Scottie

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.

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.