Updated 2-29-24
“While each hot tub repair situation is a little different, there’s one good rule of thumb as to when to stop fixing it,’ says our own Bill Renter. “When it has become one thing after another, when you’re spending more than the hot tub cost in the first place — it’s time to stop fixing it.”
One very recent example concerned a Best Hot Tubs’ client in Ashland, NY, not far from our Windham location. The homeowners had bought a property with the intention of renting it via Airbnb. But after redoing the house, they realized it was so special they wanted to live there and buy another property to rent out.
“One thing the home still needed, however,” says Bill, “was a new hot tub. The property’s old one was constantly in need of repair. It had been bought over 8 years prior, before Best Hot Tubs opened a showroom in Windham. Back then, the previous owners had to travel across the Hudson to purchase one.”
Anyway, the new owners understood it was time to replace the original hot tub; they also wanted to expand their deck to accommodate it, where there would be plenty of room to socialize around it.
Quality hot tubs can last a very long time, adds Bill. “The trick is to have your hot tub properly — and regularly — maintained. “This is one reason we expanded our service department here at Best Hot Tubs. Homeowners often think they can take care of their spa on their own. And they usually do for a while. But in time, they become lackadaisical and that’s when trouble begins. When you use a service like ours, you don’t have to think about it.”
Another Old Hot Tub Replaced
This other good example happened a bit further back involving a Windham client of ours.
“They quickly discovered that the old hot tub leaked, and they called us to repair it,” says Bill Renter, owner of Best Hot Tubs (Windham, Farmingdale, Westbury/NY).
“The spa was 15 years old and had a lot of problems. We’ve learned through years of experience that when a key part isn’t working, as was the case here, it’s hard to tell if any of the other parts are also broken. You won’t know until the key element is repaired. This often means we have to return several times and, it could happen that one ends up spending thousands on repairs.”
On one visit to repair their hot tub, Bill opened it up to show them the insides. The internal wood-frame construction had gotten wet from the leaks, which had long ago softened the wood.
“Soft wood makes it easy for rodents and other critters to chew their way into the hot tub; in this case there were a lot of rodent droppings inside the guts of the tub.”
And it’s not just the repairs that can make it not cost effective to repair an old spa, says Bill. Today’s quality spas like we sell (Bullfrog Spas and Aspen Spas) are so much more energy efficient to run than other spas that over time you make back a lot of your money just in energy savings.
After a few attempts to get the old spa running, Bill invited the homeowners to our Best Hot Tubs showroom in Windham to see what a new, well-designed and built hot tub looks like.
While at our showroom, they were particularly taken with Bullfrog’s X series. So when more kept going wrong with their old hot tub, they decided on Bullfrog’s X7L model, which, despite being a value-priced spa, still boasts Bullfrog’s impermeable structure, superb insulation, great energy efficiency and amazing massage jets (JetPaks)