Tom

We still offer the western red cedar for both Arctic and Coyote, but offer alternative cabinets in both lines. Both the wood and alternative lines offer "total access" on all four sides. To get back on topic, the original question asked about the insulating value of Durawood vs. Real wood. I've seen figures giving between R1 and R1.33 per inch for cedar, while I wasn't able to find figures for Durawood or EON.

We have an EON (plastic) cabinet in a mahogany color, and used to have mahogany-stained pine on the Coyote line. Sorry, no real mahogany!

Welcome to the forum, Heather. IMO there is no functional advantage to stainless trim, and although I like them personally it is only for looks. In some spas, they look terrific, but only you can decide if the price is worth the "Oooh!" reaction.

Hi, Fredericksburg, and welcome to the forum! There are a couple of other Arctic dealers on the forum from time to time, and numerous customers. You'll find many opportunities to answer questions and provide factual information about your product. Thanks in advance for your input and assistance. Before you go too much further, though, I urge you (and all members) to check out the Board Guidelines. The link is at the top left corner, under the board banner. Ivieisme feels that some of your posts may violate these guidelines, possibly the part forbidding "blatant sales messages, solicitations, [and] advertisements." By common agreement, however, we accept signatures that show brand affiliation so that readers can judge our posts for any potential brand bias.

You must have inadvertently responded to the wrong post. The poster never mentioned that spa or brand. No more did the poster mention Artesian or Haven, Jacuzzi or Marquis, other brands suggested in the thread. So I don't understand the rolling eyes here...

I have some big projects coming up and will have to excuse myself from moderating duties for a while. I'll try to check the board once a week but won't be able to respond to complaints, spam, etc. and PM's may wait a while for an answer. Wanted to wish you all a happy new year full of relaxing soaks.... Tom

Ooops. Chlorine and bromine are totally different chemicals. Both are effective sanitizers, and I'll guess that thestallion meant that bromine is a form of sanitizer like chlorine.

There is some confusion because to a layman, "salt" means "table salt" while to a chemist, it has another meaning. "Salt water" usually refers to ocean water which is largely a sodium chloride solution. So with that connotation, the Genesis system is not a "salt water" or "salt" system. However, sodium bromide (used in the Genesis) is "a salt" in every way that sodium chloride (table salt) is "a salt", or potassium iodide, or magnesium chloride. In that sense the Genesis system is "a salt" system. Confusing, but I've seen many such references in industry literature. I much prefer the designation "automatic bromine generator" because it is clear which sanitizer is being used. To make things even more confusing, I've seen systems that claim to use "sea salt". This may mislead some users with chlorine allergies to purchase a system totally inappropriate to their needs, since "sea salt" is largely sodium chloride with a few other salts thrown in. This one should be called an "automatic chlorine generator".

I checked this out and the company says the detector cards are 1) Not waterproof and 2) Designed for higher levels of ozone than might be found in spa water. So it looks as though expensive sniffers are still the only option and these are not appropriate for the average consumer because of the cost of purchase and frequent calibration. Turns out the fellow I talked to has ozone in his hot tub and loves it. But our discussion did indicate a market for such a device and maybe something will turn up in the future.

This is in our FAQ and some of the information there may be of use to you. I will update the FAQ with information from this thread if appropriate. For example, those strips look interesting and worth including if they test out.

These systems are intended to simplify water care by automating part of it. They seem to work well for some people but a few (on well water?) apparently find it hard to keep the water in balance. Some are marketed as using "sea salt" (which is just sodium chloride with minute amounts of a few other salts thrown in) and are chlorine systems. Others use sodium bromide and are bromine based. There are many on the forum knowledgeable about these products, and I suggest you search the Spa Chemistry subforum. The salt system in an Arctic Spa is an after-market product installed by the dealer. Any such device is warranted by its manufacturer (which is not us!). One popular salt system is the Genesis Device by Pioneer H20 Technologies--check their site for excellent information--but there are other similar products on the market. Your dealer can tell you which system they have installed.

This comes up so often that I have put it the Introduction. Next time someone asks, we can just refer to these instructions, courtesy of Pathfinder.

You'll see the warning on every hot tub and widely posted on hot tub-related sites. There are probably several reasons for those warnings. For starters, I suspect that manufacturers post them for protection against liability, so that the customer cannot say, "nobody told me not to." You have been warned, so our legal @ss is covered. While we can all recognize the danger of reaching a BAC of 0.25 and keeling face first into the tub, I'll interpret biggz' question to mean, "Is there some medical risk of moderate social drinking in the tub?" Anecdotally, most of us would say "NO". We've had a couple of beers or glasses of wine and survived with no problem. Some of you may have had considerably more with the same happy survival rate. Medically, what is the evidence? Unfortunately, most websites I found that discussed the effects of alcohol dealt with the medical or social effects of abuse or overuse. Few detailed the physical consequences of low consumption. I learned that Alcohol is a CNS depressant and vasodilator (opens the blood vessels and lowers blood pressure) and that hyperthermia can possibly exaggerate some of its effects. So medically, there may be some evidence that for some individuals, even low levels of BAC can make you dizzy enough to fall and clonk your skull, or to relax you enough that you slip under the water. Hmm. You'll find an interesting letter here, and the abstract of one study showed that about 17% of 158 deaths in "spas, jacuzzis, or hot tubs" were related to alcohol. No indication of level of alcohol consumption in these deaths, but I'll bet they all involved a high BAC. That's 26 deaths in a single year out of how many million hot tubs in the USA? According to an intriguing site called Odds of Dying, your chances of death by falling in a bath tub were 1 in over 730,000 in the year 2004. No indication how many of those bathtubbers had had a drink or ten. Google experts among you may be able to turn up some more evidence pro or con.

Apparently the first half of this statement is untrue, while the second half is accurate according to P&S News: The acquisition of Keys’ spa assets succeeded where Infinity’s desire to buy the assets of bankrupt hot tub manufacturer Hydro Spa failed. Hatley said in October that he was “95 percent sure” he’d close a deal to buy the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Hydro Spa’s assets. But he said the purchase fell through when executives of the company that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Sept. 19 “changed their minds.” Hydro Spas’ assets were put up for public auction on Nov. 9.

<Bump> Any more hard news about this? My copies of Pool & Spa News seem to be disappearing before I can read them...

Welcome!

It's not as bad as you'd think. Often used to get out, go roll in the snow, come and climb back in (okay, I was younger then, haven't done that for a couple of years!). Getting out, wrapping a towel around my shoulders, walking the few steps into the house is okay. For me, it's most uncomfortable on the feet. Some great ideas in this thread! Most we ever do is put warm robes or towels in a cooler and cart it outside.

Arctic Spas covers use Mylar in that manner.

Board Guidelines: "A username that is an obvious product/domain/service name will be removed." So FF is on a temporary suspension until I can review this. I think FF's replies have been helpful and appropriate. IMO he's within the rest of the guidelines. Most members are open about their brand affiliation if they have one -- it allows us to discount potential bias and keep an eye out for sales spiels... which, I suspect, is where TinyBubbles came in...

I have responded to this customer in a PM.

Huh? Which site, and even if true, how is that relevant to the topic?

Please keep it civil, folks. Anybody got more hard news about the purchase?

You can probably get the application package from awards@bigfishpublications.com. I think the first results will be announced at the Aqua show.

There are a few possibilities, and unfortunately all of them will require a call to your dealer. The technician I checked with said it is most likely a fuse. Could be just a coincidence and nothing you did! But he added, "It could be they somehow got into the low level programming and turned pump 2 off. And it could even be the pump 2 switch itself is broken." If it's the low-level programming, your dealer can probably walk you through that over the phone. There are other diagnostics your dealer may want (does the indicator light come on when you press the pump 2 button?). Best wishes Tom

Background: Spasearch is a consumer magazine and website from Bigfish Publications in Arizona. In 2006, Bigfish introduced a program touted as the industry's first independent awards program for hot tub manufacturers. The award, intended to recognize the top 10% to 15% of the industry, was open to any manufacturer who could meet the requirements and was not related to advertising with the magazine. The first set of awards was announced in late 2006 and early 2007. The Requirements: Manufacturer must be registered to conduct business in the US or Canada under the same tax ID for the past three years be a current member of at least one of: APSP or PHTC Canada; NSBA; US or Canadian Chamber of Commerce. [in 2007 the BBB was one of the organizations but this is not the case for 2008] offer a minimum warranty of 7 years on hot tub structure, 5 years on hot tub surface, and 3 years on all components including heaters, pumps, and electronics. offer continuing classroom education regularly for NA dealers related to sales, service, and support with course curriculum greater than 8 hours of training during a 12-month period. offer a minimum of six hours of live toll-free telephone support per day for homeowner sales, support, and/or service inquiries, Monday-Friday exc. holidays have UL, ETL, or CSA compliance n all hot tubs sold in NA. score a minimum weighted aggergate score of 85 on a customer satifaction survey agree to a code of conduct governing data collection and use of the award have a local dealer network of at least 75 dealers in NA which have exterior permanent signate, offer a filled operational hot tub and allow wet tests, and display at least four of the manufacturer's tubs OR if selling direct to the public must have at least 15 dedicated territory reps in NA, conduct sales presentations in person, include an on-site home inspection with every quote, and document at least $150K in consumer-direct advertising over the past year The difference between the two programs is that for an Approved rating, the company is allowed to use its own customer survey conducted within the past two years and must be based on at least 300 returned surveys, while for Certified the customer survey is conducted by an independent research organization as part of the award application and requires only 100 survey responses. What's new: Last year, the manufacturer was allowed to provide a list of customers. As you'll note in last year's discussion, this left open the possibility that the manufacturer could 'tailor' the list to weed out dissatisfied customers. This year, the auditor is required to be onsite to examine the preparation of the list and to randomly select records for the survey. To protect customer confidentiality, only telephone numbers will be selected. This year, only customers who have purchased since Sept. 1 2006 will be surveyed; last year, customers could have had their spa for years. Last year, email surveys were taken. This year, all surveys will be one-on-one by telephone interview. The BBB has been removed as one of the business/industry organizations required for membership As last year, the survey results will be analyzed by a third party market research firm to tabulate the results and validate the audit. What's the cost? As last year, the application fee for Approved is $1750 USD; for Certified, $4995 USD. Don't know if I missed it last year or if it's new, but if you apply for Certified and flunk out, you can have a new survey done after 60 days for an additional $3825 USD. The program has been changed to address some of the criticisms raised last year. Before you get to discussing this, please read last year's thread so we're not going over old ground. By having an independent auditor do the selection of customers from the survey, the possibility of manipulation has been reduced. Whether or not the possiblity has been totally eliminated depends on the selection method. The aggregate score is NOT a percentage (Spasearch mistakenly includes a % sign after the number, but it is in fact a weighted average). Please do not assume that a score of 85 means that 15 people were dissatisfied. The weighting exaggerates the effect of extreme responses to overcome a well-known statistical trend towards mid-range answers. The cost is minimal and is the same for all applicants. Any company that cannot afford this fee is too small for consideration and all the arguments about this last year remain valid. No need to rehash IMO. Changing from email response to telephone response further reduces the possibility of "loading" the survey by redirecting email addresses. The decision to survey only recent customers will not please some, but it is done for a statistical purpose--to better ensure that the datasets are equivalent or to use the cliché, "it will help ensure a level playing field". Last year, there was an excellent debate and some highly credible criticism. I think that industry professions were mostly involved at that time. IMO this program has some merit to the consumer. This time I hope to hear from more hot tub owners and shoppers -- what do you think?