Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Purchasing a hard tub is an incredible commitment in time, chemistry, and maintenance (never mind the thousands of dollars to purchase and install). After seeing this Coleman steeply discounted on Black Friday at another retailer, I decided to give this inflatable a try. The Coleman is a branded variant of the Lay-Z Spa, and other than color, it appears to be identical to the other Lay-Z Spa sold. However, it appears that it holds about 50 gallons more water. It plugs into 120V, which makes it extremely easy to plug and play. Just be careful what else you have on the circuit with this tub, as it *will* consume an entire 15A circuit when you take in account safety margins. I have a Kill-a-Watt connected in series so I can monitor its power consumption (more later). The little green ovalish box is the brains of the operation. It contains the heater, a blower (which doubles as both inflator and bubble maker), and a membrane control panel. I have found it difficult to read during the day. The dark LED segments show bright white while the red is dimly lit. Setup: The instructions are not the best. Warnings are randomly scattered all over the place, making it difficult to read. While physically using the inflator works great, the pressure gauge is not even to the right scale needed to properly measure the correct pressure required. The first marking on the gauge is 2 psi and there is no 1 psi marking! Expect it to move a couple of millimeters and not point anything in particular when you reach 1.2 psi. The main air chamber has a very nice locking connector with a high quality one way air valve, so it is not like blowing up a pool inflatable. The sides are very firm once inflation is complete. *Pro Tip* While inflating, its very likely the keypad will auto lock before you are done. Make sure you unlock it again ahead of time, otherwise you'll spend a minute trying to figure out why the heck it won't turn off and overinflate your pool! There is a ground pad that looks like thick bubble wrap. There is still bits of snow on the ground, and it felt warm sitting on top of it. Although the instructions mentioned nothing of this pad, I faced the flat side down and put the pool on top of it. Do this before you put in the water! The hoses connect up nicely and it took me a couple of minutes to finish the connection. Expect it to take an hour or two to fill up the tub with your hose. I'd imagine, the warmer the water, the better. I couldn't find my sink adapter, so I just used whatever bitter cold water came out of the garden hose though. Operation: People complain about how slow 120V systems are to heat up. This is because you are physically restricted by the number of watts you can pull through a typical house plug. The tub has a two stage heater and can pull between 700 and 1200 watts. It apparently decides to use full wattage if the water is cold enough. It will switch to 2 elements after about a minute from my observation. When heating, it also runs the pump. This means only 1-2F degrees an hour of warming per hour. While they made a good effort to insulate the tub, it still is an inflatable. The bubbles are surprisingly large for just blowing air into a holed ring in the bottom. It looks just like a typical hard tub. Just remember: the amount of power required to create the bubbles takes away from the power needed for full heating capability. My tub is not at temperature yet (57F), but as it stands now, it turns off all heating in order to make bubbles. Sound: The heater + pump does not make much sound. Its a quiet hum, around 50 dB (or what is called a "quiet street" sound level or maybe a refrigerator hum). Obviously bubbles make a lot more noise, and there is a slight vacuum cleaner sound. But I would imagine a lot of other hot tubs have similar noise levels. Chemicals: You need proper chemicals in your spa. Not putting any in because its "just you" or randomly throwing in a tablet into the floater are not good ideas. You can get sick or chemically burned. The manual is completely useless and tells you to "go to a spa store" to learn about some "chemicals". Thanks guys. Just what I need is another salesmen who will try to sell me a hard tub. Searching on the internet is not much help either, as it is full of snake oil additives, unsound science on forums, etc. Make sure you buy a pack of test strips, as blindly adding chemicals can be very dangerous. You will want to know pH, chlorine/bromine level, and alkalinity. For the type of chemicals, there are two routes to go: Bromine or Chlorine. Bromine is a little bit more work but has some purported benefits. It has less odor, can be restored using a shock, etc. People in our hot tub notice little to no odor. Read the directions, but typically one will add Sodium Bromide (granules) to bring the Bromine levels up to an initial value. After that, you will likely use a Bromine tablet in the floater (1"). You will have to apply a "shock" to convert all that Bromine into free Bromine if your granules do not also include a shock. Pick up some pH Up and pH Down. Its cheap. When I initially filled it, my water was around 6.8 (too low). My Alkalinity is slightly low as well, and usually pH Up will boost this incidentally. Your water will be different. You can use the bubbles to mix chemicals as needed. Energy consumption (from Kill-A-Watt): Standby: 5-8 Watts (electronics only) Pump: 27 Watts Bubbles: 650 Watts Heater: ~700 Watts with one element, ~1200 Watts both elements (automatic) Bubbles + Heater: Doesn't appear possible ** Update - 1 week of usage ** In the Seattle winter with 40F days, this hot tub typically takes around 24-30 hours to reach temperature from cold hose water. It burns around 40kWh of electricity to heat this water up, so the initial startup costs can be costly. (40 * $0.10 = $4.00). I also noticed that it takes a lot of energy to maintain 104F (it runs 100% of the time), and you might be looking at $90 in electricity over the month! This is likely an insulation issue. * however * I have discovered that simply lowering the temperature a couple degrees when you are not using it makes a huge difference. Backing off the temperature, to say, 100F, practically quartered the power consumption. I should have some better numbers later, but this is the way to go. It only takes about an hour to go from 100F to 104F in the worst case, so not much is lost. We have used it quite a few times over the week, and it was very enjoyable. The tub is soft and comfortable, much more than a fiberglass or tile tub. I actually prefer it. The surround is still very firm and has not lost inflation. ** Update - 6 months later ** The inflatable vessel has developed some problems (leaks) and I have now engaged the warranty process. I am waiting for my RMA to be approved. I could not tell you if this is normal for this hot tub or not. I got my first leak on one of the seams. It was a small hole and I easily patched it. But then another developed...then another...in each case I noticed the internal ribbing completely failed. Eventually, a large section failed and it was hard to keep up with batching all of these holes as the hot tub slowly tore itself apart. These holes developed while nobody was using the hot tub. I will keep this updated with the progress on this. If the customer support is sufficient, I am not going to dock any stars on this review. **Update: Post Warranty** Everyone has delt with crappy manufacturers on warranties, but this company is not one of them. I had to cut out the serial number from my tub (don't be scared) in order to get a full replacement. The new "vessel" is working geat with no issues. I also have a comment on temperature: while low temps create long duration of full heating cycles, I've consistently kept our tub at 102-104 in the 20F range. Extremely low temps make it work harder (almost 2 days to acclamate!) but reasonable temps will hit temperature within a day. My biggest issue with this tub is the auto shutdown. If no key presses are hit, it will turn off in 3-4 days. Unfortunately, this is the length of our Seattle rain spells. You have to babysit the console every few days. You just need to unlock it and lock it to make it happy. This tub features an Atmel 328. I happen to be an expert at programming these. I am considering a mod but curious if anyone is interested.. WiFi or Bluetooth 4.0 is also possible.