Your old hot tub is four kinds of waste in one shell

7 minute read.

One object, four kinds of waste

Take the side panels off and it comes apart into materials that have nothing to do with each other. The shell is an acrylic sheet with fiberglass behind it and rigid foam sprayed over the back of that. The cabinet wrapped around the outside is timber or a wood-look composite on a lumber frame. Underneath sits a molded base pan or a treated frame on a pad. In one corner is the equipment bay: a pump or two, a heater, a blower, a control pack and a nest of PVC pipe and union nuts. Over the top is a cover, foam cores inside a vinyl skin. And until somebody drains it, a few hundred gallons of water.

That matters because you can't get rid of it as one thing. The shell isn't scrap, the cabinet isn't furniture, the equipment bay is the only part with any money in it, and the water has to be gone before any of the rest can move. A hot tub is four small jobs stacked inside each other, and each one is easy on its own.

It's also why the advice people get is so inconsistent. A neighbor took theirs apart over a weekend with a reciprocating saw and a wheelbarrow. Somebody else paid to have theirs lifted over a fence in one piece. Both of those are true, and neither tells you much about yours, because what decides it is your tub, your access and how the thing got back there in the first place.

Work through it in order and it stops being complicated. Water, then power, then the metal, then the shell. Everything below sits in that order, and doing it out of order is what turns one Saturday into three of them.

The water comes out first, and it takes longer than you think

A full tub isn't going anywhere. Nothing lifts it, nothing cuts safely with water sloshing behind the panel, and a few hundred gallons weighs more than the whole rest of the job put together. Draining isn't a courtesy you do to be helpful before the truck arrives. It's step one of the work.

Give it far more time than seems reasonable. A garden hose run as a siphon moves a few hundred gallons in hours rather than minutes, and it'll still be trickling long after you've stopped watching it. A submersible pump is much quicker if you can borrow one. Send the water somewhere the ground can actually take it, well away from the road and off the property line, because a few hundred gallons finds the low point in a yard whether you meant it to or not. Start the evening before and it's done by the time anybody needs to move anything.

The cover is the piece people forget. Foam cores inside a vinyl skin drink water for years through a split seam, and an old cover comes off the tub a great deal heavier than the one that arrived with it. It also keeps holding water after the shell is dry, which is why it travels as its own item instead of riding inside the shell where it'll soak whatever's underneath.

Don't count on the drain valve, either. On an old tub it's usually seized, cracked or hiding behind a panel that hasn't come off in fifteen years, and finding that out on the morning of is how a day gets away from you. A submersible pump doesn't care whether the valve works, which is the main argument for borrowing one.

Then there's the shelf of chemicals. Chlorine or bromine granules, pH adjuster, shock, the half bottles nobody's touched in three summers. Those don't travel with the tub. They belong on a household hazardous waste route, along with any old paint or fuel that has collected in the same corner of the garage, and it's worth finding out where that goes locally before the day rather than on it. It's the one part of this that doesn't leave with us.

Kill the breaker, then look at the metal

Anything bigger than a plug-in two seater runs on its own circuit wired straight from the panel, and there's normally a weatherproof disconnect box on a wall or a post within sight of the tub. Switch the breaker off, then check the tub is genuinely dead rather than trusting whatever somebody wrote on the panel door years ago. Only after that does the whip come out of the equipment bay. If opening a panel isn't something you want to be doing, an electrician handles this in a short visit.

Think about what gets left behind, too, because it's the step that gets forgotten once the tub is gone. There's an empty disconnect box on a post, a stub of conduit and a circuit back at the panel that now runs to nothing. Cap it, label it, or have it pulled properly. An abandoned live circuit in a yard is a problem for whoever owns the house next, and that might be you in five years or somebody at a closing table.

With the power off, the equipment bay turns out to be the only part of a hot tub anybody actually wants. Pump housings, the heater and its element, union nuts, brackets and a run of copper are all metal, and metal is the one material in the whole tub with value on the other end. Pull it out as a unit rather than in pieces where you can, because the plumbing comes away much easier when there's something solid to hold onto.

The plumbing is the other half of that corner. Flexible PVC, unions, a filter housing, a couple of valves and, on a lot of tubs, a blower. None of it is worth anything, all of it is full of water, and all of it keeps dripping long after you were sure it was empty. Cut it back toward the shell and let it drain into the tub rather than down the driveway.

Set the metal aside as you go instead of throwing it on the pile. Once fiberglass panels and foam land on top of it nobody is picking it back out, and the one part of this job with any money in it ends up going the same way as everything else.

Cut it up, or move it whole

This is the real fork, and it gets settled in your own yard rather than at the gate. A tub that goes whole needs a clear run out and enough hands to keep it level. A tub that comes apart turns into fiberglass panels, a stack of cabinet timber, a sack of foam crumbs and a crate of metal, which is four streams instead of one awkward object.

Whole is easier on your afternoon and harder on everything else. A tub in one piece is wide, awkward and heavier than it looks, and it wants a clear run with four hands at a minimum and usually six. Check the run before you check anything else: a gate narrower than the tub, a step down off a patio, a corner between the house and the air conditioner, a retaining wall, a fence panel that may or may not come out. Plenty of tubs were set in place before the fence went up around them, and that is the single most common reason a whole-tub plan stops being a plan.

Cut is more work up front and simpler everywhere afterward. Pieces lie flat, they carry one at a time, and one person on their own can clear a tub out of a back yard over a couple of evenings. Plan for the mess, though. Cut fiberglass is loose, light and takes off in a breeze, and the foam behind it gets into everything within about thirty feet. Lay a tarp, keep the pieces weighted down, and expect to spend real time picking crumbs out of the grass afterward. Eye protection, gloves, a dust mask and long sleeves, because fiberglass dust is miserable and it finds every gap in what you're wearing.

Set the two against each other and the decision usually makes itself.

The fork tends to settle itself once you have measured the narrowest point on the way out and counted the people who will actually be there on the day. Offers of help have a way of thinning out between Wednesday and Saturday morning.

One thing catches people either way: the tub is heavier now than it was the day it arrived. Old foam takes on water through cracks in the shell and around the jets, and a tub that has been leaking slowly for years can be carrying a lot of weight that nobody accounted for.

What is underneath, and what is there afterward

The tub leaving isn't the end of the job. What it leaves behind is worth deciding on before it goes rather than after, because most of it is far easier to deal with while there's already equipment and a trailer on site.

• The pad. Most tubs sit on a concrete slab, a bed of pavers or a compacted gravel base. Any of those can stay or go, and a slab is its own removal rather than an afterthought.
• The rectangle. Grass under a tub has been dead for years and what's left is a pale, compacted patch that doesn't recover quickly on its own. Have a plan for what goes there.
• The deck. If the tub sat in a cutout, the framing was built around that hole, so you're left with an opening, a rail that stops in mid air and boards that don't run through. That part is carpentry rather than hauling.
• The circuit. Dealt with above, and it is the item most often left half finished once the tub itself is out of sight.
• The plumbing, if there was any. Some tubs have a hose bib or a drain line run out to them. Cap whatever is open.
• The steps, the surround, the cover and the cover lifter. They all come off with the tub and they're the things people forget to mention when they describe the job.

Say which of those you want gone the first time you describe it. A tub, its steps and its cover is one job. A tub, a slab, a deck cutout and a rail is a different one, and it's better settled at the start than argued about halfway through the afternoon.

Nobody is coming to the curb for it

The first plan most people have is to wheel it out front and let the trash service deal with it. That plan doesn't exist for a hot tub anywhere around here.

Ordinary household pickup is sized for what a family throws out in a week. A hot tub is not that, whole or in pieces. Where bulk pickup exists at all it tends to mean an appliance or a piece of furniture rather than a fiberglass shell with foam bonded to the back of it. One call to whoever bills you settles it if you want to be sure, and it's worth expecting the answer to be no.

Which is where we come in. Tell us whether it's drained, whether the power is off at the panel, and what the tub is sitting on. The shell comes down to pieces that will carry out, the equipment bay leaves as metal, the cabinet leaves as debris, and the pad gets raked and swept before we go, because a tub that's sat for years leaves a rectangle behind it.

The thing that moves that job more than anything else is the run from the tub to wherever a truck can park. Twenty feet across a patio is a different afternoon from a hundred and fifty feet around the side of a house and through a gate, and that is the measurement worth having in front of you when you call.

If you'd rather handle it yourself, everything you need is above. Take your time on the water, be certain about the power, keep the metal separate, and the shell turns out to be the easy part.

Where to go next

• What hot tub removal costs
• Should you haul it to the dump yourself?
• What's actually free when you clear out a house
• Everything else that goes on the trailer
• Send a photo and the measurements and we will tell you which version this is