Heavy Spa Covers Waste Money. Have you seen this advertisement? It would be impressive if the business putting it out there actually had something different to offer. But since every rigid foam spa cover will eventually saturate with moisture buying another one is just a waste of money. But it seems like every spa dealer is selling the same thing. Right here is where your mother would say, If all your friends were jumping off a cliff does that mean you would too? Just because everybody is doing it does not make it right.

Maybe instead of just buying another cover that you know is going to end up the same way we should look at what went wrong with the last one. What causes every foam filled spa cover to get heavy? The type of foam used in the typical spa cover is made up of beads of foam bound together to make a light weight rigid board. This sort material is used in all types of construction applications. The way it works is the little air spaces in between the foam beads holds the air still. These foam boards are commonly used to insulate refrigerated rooms, and crawl spaces under a house. However this type of insulation is not designed to be exposed to warm, humid air.

Providing it is used in a dry situation, foam board has a predictable insulation value. If you wanted to produce the perfect environment for a rigid foam board to fail you would need to put it over a source of warm, humid, steam. Why? Because steam can get into those tiny air spaces in the foam. Once the steam cools it turns to water. The water displaces the air until the foam has no insulation value what so ever. Some spa cover dealers like to give you the impression that wrapping the foam with plastic will stop their cover from getting saturated. Or layers of plastic, or thicker plastic will be the answer. Although this seems to make sense, in reality every cover that uses foam will eventually get saturated. No matter what it is wrapped in once the foam is saturated the cover is not insulating.

And the only way to avoid the foam from saturating is to never put it on your spa. You may have looked outside this winter at your spa cover that was so heavy you could not lift it, and thought it was insulating your spa water because snow would not melt off it. Snow does not melt off a frozen pond either but that does not mean the pond water is warm. When snow falls on a saturated foam spa cover, it freezes the moisture in the cover because it is in direct contact with the foam. Basic science tells us that cold sinks and heat rises. What does happen the steam from your warm spa water hits the bottom of the frozen spa cover.

Then the steam cools and turns back into water. The water, now cooled, falls back into the warm spa water, cooling it off. So before you replace that cover with another one that will just end up in the same condition, I suggest looking for a different type of spa cover. Look for Replacement Spa Covers that will insulate the water from the water surface, without rigid foam.