Are you looking for a holiday cottage in Cornwall with a hot tub?

When we lived at the Beach Haven we had a hot tub. We loved it. After a stressful day at work, it was lovely to let the warm water and bubbles soothe your aches away. However, when we started holiday-letting, we removed it without a moment’s hesitation. Why? Read on to discover why a holiday cottage in Cornwall with a hot tub might just not be quite so desirable after all!

Hot tubs are extremely high maintenance! They require daily monitoring for water quality and ph levels. If these are not maintained, there are some truly horrible consequences!

Sanitation is absolutely vital so a holiday-let hot tub needs to be drained, thoroughly scrubbed down, filters cleaned and then refilled in between guests’ stays. It’s quite a long process. A medium-size hot tub holds about 1500 litres of water. That’s about a tenner’s worth of water to fill it up. Then there’s the cost of the initial water heating – about the same again. Add to that the cost of the paying the person who has to clean and maintain it; chemicals; filters; top-up heating; annual maintenance; depreciation etc and you’re looking at an owners’ cost of well over £150 per week. This, of course, has to be built-in to the weekly rental price. If it’s not, what corners are being cut?

Why is that important? Here’s a few reasons:

  • It is not easy to maintain good water condition. The water quality has to be controlled daily with chlorine or bromine. These chemicals have links to causing asthma and can be carcinogenic.
  • The average bather has around a gram of faeces in their butt area! This obviously ends up in the hot tub water. When urine and other waste, such as sweat, mixes with chlorine, it creates an irritant called chloramine. This causes red, stinging eyes. Imagine half a dozen people in the hot tub with that cocktail floating around!
Legionnaires Disease holiday cottage in Cornwall with hot tub
Legionnaires Disease
  • The warm water full of a ‘food cocktail’ including dead skin, hair, blood, scum, urine, faeces and, ahem, other ‘bodily fluids’ is a perfect environment for growing bacteria, including the one that causes Legionnaires’ disease, which is a severe form of pneumonia. Symptoms of this disease include high fevers, muscle aches, tiredness and headaches. It can be fatal! Two men died after contracting Legionnaires from a contaminated hot tub in a showroom!
Hot Tub Folliculitis holiday cottage in Cornwall with hot tub
Hot Tub Folliculitis
  • Crypto: this is a disease carried in water by the cryptosporidium parasite. Do you enjoy a good session of diarrhoea and vomiting on holiday? This one’s for you then! It’s the hot-tub version of Delhi-belly!
  • The naturally-warm environment in the cavities of the insulated shell in a hot tub can also be a tempting environment for vermin to inhabit. How lovely to sit in a hot-tub and hear the scratching of the long-tailed, furry critters behind you. You might even see one if you’re lucky! You love rats, right?

Alcohol: you’re on holiday; you’re probably going to fancy a tipple or two. How lovely to combine a drink with a soak in the hot tub? However, a bit like drinking and driving, you shouldn’t combine the two. Here are a few reasons why:

  • Dehydration. Sweating in a hot tub dehydrates your body. So does alcohol. Both at the same time is too much. That can lead to light-headedness, dizziness, nausea, heart palpitations, confusion, weakness and even coma or death.
  • Dizziness. The high temperatures of a heart tub can lower your blood pressure. If you’ve also been drinking, that can lead to dizziness that will make you stumble or fall – never a good thing near water, particularly if you’ve got a glass in your hand
  • Sleeping or unconsciousness. The hot tub is great for relaxing your mind and body, so much that you could easily drift to sleep. Alcohol also relaxes your muscles and your mind. The combination could make you pass out and sink!
  • Heat Exhaustion. Hot tub heat expands your blood vessels and increases your body temperature. Alcohol does this too. It can lead to heat exhaustion that can trigger unconsciousness, or even a stroke or heart attack. Symptoms include confusion and dizziness, fainting or fatigue, headache, nausea, extreme sweating and rapid heartbeat and elevated body temperature.

Add to that, there is the risk of accidental drowning. children climbing on the hot tub lid when not being used. It’s thick but it’s made of polystyrene for insulation! And dogs jumping in! Yes, ours really wanted to!!

If we still had a hot tub at the Beach Haven, someone would have to come round every single day to check the water quality and adjust it accordingly. We think that’s a bit of an imposition on your privacy (and very inconvenient for us!).

If, during your stay, your health was compromised and you, one of your group, ended up with one of these conditions. Who are you going to blame? Us, obviously and rightly so. We most certainly do not want to be sued as a consequence!

There is also an environmental conscience aspect. That’s 300 gallons of water that has to be heated from scratch; kept to temperature for the duration of your stay; heavily treated with chemicals and then flushed down the drain. Only to be repeated at the end of your stay.

So, do you still want to spend around £150 per week extra for the privilege of a holiday cottage in Cornwall with hot tub just to bathe in some warm water for a couple of times during your visit? Nope? Thought not! 😉 After all, you are coming on holiday to Cornwall to enjoy the beauty of the natural environment: the sights and sounds of the ocean, the beaches, the clifftops, the harbours and villages. You should be inhaling the amazingly fresh, salt-infused air we have here, freshly filtered by 4000 miles of Atlantic Ocean; not breathing chlorine!

Why not check out our natural attractions in and around Bude instead?

www.thebeachhaven.co.uk

Further reading on the risks associated with hot tubs:

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