Some of you may recall my various adventures in hot tub repair. Long story short, I’ve been trying to get this thing running properly for over a year now. The primary problem with it has been a leak, but I’ve also had to do a considerable amount of rewiring. Let’s face it – The damned thing is old, and I’m not sure it was wired properly to begin with. There was a lot of rust on the connections, causing several of them to short out. This happened a few months ago. K. and I were sitting on the back porch when we heard a loud pop. From that point on, the hot tub would turn on no more.

I had pretty much given up on it.

But, you know, having something that large hauled away is expensive as hell and right now I don’t have that kind of money.

So this morning I attacked the hot tub again.

First of all, I completely rewired the four prong outlet that connects to the control panel. Sure enough, rust had caused a burn to appear on one of the cables. I cut off all the connections, restripped the wires to make new ones, and put two new receptacles in. Flipped back on the breaker – All working properly.

Step one complete.

The other step I’m less sure of. Well, kind of. I’ve known where the main leak has been for a long time, and I’ve done everything I could to try and patch it. I’ve used this putty that K. affectionately calls “gorilla snot,” and I used this watertight cast like material as well. As far as I could tell, the results were mediocre and temporary at best. So today I said to hell with it and completely cut the filter out of the pipeline. Upon removing the threaded connectors I found the problem – The pipe going into the filter had cracked on the threads. As a result, no matter how much sealant I put in there it couldn’t hold the leak because there was a gap between it and the sealing compound. So I got new connectors, a few couplers, and some new pipe. Threw it all together and put it back in.

So far, so good. The initial tests seem to hold.

I’m currently in the process of bailing out the hot tub (which sucks, in case you are wondering). I will soon fill it again and find out if that was the ONLY leak. If not, I’m going to have to resort to pulling side panels off this thing to try and get it patched up.

So wish me luck.

Back to it – I want to get this finished so I can take a damned shower.