Hello everyone. 

Well unfortunately the control pad for my outdoor spa got moisture inside the glass and then it stopped working completely. 

I booked for the repair shop to send out a technician to take a look at my spa and see what could be done to rectify it. 

A young man turned up and right from the start the news was bad , 

as he informed me that the control pad on the unit was now completely obsolete and couldn’t be supplied. 

He opened up the side panel and then he took off the inspection cover off the control unit . 

There was a little bit of corrosion on a few terminals , but visually it wasn’t in that poor a condition. 

He closed everything back up and I awaited the shop manager to call me with a repair price. 

Now realistically, its an older type of spa so one would think that obviously that the shell and jets and frame are ok as they are acrylic and plastic so they were serviceable. 

The questionable bit is the  condition of the pumps , as this spa ran three pumps , and they were obviously also getting older . 

I got the call from the shop with the bad news , 

because the touch pad is unavailable, 

I would if I decided to repair the spa , have to not only replace the damaged touch pad with a new one and I also then would have had to replace the complete control unit to be a match with the new pad. 

There were also no new universal touch pads available to plug straight in to my unit. 

The price to get my old spa going again with parts and labour was around 3.4k . 

Obviously it was not practical and completely uneconomical. 

You can buy a reasonable newer model secondhand spa for less than the quotation. 

So usually I like  to recycle   whatever I can , 

but in this case I couldn’t. 

Id much rather have put a new touch pad in it, 

than to have to  take it to the local transfer station as landfill . 

So this morning I took up the challenge of getting rid of it , completely on my own . 

I have had a hernia operation not so long ago so I preceded with caution  

In the past I would have lifted it right up on its side by lifting the spa manually . 

I have occasionally moved a few spas around in the past and I knew that it was quite possible , with a bit of fore thought , 

and it would be especially easier  today , because It didn’t matter if I marked it as it was now just a piece of heavy rubbish . 

First up, 

remove the lids and pump the water out , 

onto my lawn with a sump pump that I have in the shed. 

Now originally when I put the spa there it went straight on top of the dirt .

So after all this time and the weight of the water constantly pushing the spa down, I knew it would be stuck fast , like its glued onto the ground . 

The first step was to put a big solid block of wood parallel to the side of the spa and then jamb my crowbar into the ground next to the spa and leaver it upwards by standing with all of my weight on the on the end of the crowbar . 

Cool,  

up she came by a few inches, then came  the comical bit , when I tried to slip a block of wood underneath the spa in the gap I made while standing on the end of the crowbar . 

It was basically impossible to reach the distance and I thought I might need some help with the blocks. 

Persistence paid off and I eventually managed to somehow get a few blocks under it. 

So next I grabbed a bottle jack out of the shed and set that up next to the blocks of wood and I pumped the jack ram up to full height . 

Now it was on the way up. 

I then got two green 2 tonne soft lifting slings and a D shackle and a cable drive come along out if the shed and I attached one sling to the top central spa frame with a choke  knot and I joined the other sling to it with a shackle . 

By rule of thumb the correct way to do up a shackle of any size in any application is to tighten it all the way up the thread , and then back it off quarter of a turn , this  method prevents the shackle pin locking up under force. 

Here is the interesting bit , as I was setting up a pull, 

Of course I needed something to actually pull off, 

my trailer was sitting opposite on the driveway, 

so I attached the come along hook to the rope rail on the trailer , I released the cable and attached the free end of the sling. 

With a few cranks of the handle the tension on the slings increased. 

Hmm

A few more cranks of the handle and nothing? 

I noticed that the spa was pretty heavy as when I cranked the handle instead of the spa lifting upwards, the trailer it was pulling off was slowly sliding on its tyres across the driveway towards the spa every time I winched the handle.  

So out with a heavy rope and I tied the other side of the trailer rope rail to a close by fence post in my garden. 

I tied the rope as low on the post to the ground as I could to give me a strong anchor because if I tied off the top of the post it would likely snap off like a matchstick . 

That should hold it . 

And it did , I hand winched the spa up towards vertical, taking two pulls as after I ran out of cable I had to double up a sling and pull it again until the spa was on its side and vertical. 

Next job was to back in the trailer towards the spa, and my trailer actually has a small 12volt electric winch on the front , so I released the cable and tied that rope around the spa and then with a spare car battery and jumper leads  I dragged the unit with the winch up onto the trailer. 

Strap it down , 

throw in my scrap metal and a bit of rubbish into the spa and I’m ready for the tip . 

The guys at the refuse station were scratching their heads when I arrived, but we came up with a plan for them to pick it up in the air with an excavator with a grab attachment , and have me drive forward pulling the trailer out from under it when its up in the air. 

So now its my bad and iI forgot about my tailgate being closed , 

so when I saw it lifted a few inches in my mirror ,

I drove the car forward, but not very far as the tailgate had stopped the spa from exiting .

I got out and had a look , my tailgate was not  looking the best and had a big bend in the middle. 

Bugger , 

it cant go back on as its now shaped like a banana , instead of flat , so I laid it down on the ground under the car and I watched out of my open 

door as I ran over the tailgate to use the car wheel and weight to straighten it back out. 

It came out pretty good . 

I put it back on as best as I could , 

Then the excavator man came over and asked me how I straightened the tailgate . He must have also thought that I had been singing  sometime in the spa as an old microphone had fallen out if it , from the rubbish I had put inside it .

So it was a successful mission after all , 

Maybe someone should import or manufacture universal touch pads for older spas as it would allow some of them to continue an extended serviceable life rather than just being wasted and smashed up at the tip. 

To much stuff in our society is made purposely throwaway and also made obsolete to quickly just to sell  us consumers another one . 

Cheers xxx