Chapters:
Chapter 3 Topics
3-H: Does Height Matter?
(Yes, in more ways than you think)
Some people are tall in the legs and short in the trunk, or vice versa
Sometimes clients tell me they want a tall hot tub because they like to sit deep in the water, or they want a low-profile tub because they are short or have kids. But it’s not the model’s height that determines water depth – let me explain three things that affect water depth:
1. Trunk/torso/spine length of the user. Children and shorter adults obviously tend to sit lower in the water, but body-type also makes a difference, as shown in the above picture.
2. Some models have more loft between the exterior base of the tub and the interior hot tub floor. The height of the hot tub is not in direct proportion to the actual water depth.
3. It’s the height of the seat, not the height of the tub that determines how deep you sink into the water.
Some models have higher seats so you sit like you would in a truck, while others have shorter seats, more like a sports car.
Having a shorter hot tub (under 34 inches) doesn’t necessarily mean that your torso will be less submerged in the water – it might rather mean that the seats are only a few inches high, so you’re sitting just as deep in the water as a you would in a tall tub, but then your legs will stick further into the foot well. So if lots of people are in a hot tub, you’ll be playing footsies or legsies with everyone else trying to share the space in the foot well. That’s not always a bad thing for families but may be an issue when entertaining.
Conversely, some shorter models may have higher seats, which means that you’ll sit higher, more out of the water than a model with low seats, but your knees will bend, and legs will drop in a way that creates more leg room for users.
This might be the best drawing I’ve done since grade-school
If you don’t want to compromise, then you may have to go for a taller model with higher seats and less floor loft. Then you can have both deep seats and more leg room.
Personally, I like to have a good variety of seat depths – a couple for deep soaking, a couple for recreational lounging, and a couple “cooling stations” where you can sit shallower to cool off, or for the young ones.
Speaking of kids, I wouldn’t worry too much about shallow seating for small children. They don’t sit deep and lazily lounge like adults do. They just stand, crouch and bounce around in circles and sit on the laps of their parents anyways.
That’s a lot of words. I’ll bet that over 99% of readers zone out and move on before getting to this sentence. If you land in the 1% category, bring a printed copy of this paragraph to receive a $20 in-store credit toward anything in our store as a reward for being a keener. This is a one-time deal, one per household, valid only as long as this sentence is actively posted on this website, and you may have to answer a quiz on the above information to prove you actually read and understood it all.
If you find all this to be too confusing, just come on down and sit in some of our display tubs to try them on for size.
