New Spa is In

| August 26, 2005

The new spa was installed yesterday. At least, it has been physically located to its position on the backyard patio. Waiting this morning for the electrician to come by and hook it up to some juice, and then I can fill it with some water.

It’s the Caspian by Tiger River spas, which I understand is a line of Hot Springs Spas. We got it at South Bay Spas in Harbor City.

More pictures here

Update:
Electrician came. I couldn’t get the same one who hooked up our previous spa; he left the company we used. Instead, we got a young man named Lewis, and he spent a lot of time to try and make everything fit.

Finally got the wires hooked up, but the breakers kept tripping. He immediately blamed a faulty component in the spa’s control box, saying that he knew how to read a wiring diagram and was sure that the wires themselves were sound.

Well, I had him leave because he had already been there two and a half hours, and it looked like he had done everything he needed to, but after he took off, I took a read of the owners manual. In the installation section, it said that if the breakers were tripping right away, to make sure the white wire was hooked up to the 30 amp breaker rather than the 20 amp one. Sure enough, when I looked in the breaker box, the white wire was connected to the 20 amp breaker (I guess that’s the way the old spa needed it). So all I had to do was move the white wire from the 20 amp breaker to the 30 amp one, and everything was copesetic.

Got the chemicals going (although it looks like I’ll have to add some water hardener to get the Total Hardness up), and the spa heated up to 104 by the time we got back home from Morgan’s basektball game. Girls got a chance to swim in it for the first time last night.

Only remaining issue is that the pipe bringining the wiring in is a little too wide for the notch that was pre-cut into the lower frame of the spa. Lewis cut it a little wider, but didn’t want to cut it deeper because he was afraid it might weaken the structural integrity of the frame. So we cut a piece of wood out of the door, but the bottom half of the door still doesn’t quite fit close enough to the spa body. Going to have to shave some more of the inside of the door to get a closer fit.