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...The fountains are indeed interchangeable but personally, I think they are silly. Who wants water fountains shooting in the air and splashing while soaking in a hot tub? The do look pretty darn cool though. ...
Fountains generally are gimmicky. Not my bag.
Quote from: swilly1000 on December 23, 2018, 09:46:29 pmFountains generally are gimmicky. Not my bag.I'm with you 100% BUT that's just us, others really care when shopping as they can be a point of sale eye-catcher, whether they care later is debatable .
The babbling brook one is actually really cool and I should mention that I really like that one.
There are 3 "fountain" locations. One is meant to be the babbling brook and the shell is molded to facilitate that. The other 2 are actual arcing fountains that have interchangeable heads. You can turn on just the brook and leave the fountains off independently.
D1 are really nice spas. The Amore Bay is one of my favorite spas out there. I'm a little fuzzy on their pricing but I would guess $15k to $17k range for it depending on a few factors. The jets are very good. The sequencer is pretty cool. The switches to me are a bit gimmicky but certainly a neat design. The fountains are indeed interchangeable but personally, I think they are silly. Who wants water fountains shooting in the air and splashing while soaking in a hot tub? The do look pretty darn cool though. The 5 pump thing doesn't necessarily correlate to stronger jets because only 3 are jet pumps and 2 of them are small circulation pumps. One is for filtering and the other is for the fountains. The contours to the loungers are fantastic and super comfortable. Maybe my favorite "loungers" though they are more like adirondaks than true loungers. This is a great thing for people who float in normal loungers. They are also sort of "his & hers" since one is a little longer than the other.They do a lot of little things really well that are hard to appreciate until you have one. For instance, they have air bleeders up top to relieve an airlock. Trust me when I say this is a godsend to a homeowner who isn't very handy and gets an airlock. Honestly, even if you are handy it's still super nice to have. They have always been an engineering kind of company and constantly innovating really cool stuff. They have some ridiculous amount of hot tub patents.All in all, D1 makes an amazing hot tub that is absolutely gorgeous and very user focused. I really want to love them and on paper they should be my favorite. Unfortunately, in my experience they are a bit overpriced and we had too many service issues. Also, it takes forever to get parts and their support in that regard could be very frustrating. I suspect this has a lot to do with being bought out by jacuzzi group and moving production to mexico. They also use (or at least did) gecko electronics which I really don't like at all. Overly complicated and some really dumb design decisions. I don't recall the specifics but there was something that would happen occasionally requiring a "factory reset" which required the customer to remove the access panel and find a button that was not really obvious. Sorry my memory is fuzzy but I just remember it being unreasonably complicated and difficult for customers to figure out but not covered under warranty to send a tech out to do.I haven't used the new control panel yet, so no comment. It looks damn nice though.Their water treatment system at the top end was fine but didn't seem any better than any other companies best systems. Arguably worse than some I've seen, though they certainly talk like it's the best.So to answer your question regarding purchasing from a dealer 1.5 hours away, I would personally be nervous due to the amount of service issues we have. I admit that my experience is sort of anecdotal in that I only sold them a year or so and I haven't heard much bad about them from other people. I've also seen quite a few pretty old D1's out in the field but again, I suspect things changed for the worse after the buyout. I say check them out because their bay series are truly incredible spas. Maybe express your concerns about service and the fact that they are so far away and see how the dealer handles it. They also may have finally settled into a rhythm with all of the changes and all of the issues that I experienced may very well have been temporary and resolved.