Should be fun, but trouble’s bubbling under the surface

LET’S spare a thought for all the people who bought hot tubs last year. They were such a precious commodity during the latter stages of the lockdowns that – I kid you not – I once bought three of them from Argos online in one week and, within days, sold each one for £150 more than I’d paid to people on Facebook who seemingly had more money than sense. It funded a nice post-pandemic holiday in Wales.

I realise that makes me a bit of a profiteer, but I don’t care. People were so desperate for these inflatable vats of momentary outdoor indulgence they were willing to overlook the long-term financial oblivion that hot tubs inevitably submerge you in.

If you’re the sort of person that buys a hot tub, especially the fragile inflatable kind you can now pick up for just £150, I hate to say it, but you are categorically daft.

My wife and I bought our inflatable hot tub in 2019.

Flush with a bit of pre-pandemic disposable cash and dizzy on the fumes of relatively cheap electricity being hosed into our house, we indulged ourselves in a top-spec Lazy Spa with the funky flashing lights and all the accessories you can think of.

It cost about £400 and, for two or three years, it’s been a marvellous thing to own. Sort of.

Diving into a bubbling cauldron of steaming and fizzing 40C water when it’s a bit nippy outside is an absolute delight – but that’s where the pleasure ends.

Keeping a hot tub running effectively, without it peeling off your skin or giving you legionnaire’s disease, is an abrupt lesson in chemistry. If you thought your £150 hot tub was a bargain, just wait until you realise you’ll need to spend at least £50 on chemicals and filters in the next few months. And then you’ll need to spend even more next spring. Still a bargain?

Keeping at least 1,000 litres of water safe and free of little swimmy things is a non-stop job. Chlorine, PH, sanitiser, defoamer, calcium and something I’ve never understood called “sequestering” will all become a daily heated topic over the breakfast table, but they all need to be spot on before you can even look at your bathing costume and grab a bottle of Bolli. A degree in chemistry isn’t a requirement but, trust me, it’s certainly desirable.

And then there’s the energy costs. You might have seen in the news that electricity is getting pretty expensive. Shortly after my wife and I took the idiotic step of buying a hot tub, we sat with a calculator and worked out what it actually cost to keep it at a pleasant 38C. It turned out it was about £4 per day. And that was three years ago, when a normal day’s electricity cost about the same as a slice of toast.

If you try to run a hot tub for a day now, taking into account the cost of water, electricity and all the chemicals, you’d need to sell your first-born to keep it tepid for an evening. And then you’d need to flog off your second-born to get it up to temperature for the next day. And when you run out of children, you’ll need to shed at least one car. So it’s no wonder inflatable hot tubs have started appearing in shops this summer for £150. And I genuinely pity the people who spent well over £500 on them last year. They seemed like fun at the time, and admittedly they are a wonderful thing to soak in on a nice evening, but owning a hot tub has become as expensive as owning a racehorse. And at least Shergar can regulate his own temperature and chemical balance. I think I might pop to the local stud farm and trade in my Volvo.

You never know, the financial gains might pay for another night’s supply of chlorine and filters.

Keeping a hot tub running, without it peeling off your skin or giving you legionnaire’s disease, is an abrupt lesson in chemistry.