa water turns to steam it gets into the crevices in the foam, cools and condenses back into water.  Once enough water gets into the foam not even a cover lifter will help you get it off or back onto your spa.

Even if it were possible to keep the foam from saturating with water no rigid cover is ever going to be in contact with the water that it is supposed to keep warm. Every spa cover that uses foam is constantly losing heat between the bottom of the cover and the spa water surface.

But the sad fact is that with a foam cover that slowly gets heavy hot tub use slowly goes down. Generally speaking the foam fails slowly so you don’t notice it. If you use your spa every day, you do not notice the slight difference. It just becomes a little more work. So you just put up with it. Eventually your brain registers the amount of effort required and the thought of wrestling that cover off the spa becomes less about how good the spa feels and more about the effort required.

That is a tragedy considering how much you looked forward to it when you first got your spa. It is also unfortunate considering how much you spend to heat the water that you are less willing to get into. It is a shame considering how much you paid a lot of money to get that spa in the first place.

Did you know that the more time you spend in your spa the less sleep your body requires? If you got your spa for therapeutic purposes how often do you think you can afford to go without that therapy before you start to suffer?  Are you willing to loose all that just for the sake of a few inches of foam?  If you have started stacking stuff on top of your spa you are not using it enough.  Seems like an expensive place to pile your stuff but people do.

Before you just buy another foam filled spa cover that you know is just going to end up the same as the one you have now can I suggest an alternative?  Shop online for a different type of cover. Look for a spa cover  that does not use foam so it will not get heavy. If you do, you can enjoy your spa for years to come.