This is a cautionary tale for anyone who buys or is about to buy a replacement hot tub cover and it provides useful information to all hot tub owners.
I just received my new Deluxe cover for my '95 Hot Spring Grandee. It has a 5" x 3" taper, 12 mil vapor barrier (2 separate 6 mil wraps) and a whole bunch of add-on features that ran the price up to about $620 CAD including an $85 surcharge for one dimension of the cover being over 96".
Acting on the advice of an experienced friend, the first thing I did after getting it unwrapped was pull the polystyrene cores out of the cover to inspect the quality of the deluxe 12 mil wrap I paid a lot extra for and ensure that I got the wrap I paid for. To my absolute dismay and horror I found that the vapor barriers on BOTH CORES had been accidentally cut with a razor knife and hastily repaired with a strip of 2" packing tape. The cuts went through both layers of the barrier. One was nearly 7" long and the other about 5.5" long. I have marked the extent of the cuts with colored tubing in the attached photos.
One of the packing tape repair jobs was very hastily done and completely shoddy. A lot of the tape was creased and wrinkled so it wasn't even sealing the cut. Water would've started infiltrating the core almost instantly. The other repair jiob was a little better but still not very good. Besides that, I doubt the packing tape would've held up very long under the conditions it would've been subjected to and since one of the cut locations was along the inside edge (i.e. inside the fold), I suspect that core wouldn't have lasted very long before becoming waterlogged. The other core was cut along an outside edge which is exposed to the environment so may have lasted a little longer before getting waterlogged. But let's be clear here: The quality of the repair job is not what's at issue here; covers should NOT be leaving a hot tub cover factory with cuts in the core vapor barriers no matter how well the repairs to the cuts are done.
I took numerous photographs of the cuts in the vapor barrier and also of the cover to show that the cover was intact and not cut to prove it was not us who had made those cuts when we were cutting the shrink wrap off the cover.
I called the company who made the cover and luckily the phone was answered by the owner. I explained the situation to him and he told me to e-mail him all of the photos I took in full resolution. I put all 20 or so of them in a zip file and sent it to him through WeTransfer.com's excellent free file transfer service. It was late on a Friday afternoon when all this happened. He downloaded them right away and wrote back a minute or two later to tell me he was going to have a "little chat" with production on Monday and would get back to me with a resolution afterwards. He'll have the whole weekend to fume over it before he talks to them Monday morning. Boy, I sure wouldn't want to be the employee/employees responsible for this problem on Monday morning. Guarantee it will be a real bad start to the week.
My question is how many of their covers are going out like that? Both my cores were cut and poorly repaired. I'm probably one of the VERY few customers and perhaps the only customer that has ever checked the cores/wraps upon delivery. If covers only go out like that "once in a blue moon", what would be the odds then that the one guy who ever bothered to check his cover would find the core wraps on BOTH cores were cut clean through and shoddily repaired? Astronomically low, methinks. But if covers are going out like that all the time then it wouldn't be so surprising that I found what I found, would it? I put that question to the owner as well. I bet that's got him thinking.
So the lesson for all of us hot tub owners is to always pull the cores out of your new hot tub covers to inspect the core and vapor barriers as soon as you take delivery of it. Who knows how common this might be? It might happen all the time but since virtually no one ever bothers to check, it probably goes undetected 99.999% of the time.
I just received my new Deluxe cover for my '95 Hot Spring Grandee. It has a 5" x 3" taper, 12 mil vapor barrier (2 separate 6 mil wraps) and a whole bunch of add-on features that ran the price up to about $620 CAD including an $85 surcharge for one dimension of the cover being over 96".
Acting on the advice of an experienced friend, the first thing I did after getting it unwrapped was pull the polystyrene cores out of the cover to inspect the quality of the deluxe 12 mil wrap I paid a lot extra for and ensure that I got the wrap I paid for. To my absolute dismay and horror I found that the vapor barriers on BOTH CORES had been accidentally cut with a razor knife and hastily repaired with a strip of 2" packing tape. The cuts went through both layers of the barrier. One was nearly 7" long and the other about 5.5" long. I have marked the extent of the cuts with colored tubing in the attached photos.
One of the packing tape repair jobs was very hastily done and completely shoddy. A lot of the tape was creased and wrinkled so it wasn't even sealing the cut. Water would've started infiltrating the core almost instantly. The other repair jiob was a little better but still not very good. Besides that, I doubt the packing tape would've held up very long under the conditions it would've been subjected to and since one of the cut locations was along the inside edge (i.e. inside the fold), I suspect that core wouldn't have lasted very long before becoming waterlogged. The other core was cut along an outside edge which is exposed to the environment so may have lasted a little longer before getting waterlogged. But let's be clear here: The quality of the repair job is not what's at issue here; covers should NOT be leaving a hot tub cover factory with cuts in the core vapor barriers no matter how well the repairs to the cuts are done.
I took numerous photographs of the cuts in the vapor barrier and also of the cover to show that the cover was intact and not cut to prove it was not us who had made those cuts when we were cutting the shrink wrap off the cover.
I called the company who made the cover and luckily the phone was answered by the owner. I explained the situation to him and he told me to e-mail him all of the photos I took in full resolution. I put all 20 or so of them in a zip file and sent it to him through WeTransfer.com's excellent free file transfer service. It was late on a Friday afternoon when all this happened. He downloaded them right away and wrote back a minute or two later to tell me he was going to have a "little chat" with production on Monday and would get back to me with a resolution afterwards. He'll have the whole weekend to fume over it before he talks to them Monday morning. Boy, I sure wouldn't want to be the employee/employees responsible for this problem on Monday morning. Guarantee it will be a real bad start to the week.
My question is how many of their covers are going out like that? Both my cores were cut and poorly repaired. I'm probably one of the VERY few customers and perhaps the only customer that has ever checked the cores/wraps upon delivery. If covers only go out like that "once in a blue moon", what would be the odds then that the one guy who ever bothered to check his cover would find the core wraps on BOTH cores were cut clean through and shoddily repaired? Astronomically low, methinks. But if covers are going out like that all the time then it wouldn't be so surprising that I found what I found, would it? I put that question to the owner as well. I bet that's got him thinking.
So the lesson for all of us hot tub owners is to always pull the cores out of your new hot tub covers to inspect the core and vapor barriers as soon as you take delivery of it. Who knows how common this might be? It might happen all the time but since virtually no one ever bothers to check, it probably goes undetected 99.999% of the time.
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