Some of our customers ask us to help shut down their hot tubs for the winter.  We call the process winterizing. But for many homeowners, the winter is their favorite time to use their hot tubs.  For them, we recommend a pre-winter hot tub checkup.

Preventative Maintenance to keep running all winter

When we provide preventive maintenance on a hot tub, we look for leaking pipes and valves, bad glue joints, and we examine all the electrical components for signs of corrosion and potential failure.  That means pumps, heater, keypad and computer controller.

If we see anything that is near it’s end of life, we will point it out to you and advise what your options are.

You do have to be aware that not all wear and tear is noticeable on components.  For example, we might see substantial corrosion on a heater and estimate that it is likely to fail in the next 3 months.  But that doesn’t mean that a heater with no visible corrosion is guaranteed to last.

While we can’t tell you if a pump is going to fail tomorrow, we can see signs that it is at its end of life, such as water and chemicals leaching out of a worn out ceramic seal on the motors shaft:

Heaters or pumps can fail without any visible warning.  So, just because we don’t see anything obvious in the hot tub doesn’t mean that all the components will last through the winter.  All our pre-winter service will do is identify likely failure points, not guarantee a winter of no-problem use.

While a little preventive maintenance may help avoid unexpected down time, the greatest value is that it can prevent that down time from occurring during the winter.  If your hot tub shorts out in the middle of February, the temperature is 14 degrees and there’s 18 inches of snow on the ground, it’s going to be impossible to get it repaired. The water will get colder and colder until it freezes and then you could be looking at thousands of dollars in repairs, if it is even possible to repair.

We always recommend that homeowners have an emergency kit for preventing hot tub damage due to winter freezing.  Click here to check out our article on how to prepare for the worst.  And give us a call or shoot us an email to schedule a preventative maintenance checkup to help avoid costly winter problems.