Hot Tub Water Usage: Basics and Simple Comparisons

A big topic right now around the country, and with good reason, is water conservation. And while a home comfort item like a hot tub certainly uses water, you might be surprised at the amounts here – and particularly how low they are compared to many other uses of water in your home, including certain fixtures you use every day. At Dolphin Pools & Spas, we’re happy to serve as a licensed Bullfrog Spa dealer in Utah, providing these and numerous other hot tub options to a variety of clients. For those considering a hot tub but concerned about water conservation and overall water usage, this two-part blog will go about comparing average hot tub water usage to other water fixtures in or outside your home – showcasing how in reality, hot tubs don’t use all that much water at all, and generally won’t be an obstacle to your conservation efforts.

Hot Tub Water Usage

As a baseline, we must first determine the average water used by a hot tub during its uses so we can compare this to other water fixtures. A standard use of a hot tub usually uses between 250 and 450 gallons of water – let’s middle that number and go with an average of 350 gallons used per hot tub session, give or take. We won’t bore you with the entire equation, but when you assume about four days of use per week and also factor in refiling your water roughly once every 4-6 months, you can usually get about 250 different hot tub “soaks” for that 350 gallons of water before it needs to be changed out. A little more math tells us that, using those numbers, each hot tub session will use around 1.4 gallons of water per person (the number is even lower for saltwater hot tubs, which need to be drained less often). How does this compare to other water fixtures?

Daily Showering

A water use that’s constant in nearly every household is showering, a process that – using the average low-flow showerhead today – uses up about 1.8 gallons of water per minute. If we assume about 25 showers per week in your household at five minutes per shower (conservative estimates), you’ll be using over 1,000 gallons of water per month just on showering.

Lawn Watering

Lawn watering is another major use of water, generally requiring about three gallons of water per minute depending on the lawn you’re watering. Even watering just three times per week, this equates to over 1,000 gallons per week on watering a lone – even if you have slightly lower needs than other homes here, your usage will still be very high. You could fill that 350-gallon hot tub over a hundred times with the amount of water you’re using on sprinklers every week. For more on hot tub water usage and why it’s lower than you might think, or to learn about any of our hot tubs or swimming pool services, speak to the staff at Dolphin Pools & Spas today.