7 Benefits of Salt Water Hot Tubs


Saltwater hot tubs have become all the rage among aqua-enthusiasts, not just because they are economical in the long run and easy to maintain but also because they present significant health and leisure benefits for homeowners.

The benefits of saltwater hot tubs are that they feel natural, enhance your fitness, improve blood flow while relaxing your muscles and easing pain. They are also mostly self-cleaning, don’t have the typical chlorine smell, and are very user-friendly.

In this article, we will explore the top seven benefits of salt water hot tubs in detail, starting with natural feeling water. By the end of this article, you’ll know why such a hot tub is a smart investment.

1. Water With a Natural Feel

When you have a saltwater hot tub, you get to enjoy natural feeling water closer to hot springs and seawater instead of hose-water pumped full of chlorine. When you swim in a swimming pool at your local facility, you might enjoy the act of swimming, but you do not get to relax the same way you do by the beach.

When you’re by the beach, you can feel the sand in your toes and can smell the salt in the air. That’s because seawater is salty yet fresh. With a saltwater generator, your hot tub cannot just contain salty water. The water must be freshly salted and have the citric smell that is typically associated with the sea.

Even if you don’t soak in it, it’s very relaxing to enjoy beside a saltwater hot tub. You can even have sandbox decor that presents you with both the sand and the seawater within the comfort of your own home. 

The second benefit of saltwater hot tubs is that you enjoy certain health benefits. There are a whole plethora of fitness and health perks associated with saltwater hot tubs. First of all, you get to relax. If there’s one thing we need for general mental wellness, it is more relaxation.

2. Complements a Fit Lifestyle

The second benefit of saltwater is related to fitness enhancement. While a saltwater hot tub will not give you a ripped gym body, it will aid your active lifestyle. If you work out, your muscles might get sore every time you break a PR. And you can always relax in a saltwater hot tub and reap the benefits of hydrotherapy. This brings us to the third key advantage of saltwater hot tubs: it improves blood circulation.

3. Improves Blood Circulation

As mentioned earlier, the health benefits can by themselves form a category. However, blood circulation, muscle relaxation, and similar positive effects feed into each other. Salt Water, especially at the right temperature, can help improve blood circulation and enhance aerobic activity. Multiple studies support the idea of hot salt water having health benefits. These findings are the basis for the use of saltwater in hydrotherapy, which is the next advantage.

Having enough water to move around it is a good idea if you are learning to re-educate your joints and your muscles to move in the right direction. Even though larger hydrotherapy tanks are used to recover from surgery, you can (to some extent) have similar movement-enhancement action at home. 

For example, if your arm is a bit sore because you slept on it, you can relax it in your saltwater hot tub. This would not be as effective if your hot tub was simply filled with hot water and chlorine.

4. Helps Ease Pain (Muscular and Emotional)

Pain and stress are mostly psychological. As mentioned above, a saltwater hot tub has the calming feel of natural water, and relaxing in it combines the benefits of saltwater alongside the actual smell and the aura of the beach lifestyle. 

These can work in tandem to relax you. It is natural to feel mentally relaxed when you can close your eyes and feel like you’re at the beach. While you’re in this calm state, the salted hot water that you are sitting in can relax your stomach, your stressed out muscles, and relieve a lot of body pain.

5. Self-Cleaning (for the Most Part)

The next benefit of saltwater hot tubs is that you don’t have to worry about the pool chemical and pH maintenance because, for the most part, the existence of fresh salt will take care of any microbes. 

There is a small stream of chlorine that is released into the water because of the water’s constant interaction with salt. And that stream can take care of most microbial filtration even though you might need to spend some money on pool chemicals. Generally, homeowners spend less than $100 across a whole year for their pool chemicals if they invest in a saltwater hot tub. 

Aside from bH maintenance, you do not have to spend a lot of time maintaining the saltwater hot tub because you don’t even have to worry about drowning out the water as much. Hot tubs generally can hold water for a long time, but it is not a good idea to keep water sitting for an extended period, especially if you do not have the appropriate circulation system.

Hot Tubs usually come with a circulation system because heat pumps require circulation. However, because hot tubs must be actively heating the water to be circulating it, people only have two options: The first is to keep heating it every day regardless of whether you use it or not, and the second is to drain the hot tub and fill it whenever you’re using it.

With a saltwater hot tub, you don’t have to worry about that because as long as the salt generator runs and you have enough salt in the water, it will not present the ideal environment for microbes to propagate. This naturally leads to one of the greatest perks of saltwater hot tubs: the odor of chlorine is practically absent from these tubs.

6. No Chlorine Odor

The chlorine smell isn’t absent because there is no chlorine in the tub. As mentioned above, there is a stream of chlorine being released into the water, but at the same time, it is not an overpowering amount of chlorine because the salt itself is working towards keeping your water clean. 

The smell that overpowers the smell of chlorine is that of the sea, a pleasant aroma compared to the strong, pungent smell of chlorine and other chemicals. Whenever you dip into a hot tub, you know that you are not sitting in a soup of chemical water but enjoying plain water with some salt.

7. User-Friendly

Finally, there is a relatively unaddressed benefit of user-friendliness. People love saltwater hot tubs not just because they’re superior in certain ways to other hot tubs but because the systems are designed for homeowners. Most regular hot tub systems are designed to help Home Builders and installers., especially those in the business of flipping houses. 

That’s because house flippers happen to be the biggest market, as the cheapest way to add value to a house is to set up a hot tub in it, which most house flippers do. Since most hot tubs are made for house-flippers, the process of installing a hot tub requires a lot of intricate knowledge and some level of expertise. 

In contrast, just adding a saltwater generator to a hot tub or getting yourself molded acrylic hot tub and then adding such a system is quite a user-friendly alternative. More importantly, even the operation of such a hot tub is very user-friendly because this addition was introduced to cater towards homeowners as opposed to house-flippers and home-builders. 

As a result, you will not feel like a novice when you’re operating a saltwater hot tub because the dials, the loading dock, and the salt cell replacement are all designed to be accessible to you as a new buyer. That benefit alone might make many homeowners switch from going for a hot tub to buying a saltwater hot tub.

Final Thoughts

Saltwater hot tubs are expensive when you only look at the setup costs but are beneficial for both your wallet, health, and leisure, in the long run. You can avoid sitting in a pool of chemicals, conserve water, have fewer drains, and purchase fewer pool chemicals while using an easy-to-operate system to have hydrotherapy and the benefits of fresh, natural, hot spring water at your home.

Jed Arnold

Jed spent every year from the ages of 15 - 22 as a Lifeguard (Red Cross) and ages of 17 - 22 as a Certified Pool Operator (CPO). Between working for over a dozen facilities and owning a pool, he carries over a decade of pool experience.

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