1980's Inground Spa Update

[Mark237]

Hi All,

After having a great experience with this site last Summer and fixing the chemistry on my pool I'm back with some renovation questions. We have an attached, spillover inground spa/pool combination from the 1980's and I would like to make the spa work better. My goal is to utilize the spa year round while the pool is only used during the Summer months. I'd also like to update the spa to have jets and remote start/heat features. I had a number of pool companies out to look at it and they all weren't out of the box thinkers so all I heard was they could replace the original nozzles into the spa to provide some more water movement. They failed to even do that.

We're going to update the whole pool surround so I'm open to changing plumbing if needed. Just need some expertise on potential options and how much work/cost each would be to see if it's worthwhile. The heater is a 1980's gas model so that and the pool house plumbing needs to be updated anyways. Another question is the type of cover to use so it's safe yet usable.

Any thoughts? We're going to update the whole pool which I'll post in a different part of the forum for those questions.

 

[JasonLion]

Do you winterize the pool in your area? If you don't then getting the spa running in the winter is easy. Getting the spa to work while the pool is winterized is semi-problematic and will at a minimum take a fair bit of re-plumbing and probably require some new equipment as well. Providing freeze protection to a spa that is not all in one gets complicated. In an all in one spa the very nearby warm water keeps the rest of the plumbing from freezing. With a separate equipment pad preventing pipes from freezing gets much more complicated.

The other part that is challenging is adding jets to an existing spa. That is a very similar amount of work to re-building the spa from scratch (i.e. a huge amount of work).

Compared to those two, remote start/heat is trivially easy, as most of the mid-range and all of the high end automation systems offer that as an option.

 

[Mark237]

We have mild winters so winterizing isn't a given if you can suggest some way of automating the heat to come on so the pipes don't freeze on the few times it happens over the winter. I'd love to have this hooked up to support both the pool and spa without having to manually turn it on and switch the valve from pool to spa or vice versa. Thoughts?

Other ideas on how to retrofit the current blowers so there's some water movement? Thoughts on the best cover to use?

Thanks!