Full Foam Spas VS More Modern Thermally Sealed

Plumbing restrictions and turbulence caused by full foam

designs:

 

 

The basic design of a spa is the foundation on which the entire spa is built. If you have no integrated design you have weakness of design.

If you start with the whole picture of the design in which you integrate, incorporate all of the parts as a whole, then the only way to build a spa is with thermally closed which allows the whole spa to be used properly.

There is no other way, because all attempts at making a whole spa using foam filled cabinet, will dis-integrate the spa.  Then you find the designers trying as hard as they can to put in complicated and inadequate parts to improve on a bad basis for a spa.

If you understand software, you may understand it from this perspective.  If you take a 20 year old piece of software and try to modernize it and add features to it, it becomes a mess, because the original flow chart for the design of the software had no thought of integrating these new features.  In that case it is cheaper and better to redesign the whole software and integrate all of the new features in the flow chart, so that each part is bridged to the whole of the software.

This same principle goes in all construction of anything.   Try making changes to a house while the house is being built.  It costs about 4 times to redo the construction and get the structure correct for the new feature you are adding to the house.  If the  original design had those features, the house would build a lot better and faster.
(If the hose is build on a bad foundation, what do you have?)


1/ If you place the jet pumps in a box in front of the spa, because there is no other place to put them, you wind up with bad alignment to the suction plumbing and often to the pressure plumbing.

2/ The jet pumps never achieve the pump manufacturer's flow rates, because of this restriction.

3/ The end result is wasted electricity and less effective therapy for the money you spend on power.

So, in our spas, we use the cabinet to help us get better water flow.  If you want water flow, you must have flooded suctions with no restriction, otherwise horsepower and electricity is wasted.

Go take a look at the plumbing on a full foam spa and tell me the relationship between the suction inlets and the jet pumps.  Look where the pumps are and look where the suction fittings are.

If you don't have full access to the cabinet, you wind up with pumps that do not align with anything, so there are extra turns to get the water into the jet pumps.

One of the rules of hydraulics, is that you must never have a direct 90 or 45 degree turn on the suction side of a centrifugal pump.  This is because the water entering the impeller (the fan that pressurizes the water) comes into the pump all turbulent and messed up.  It is much better to have it come in in a straight line with all the water molecules moving in the same direction.  It is also better if it enters under gravity pressure, rather than having a huge vacuum from restrictions.

This alone will increase the effectiveness of a pump by up to 20% better water flow.

Do you see how just this one thing is nearly impossible with any equipment that is forced to sit sideways and away from the suction plumbing, when the best is to face the back of the spa and towards the plumbing or to face the filter directly.

This is just one place were the full foam concept is wasteful and can't be fixed. It is a standard problem with full foam spas.  This clean plumbing is impossible in a full foam spa.

This is just on of those "dis-integrations" of design, caused by an improper cabinet insulation design.