A Wood-Fired Hot Tub for an Old-Style Soak
Bruce and Judy Tarin of Port Elizabeth, N.J., settle into a Snorkel model.
By JENNIFER BLEYER
Published: October 20, 2010
MARTY PICCO, a 51-year-old software developer in Santa Cruz, Calif., does not seem like a back-to-the-land type. He has an iPhone, an iPad, two MacBooks, two desktop computers, a digital single-lens reflex camera and a plasma television. But when he bought a hot tub, he went for the lowest-tech model around.
Drew Kelly for The New York Times
Members of the Picco family of Santa Cruz, Calif., enjoy their six-foot-wide cedar tub, which is nestled in a patch of beargrass and wild sweet peas.
Mr. Picco and his wife, Liz, 56, bought a red cedar tub that relies on a wood-fired stove to heat its water, an unusually primitive apparatus in an age of electric fiberglass spas outfitted with hydrotherapy jets, air blowers and underwater lights. The cedar tub, six feet in diameter, seemed to fit better with their home, a mid-19th-century redwood farmhouse, especially when he placed the tub outside in a nest of beargrass and wild sweet peas. But there was more to his choice than that.
“It’s fun, like a ritual that you plan hours in advance,” Mr. Picco said about his simple tub, which he bought a few years ago. “You chop the wood, get the firebox going and get really good at managing the fire to keep the water in a narrow range of 104 to 106 degrees. You have a real outdoor experience, as opposed to a Las Vegas experience.”
By all accounts, rustic wood-fired hot tubs constitute a tiny niche of the broad hot-tub market. Their most prominent manufacturer, Snorkel Hot Tubs in Seattle, estimates that it has sold a total of 15,000 tubs, a mere drop compared with the 6.3 million conventional hot tubs installed in the United States, according to the Association of Pool and Spa Professionals in Alexandria, Va.
But the recession sent sales of conventional hot tubs plummeting more than 60 percent from 2005 to 2009, according to P. K. Data, a market research firm. At the same time, wood-fired versions have begun to acquire a certain cachet, with people valuing them for reasons of thrift, environmentalism or, like Mr. Picco, a personal desire to slow down and commune with nature.
Precise sales figures are hard to find because sellers of wood-fired hot tubs operate independently of mainstream industry associations. But Tom Slater, the owner of Snorkel Hot Tubs, said that while the recession dampened his sales last year, they have “picked up dramatically” since then. “There seems to be a lot of renewed interest,” he said, citing the same “earthy essence” quality of the tubs that attracted Mr. Picco.
Similarly, Doug Brubaker, the owner of Forest Lumber and Cooperage, a business in Sooke, British Columbia, that sells various kinds of hot tubs, said orders for the wood-heated kinds have risen from 30 percent of sales to 50 percent since 2006. Dan Jung, who sells 1,000 hot tubs a year at Northern Lights Cedar Tubs in Winnipeg, Manitoba, said wood-burning tubs had risen from 5 percent to 10 percent of his sales. And there are new sellers, too: a Chinese venture called Richy (Foshan) Trading, which started making the tubs in 2008 and has already sold 100 this year, compared with 80 in 2009.
Attractive prices may be helping to propel these gains. The cost of wood-fired hot tubs hovers around $3,000; Mr. Slater’s models, for example, range from $2,300 to $4,100. But electric tubs with jets and enough room for five to seven people typically cost $3,000 to $7,000 — or much higher, depending on the features added. As for operating costs, the electric variety can typically reach around $350 a year, according to the pool and spa association, while wood-burning tubs cost little or even nothing for owners who use their own wood.
“Economics is certainly a reason why someone chooses them,” Mr. Jung said. “They have no operating costs other than wood, and a cord of wood, at around $150, could last years.”
THE modern wood-fired hot tub was developed in 1979. In the previous decade, regular hot tubs had become a wink-wink symbol of debauchery, but there was nothing lascivious about this woodsy new entry.
Roger Evans, 29, an engineering student at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, had a cabin in the Talkeetna Mountains where the only bathing option was to jump into a frigid stream. Eager for the occasional hot bath there, he tinkered in his university’s welding room and developed an aluminum firebox that could be immersed directly into a vat of water. Its high heat-conduction properties efficiently fired up the water, and the metal resisted rusting and corrosion. Mr. Evans dubbed his invention the Snorkel stove and soon sold several hundred a year through advertisements in magazines like Mother Earth News and Popular Science.
Mr. Evans’s company, Snorkel Hot Tubs, is now owned by Mr. Slater, and a handful of other firms also make tubs with submersible fireboxes. Other varieties of wood-fired hot tubs have arrived on the market as well. The Chofu heater from Japan, a wood-fired device that sits outside a tub and uses a “thermosiphoning” system to heat the water within, is rigged up to agricultural stock tanks for do-it-yourself hot tubs that cost less than $1,000, as well as to traditional handmade Japanese tubs.
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