Should you keep your hot tub running this winter?

As autumn turns cooler, every hot tub owner faces the same question: leave the water warm and ready for crisp winter evenings, or drain it down until spring?

There is no single right answer. It depends on how often you will realistically use it, how well insulated the spa is, and how you feel about maintenance in the cold.

The case for keeping it warm

For a lot of owners, winter is the best season for a hot tub. Getting into warm water while the air is freezing is the whole point, and it is hard to beat.

There is an engineering argument too. Modern spas are built to stay on, with insulation and automatic freeze-protection cycles that keep water moving. Holding a steady temperature is generally kinder on the system than heating from stone cold several times over the season. Leaving it filled also keeps seals and pipework from drying out, which is a genuine risk when a spa sits empty for months.

If yours has an air source heat pump, it will still be doing useful work through the winter, though it is worth knowing that a heat pump has less warmth in the air to draw on during a hard frost, so the standard heater picks up more of the load on the coldest nights.

The case for shutting down

If you know you will not use it between November and March, keeping it hot is electricity and chemicals spent for nothing. Shutting down also makes sense if you travel through the winter, since water chemistry does not look after itself.

But switching off the power and pulling the drain plug is not enough, and this is where real damage gets done. Water left in pipework and jet lines can freeze, expand and crack fittings. A proper winter drain-down means blowing the lines out, draining the heater casing, removing the filter cartridges and making sure nothing is left standing in the lower pipework. If you are not confident doing that, it is worth having someone do it properly — a cracked manifold costs considerably more than the electricity you saved.

What is your routine?

Some owners we speak to would not dream of turning theirs off. Others drain down every October like clockwork and have never had a problem.

We are genuinely curious which camp you are in. Tell us what you do over the colder months — and if you are weighing it up this year, ask us and we will talk it through for your spa rather than in general.