Preparing your hot tub for winter

Preparing your hot tub for winter

If you are one of the millions of people that now own a hot tub then there are a couple of things that you should do before the cold weather arrives.

Since most hot tubs are outside then the time to drain your hot tub and give it a good cleaning is in the fall before the temperature drops below zero. Once the temperature drops below zero you can damage your hot tub if you drain the water out and allow the water that is left in the lines to drop below zero and freeze.

When ice forms on jets and pumps they can be damaged and the act of restarting the hot tub and re-heating the hot tub is very hard on the components.
When you drain a tub and re-fill it, you are asking the heater in the hot tub to work extra hard to re-heat all the cold water that you pumped into it. In the winter it is even harder because the outside temperature fights against the heater making it run harder. This can cause the heater to endlessly blow the breaker damaging the breaker and the heater of the hot tub.

If you don’t need to drain your hot tub to clean it you should at least take the time to fill the hot tub to its desired level so that you do not have to do it when it is cold.

If you do use your hot tub frequently in the winter then you will probably have to add water sometime in the middle of the winter. What you should do is take a garden house and drain it of all the water and place it in the basement of your home. This will allow you to add water to your tub without fighting with a frozen garden hose.

If you hot tub is a little older then you should call your hot tub supplier and ask them to come out and drain the tub and do a system check. The worst thing that can happen to a hot tub is to have it fail in the middle of winter and freeze. Maintenance is always cheaper than trying to repair something later.

So before winter take the time to give your hot tub a once over.

Rob Abbott
Operations Manager
Village Builders Inc.