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Covana Oasis Cover - Is The Quality Good?


danhe2000

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I am looking at putting in a portable spa in my back yard and was wondering if anyone could share their experience with the Covana Oasis cover?

About how much can I expect to pay for it?

Can I install it myself?

Does it insulate the spa better than a typical factory cover?

Have you had any problems with it?

What is customer support like - and are local dealers able to handle it?

Would you buy it again?

It's been difficult to find any reviews about it, any thoughts you have would be great.

Thank you!

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  • 1 year later...

I know this very late but I have to comment anyways... beware of Covana.  To be honest, when it's working, it's fantastic.  I have a CS1000 on my swim spa.  It shows great and always gets lots of ooooohs and ahhhhs when people come to visit. It should work great but I have had no end to trouble since I got it almost 3 years ago though.  There were 2 years of non-stop issues, a year of bliss, and now back to issues.  There seems to be some design flaws that always come back to bite them (and me).  I have a deck built around my swim spa.  If you get a Covana, don't do that.  It looks great but it's a pain to access when you undoubtedly will have to fix something.  Also, put the weather-tight control and battery components under some sort of shelter... they aren't as weather-tight as you might think.

The local dealer spends a lot of time servicing them.  Most issues seem to require getting a hold of Covana to figure out a fix, which is a very slow process. Customer service is not their strength.  Perhaps it'll be better in a warm, snow-less climate even though they are made in a part of Canada with harsher winters than the part I am in.  They seem to have gotten past some of the earlier issues but I'm still unimpressed.  The Oasis has been around longer than the CS1000 but I hear stories that would question my faith in it as well.

It is fantastic when it works but I wouldn't buy one again given how expensive they are and the amount of headaches.  More than once I've had it fail late at night when it's freezing outside and I am trying to close it. If I don't get my latest problem fixed soon I'm going to throw the whole thing in the garbage and just go with a conventional cover.

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Most of the problems lay in the limit switches inside the control box on the older models. I silicone the control box during install and  I set my Covana customers up on an annual inspection schedule to clean the oxidation off the contacts and re-seal the control box. Those 2 things eliminated a lot of my service requests on these things.

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  • 1 year later...
  • 1 year later...
  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/17/2016 at 8:33 PM, danhe2000 said:

I am looking at putting in a portable spa in my back yard and was wondering if anyone could share their experience with the Covana Oasis cover?

About how much can I expect to pay for it?

Can I install it myself?

Does it insulate the spa better than a typical factory cover?

Have you had any problems with it?

What is customer support like - and are local dealers able to handle it?

Would you buy it again?

It's been difficult to find any reviews about it, any thoughts you have would be great.

Thank you!

Hello, I just read your question/comment on the internet, about the Covana-cover.
My question : I'm considering buying a Covana Oasis automatic cover too (2021).
Did you buy one in 2016, and did you install it by yourself ? Is that possible, without any anger or worries ? And what about quality ?
Overall, are you satisfied by the product, or did you occur some technical issues ?

Thanks for your answer. Dirk (Belgium)
 

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  • 1 year later...

DO NOT GET A COVANA COVER!!!! I have one on my 18' swim spa. They demo great and are a dream when they work. In theory they are a fantastic although very pricey idea. Unfortunately they don't work for very long.

I have had several issues:

It's not a great situation when it's late on a winter night and after a nice dip in the spa the cover gets stuck open.  There's not a lot you can do with the way these are designed. There is no manual way to get the cover closed if there is a failure in the system, which will happen.

The foam core top is constructed in a way where it will get waterlogged. The motors are not powerful enough to lift a waterlogged cover so eventually your spa will become unuseable. I have been through two covers now and need a third replacement because it's waterlogged again so I'm tossing it.

The lifting mechanisms in the leg are very hard to lubricate, especially if you have a tall unit like my swim spa. You can't reach all the way down inside the "can" that encloses each leg to lubricate everything, without some major dismantling.

Another issue I have is that the top of the flat covers (legend) is not designed to drain water. You will end up with a quarter inch layer of water across the entire cover. It doesn't sound like a lot but it will make the cover very slow or not lift at all if it's already started to get waterlogged.

Lastly, water will leak through the seams in the top panels and enter your spa. It is not a sealed top as it looks. This adds to the water logging as well.

That doesn't begin to include the additional problems others have had. Whatever you do don't put it on a spa built into a deck like myself and another poster in this thread. Then servicing it will be full of even more fun challenges. Avoid Covana - it's not worth the stress.

 

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  • 2 months later...

Ahoy! I concur with Scottie above! We bought ours in Sept 2014 (probably a first edition) from a dealer over 3 hours away from our city. It was suggested that I could install it myself. That should've been a clue right there about the support to expect. NOTE: This is a bit of a long read and has a bit of a rant to it, but just be aware of these issues before you buy. 

We live in Northern Ontario so the winters are harsh. In Dec 2018 our Covana started giving us issues. Once in a while we'd see a little a little gap after it was lowered. I though maybe there was still some settling from the deck/hot tub pad. After adjusting the lid a few times I realized that there was more to the issue. We then started getting a shimmy then a POP as a link would jump. Once I heard that noise then I knew I'd have to adjust the lid again by removing the bracket screws from the sleeve, letting the cover settle and reinstalling the screws. Soon it became obvious that the chain was jumping on one post and then another post started the same thing. And wouldn't you know it, they were the two posts requiring me to go under the deck to service them. Of course, this approach would have to wait unitil  the snow melted to access my crawl space. 

That spring I Googled how to ratchet the posts down and solved what I though was the issue and greased the entire chain, lubricated the posts, etc. You know, the usual fall maintenance but done in the spring. It worked fine for the summer of 2019 but come mid-winter, our worst fears were realized - the Covana cover wouldn't come down. Grr... Luckily I kept the folding cover that came with our hot tub and used that for the winter, leaving the Covana cover suspended for the winter, hoping no big winter storms would arrive to cause us further grief.  

I contacted the dealer and they were stumped. I suggested maybe the chains were defective as they had jumped earlier and were now jammed somehow. They suggested just buying new posts and their quote for each was 1/4 of the cost of the Covana in the first place! 

Summer 2020 rolled around and I spent many a weekend under the deck, cleaning the chain, checking the sprockets, cussing the eqpt, greasing chains, and when all seemed to be working again, the dreaded "jump" would occur. It would be back to square one.

I found a part that holds the chain had twisted and let go. It was like pulling hen's teeth to get the tech from the dealer to send me the parts pages for the Covana. They wanted big $$ to come and service the Covana. I just wanted the $15 part. After that part arrived and I installed, all issues disappeared and it raised/lowered without any issues. Success - or so I thought - was fleeting.

Mid-winter 2020 and the two "up until now" trouble free posts jammed, the other two kept going down and all was askew. It even put a small crack in the corner of the cover where it had twisted. Needless to say, access uder the deck wasn't possible until spring so I used ratchet straps to lower the two elevated posts, removed the cover and stowed it on my deck over the winter. The folding hot tub cover was deployed once again. 

I worked on it for about two weeks in spring 2021 and it starting working fine. Woo-hoo! Come the winter however, the old routine set in. Every week a post or two would jump and I would adjust the cover by removing the backet screws, let the cover settle and put the self-tapping screws back in, creating new holes in the sleeve. I removed the brackets in the spring and the post sleeves looked as if a woodpecker had attacked them. 

This spring - 2022 - was spent once again cleaning everything. I figured how to get the chain to continuously loop and cleaned every link in the 4 posts. All seemed good until I tested it. After 10 or 11 raises a post jerked and the cover became misaligned again. Not wanting my wife to deal with this issue over the summer (as I was away for 3 months) we stowed the Covana cover in the garage, ratched the posts to the lowest postion. She just used the folding cover for the summer. 

While away, I found out through aother dealer in eastern Ontario that the few that they have sold over the years have lasted about 4-5 years. Similar complaints, especially during winter operation was quite common. We decided to invest in a manual cover lifter and installed a pergola with a retractable awning over the hot tub. So far, much less stress. 

All in all, it was great when it lasted but the issues we have the last +4 years and the lack of support from our dealer 300 km away have left us with a bitter taste in our mouths. I am looking forward to a stress-free winter operation of our manual folding hot tub cover. 

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