Narrowed Down To 2

[felix6]

Hello all. I have been shopping for a spa for a while now. We narrowed it down to 2 tubs. I am interested in the Cal Spa Avalon series A857B and the Artic Spas Tundra series Legend. I am not very concerned with the Cal Spa being full foam. I am looking for advice about real quality and warranty help from manufacturers. The Artic Spa comes in about $1500 more expensive and is equipped almost identically. Wet testing has been comfortable in each. Any truthful information, good or bad for each tub, to help make a decision is greatly appreciated. If you currently own either of these tubs, I would love to hear your opinions. By the way, The Cal Spa Avalon has received the Consumer Digest Best Buy Award. Does this mean anything? Thanks in advance.

[tony]

Hello all. I have been shopping for a spa for a while now. We narrowed it down to 2 tubs. I am interested in the Cal Spa Avalon series A857B and the Artic Spas Tundra series Legend. I am not very concerned with the Cal Spa being full foam. I am looking for advice about real quality and warranty help from manufacturers. The Artic Spa comes in about $1500 more expensive and is equipped almost identically. Wet testing has been comfortable in each. Any truthful information, good or bad for each tub, to help make a decision is greatly appreciated. If you currently own either of these tubs, I would love to hear your opinions. By the way, The Cal Spa Avalon has received the Consumer Digest Best Buy Award. Does this mean anything? Thanks in advance.

Arctic has a solid reputation and is one of the few that does thermopane right, (though I prefer full foam). I would chose the Arctic.

[Pathfinder]

There are a couple key differences between the two. The Avalon has a bigger footwell area than the Tundra. If you sat in both tubs with 5 people you will definitley find a difference. The Tundra though has the Avalon beat in jets and pumps. With the Avalon there are alot bullet jets which will require much maintenance down the road as they will jet hard to adjust in a couple months. Another issue is the Avalon has odd sized jets so there will be no ability to upgrade jets down the road as you could in the other Cal lines. If you look at the neck jets they have way too much power and dont completely shut off. The tundra you will be able to swap jets down the road as you so choose. The design of the Avalon is flawed, it should only take 2 2-speed pumps to run the tub not 1 dual speed and 2 singles. The big whirlpool jet in the top left hand seat is useless its put in an awkward postion and all the flow to that jet when diverted could have gone to power another seat or the dome jets. The Arctic has dual speed pumps and so you can sit in any seat on whatever setting you like either high or low not high only like the Cal. The controls are easier on the Arctic as well as they have separate buttons for the pumps. With Cal its only one button and you have to keep pressing it several times to get the right pump combo. The Avalon A857B should retail for a max of $7495 US it was designed to be a mid level starter tub. It is in no way a top tier tub. Last year most dealers were selling it for $6995 across the board. I used to sell Cal and I dont sell Arctic but these 2 tubs are in no way similar. The similarities end with both tubs being 4 corner seated tubs The proper comparison would be a CT51 with the dome jets or a Classic Bel-air 51 with dome jets in the Cal spa line up.

The Consumer Digest Best Buy Awwards are bought and paid for by the tub manufacturers just like the 5 star ratings on another site.

[Hot Tub Guru]

Please ask me any questions about the Arctic Spa. I have been selling Arctic’s for over 8 years now. They are a great spa. Each of the 61 Arctic Jets will spin giving you a very therapeutic feeling over jets that just shoot straight out. My opinion is wet test!

Michael

Breckenridge, CO

[Neil & Holly]

Hello all. I have been shopping for a spa for a while now. We narrowed it down to 2 tubs. I am interested in the Cal Spa Avalon series A857B and the Artic Spas Tundra series Legend. I am not very concerned with the Cal Spa being full foam. I am looking for advice about real quality and warranty help from manufacturers. The Artic Spa comes in about $1500 more expensive and is equipped almost identically. Wet testing has been comfortable in each. Any truthful information, good or bad for each tub, to help make a decision is greatly appreciated. If you currently own either of these tubs, I would love to hear your opinions. By the way, The Cal Spa Avalon has received the Consumer Digest Best Buy Award. Does this mean anything? Thanks in advance.

I,m new at this hot tub thing but we bought an arctic cub.We love it!Ofcourse its only been here 3 weeks or so but it seems to be pretty good about energy usage.The covers that come with arctics are great,they really hold the heat in.The controls are easy to use.the pumps are strong & quiet. The air pump sounds like a jet engine when you run it but it works great.The arctics have real good warrantys 5 years on most & ten years on the legend series if I,m correct.Good luck

[Nightop]

Hello all. I have been shopping for a spa for a while now. We narrowed it down to 2 tubs. I am interested in the Cal Spa Avalon series A857B and the Artic Spas Tundra series Legend. I am not very concerned with the Cal Spa being full foam. I am looking for advice about real quality and warranty help from manufacturers. The Artic Spa comes in about $1500 more expensive and is equipped almost identically. Wet testing has been comfortable in each. Any truthful information, good or bad for each tub, to help make a decision is greatly appreciated. If you currently own either of these tubs, I would love to hear your opinions. By the way, The Cal Spa Avalon has received the Consumer Digest Best Buy Award. Does this mean anything? Thanks in advance.

I too will put in a good word for Arctic. We have the Glacier and love it. My wife's sister has the Kodiak. They have had theirs for over a year and it is because of their satisfaction that we went with the Arctic brand. We did look at other brands, but that first hand information from a trusted source is what sealed the deal for us. In the 4 months or so that we have had ours we have only noticed about a $20/Mo increase in our electric bill, and that is using the spa at least 5 nights a week.

The one that that I have noticed though is that even though we wet tested the spa(s) and made our choice on which model to purchase based on that, the more we use the spa, the more we find that the positions that we thought we would use the most, are actually not nessesarily the postions that we use. That however is something that you can only learn with extended use, and while we are not using what we thought we would, there are enough jets and ways to use them that the therapudic value that we were looking for in the purchase of a spa is more that there.