Spa Covers And Safety

Everyone that has ever used a hot tub has experience “hard covers” which are the covers that conveniently come with your spa when you purchase it.  It’s great right?  Does its job, sits on your spa, and keeps all the junk debris out of your spa.  Most spa owners might never even learn there are other types of covers out there.   Anyone knows that with experience in foam covers comes experience with HEAVY foam covers. Can an overweight Spa Cover be a danger to you and your family?  Of course it can, the question however that plagues you when thinking about your spa in relation to your Spa Cover is how that danger might affect you, your family members, and especially young children.

Recently, a neighbor friend of mine was checking the chemicals in his spa.  Every time he checked his chemicals he did the same thing, instead of attempting to remove the entire spa cover, he just lifted one side enough to get at the water long enough to get a sample.  He described to me that while bending over the spa water, he held the lid with his left arm, supporting it for only a moment, seconds.  While he was leaning, his arm slipped on the vinyl undercoating of his cover, and the weight of the water logged spa cover slammed down onto his shoulders, which caused him to become trapped from the shoulders up, into the hot tub. He was now face down in the spa with his legs pinned to spa by the weight of the spa cover.  He tried to move the cover off of his body, however the weight of the cover combined with his current position made this task impossible and he was unable to shift the waterlogged cover.

Yelling for help, though hard to do in this position, was not impossible.  When telling me about this near-death experience with his Spa Cover, he illustrated the position he was currently in, and how luckily enough he had left the back sliding door open when he had gone outside.  He was struggling to kick his legs away from the hot tub; in spite of this, the cover had landed in such a way he was unable to move it.  His daughter and her boy friend were in the house and managed to hear the commotion coming from outside.  When they went outside to see what was wrong, they saw that he was completely trapped underneath the Spa Cover, face down in the water. 

They were able to lift the cover off, and his daughter’s boy friend jumped into the hot tub and pulled him up from the water. They took him to the emergency room where doctors told him that the weight of the cover slamming down had dislocated his left shoulder and that he was lucky someone was there to help him.  Just a little longer could have resulted in his death.  While at the hospital there were able to put his shoulder back into place and his doctor insisted he stay over-night, as a precaution, due to the shock from his day’s experiences.

This friend of mine had owned his spa for 12 years, and in those 12 years had purchased and replaced 3 conventional rigid foam core spa covers. While the life on his foam covers averaged from 2 to 4 years, and regardless of manufactures claims, each one of his covers became waterlogged, heavy, unusable, and completely useless (not to mention, warranty?! What warranty?! Nothing, not one of his issues or complaints were addressed or covered under any warranty).

He has since bought a Spa Cover that uses air chambers to insulate rather than rigid foam feeling comfortable that the air filled spa cover will not try to kill him as the other foam cover did.  In the United States there have been over 150 spa entrapment related injuries and deaths over the last two decades.

Another friend of mine and her husband were in their hot tub, with their foam spa lid propped up against the wall—when a gust of wind hit the spa cover and it suddenly fell hitting her husband on the head. The blow was hard enough to push them both under the water. Fortunately they were not trapped and they both recovered quickly, or so they thought.

A couple of days later the left side of her husbands face suddenly became paralyzed. He had no feeling, sensation or movement on that half. Naturally they both were quite frightened and thought he had suffered a stroke. They did exactly what any of us would have done and rushed immediately to the hospital. The doctor diagnosed him with Bells Palsy—which can come about by stress and or trauma.  It was not a mystery to his doctor what had most likely been the cause of the injury.  It had only been a few days since his extremely heavy spa cover had struck him in the head.   He later made a full recovery. His is an extremely lucky case.

Here is something you will never hear from a foam spa cover dealer. Every year people are injured by foam hot tub covers. Most of the injuries have come from a gust of wind blowing the heavy foam cover onto people as they use their spa. Sometimes people attempting to carefully maneuver a saturated foam cover off their spa, have lost their grip and had the hard foam cover slam down breaking the arch of their foot.

According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission people have even drown as a result of being trapped under heavy foam covers. Maybe now is a good time to search for a better spa cover. With the World Wide Web, you can literally have the world to shop from. Do you really want to risk injury or death trying to use your spa?