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Imagine this, your a manufacturer that produces 5000 tubs a year. A company like Costco comes to you and says " we want to buy 1000 units from you but we are only going to pay you this much per unit" The manufacturer of course says wow 1000 units? You bet we can, and Costco purchasing and manufacturer sales shake hands. The production foreman gets orders from management to make them fast and use less fiberglass, insulation, glue, ect. to meet the price point. Everyone is happy except one person. And that guy was happy when he bought the tub cause he saved money over the quality manufacturers tub. But then he realized that it costs a ton to operate and it developed a couple leaks in the first year and the shell seemed a little flimsy in the middle and the service sucked. They wanted him to install it and fix it himself.Sounds like a good deal to me.
Ditto what Sam said. I sold Clearwater briefly back in 2008. Horrible quality control. Every spa on our initial order (turned out to be our only order) had issues. All were issues that should have been caught during water testing which lead me to believe they don't water test their spas. Once the stupid issues were resolved, I did have pretty good reliability, but that was one truckload only. Even up until last year I dealt with Clearwater a bit regarding service. They only had one in-house tech, hard to get a hold of and sometimes took days to return voice messages. If Clearwater was priced like an inexpensive hot tub, like Nordic or Viking, I would maybe look past the issues, but for how much they were from a wholesale standpoint, no way would I accept their issues and lack of dealer support.