While often associated with tech giants in Silicon Valley, there are innovations happening right here in Canada that may be unheralded, but are equally as important and impactful.
Canadian hot tub and spa maker Arctic Spas has uncovered a niche and has taken a leading role in developing innovative technology that not only helps the environment, but reduces costs for spa owners.
“Energy efficiency and the related usage costs have become a significant issue for the average person in their day-to-day lives,” says Brent Macklin, Co-Founder of Arctic Spas. “In the past, there has been a stigma that hot tubs use a high-volume of energy and can be costly to operate, but we’ve proven that theory wrong by developing technology that significantly improves energy efficiency and ultimately, saves the customer money.”
As the original cold weather hot tub brand, Arctic Spas has focused on energy efficiency and related benefits since its early days. It was the first company to introduce an unprecedented perimeter insulation design, which improves energy efficiency by using the waste heat from the pump motors to heat the water.
“Up to that point, other manufacturers either had no insulation or insulation that blocked the waste heat from being used,” Macklin explains, adding that the company continues to improve and optimize this innovation. “Over the years, others have tried to mimic our design, but none have been able to concretely back energy efficiency claims.”
One of Arctic Spas most recent innovations, Spa Boy, is a cutting-edge automated spa care tool that allows users to program their hot tub to run only during off-peak usage times while automatically sensing and maintaining ideal spa water conditions, eliminating the need for manual testing and chemical dosing.
It also directly addresses energy efficiency reporting issues by:
• Measuring and recording electrical consumption in real-time.
• Reporting consumption data and historical data to the spa owner in real-time through a private website or app.
• Report electrical cost in real-time with historical data to the owner by allowing the owner to input their local rate for electricity.
• Allowing the owner to alter the heating and filtration times to avoid times of day where electrical costs are higher.