In With The New & Out With The Old ~ Spa Cover That Is 09Feb21

We've been having to buy a new spa cover every 2-3 years and at $700 each that seems ridiculous. Our spa in Summit is in direct south facing sun so perhaps not surprising. I'd repaired the vinyl already a number of times but still one of the foam containers became swollen and heavy with water... it could freeze solid and break off like my original one did. So, I went on the hunt for alternatives and there are very few actually - designs are mostly foam wrapped by vinyl. But, a young award-winning Denver company did have a radical alternative. A cover who's covering is Sunbrella marine fabric and who's core is a hollow air-frame like construction with heating LEDs and fans installed. The LEDs are for melting snow (auto-sensed) and the fans are for drawing solar from the cover top and heating the spa! Plus the whole thing is solar powered. Modern Spa Covers took quite some time completing my fabrication during the pandemic but it just arrived via freight and I just installed it (though the solar is still pending). I got the job done fairly quickly and now it's time to see if if truly works. My math at 2.5X the cost of a regular cover is that I'm hoping the Sunbrella fabric lasts a lot longer and that the heating and snow-melting are efficiency boosters for me. Images go from new to old basically with the controller and thermocouple shown in the middle pics. I can walk on the cover as it employs two 1/4" layers of plexiglass as a top. Pretty cool if it all works.

UPDATE 02May21 - Solar Is Up

With decent weather in Summit I installed a new thermo sensor on the spa and installed a solar drive for the "Sun Catcher" features on our new cover. We get snowmelt in cold and heating assist in sunshine. We'll see... I need to set the internal heater to ~100° and then see if solar can heat it the last 4°. The photovoltaic drives the fans onborad the spa cover so no power is used.