If you’re thinking of adding a hot tub to your home, perhaps in the yard or maybe on a raised terrace, there are several important considerations to take into account. For example, you need to think about the shape, the style, the brand and how many people will be using it.
Hot tubs full of water are extremely heavy, so another point you shouldn’t overlook is its weight. However, since there are many variables, it can be hard to obtain an exact figure – so here, we look at the question, how much does a hot tub weigh?
Oh, and one more question for you: how many men does it take to move a hot tub?
Hot Tub Weigh – Why do you need to know?
The question of how much a hot tub weighs could have many answers, and to give you the one you’re looking for, we need to know why you are asking the question.
One likely reason is that you want to install a hot tub in your home, and you want to know if its weight is going to be a problem once it’s installed.
For example, if you place a hot tub on a wooden terrace, is it going to crash through the boards when you fill it with water and get in? Or even if you place it on solid ground, is it likely to cause that ground to subside?
In these cases, you are probably most interested in the weight of a hot tub when full.
On the other hand, perhaps you are thinking about the practicalities of moving a tub to the location where you want to install it. Often, hot tubs are delivered to the curbside, which means you may need to think about how to move it from there into your yard.
Or perhaps you are moving to a new home and you are considering your options for taking your old hot tub with you.
In these cases, you are more likely to be interested in the weight of an empty hot tub.
If you want to know about moving hot tubs, check out this video of one man shifting a tub by himself. Then you can decide if you want to try it yourself!
Now let’s look at some possible answers to these questions.
How much does an empty hot tub weigh?
First, let’s look at the relatively simple question of empty hot tubs.
While hot tubs come in a wide range of shapes and sizes, it is possible to give a rough idea of how much an empty hot tub weighs.
If we are talking about a “small” hot tub – and by this we mean perhaps a two-person hot tub – the average weight would be somewhere around 300-500lbs.
For a “large” hot tub – which could mean one for five or six people – you would be looking at a weight of around 1000lbs or more.
For a medium-sized one, then, we can imagine it might weigh around 750lbs.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that all hot tubs conform to these figures – this is just supposed to be a very rough estimate. If you want to know the precise weight of any particular model, it is a very simple matter of looking it up online. Our numbers are just guidelines.
How much does a full hot tub weigh?
To work out the weight of a hot tub when full, you need to know three things. You need to know its weight when empty, you need to know its water capacity and you need to know that a gallon of water weighs roughly 8.34lbs.
Let’s take the Newport model from Essential Hot Tubs as an example.
This is a relatively small tub that has a weight when empty of 320lbs and a water capacity of 200 gallons. To find its weight when full, then, we need to add its weight when empty to the weight of the water it can hold.
Since one gallon of water weighs 8.34lbs, we know that the total amount of water it can hold weighs about 1,668lbs.
This gives us a combined weight of 1,988lbs.
However, a hot tub isn’t designed to just hold water – it needs to hold people, too. So just as an example, let’s throw in two 175lb adults, too.
The tub (350lbs) plus the water (1,668lbs) plus two adults (350lbs) gives us a grand total of 2,338lbs – and this is just a small tub.
If we do the same calculation for a 1,000lb tub that holds 400 gallons and six adults, the total weight comes out as 5,386lbs. To put it into context, that’s about the same as a small fully-grown African elephant!
Can you put a hot tub indoors?
If this question refers to downstairs, no problem. But if you’re talking about taking one upstairs, you may run into some issues – even if what you have in mind is a lighter inflatable hot tub. Let’s use the Bestway inflatable tub as an example here.
Now, the tub in question covers an area of roughly 26.72 square feet and has a capacity of 177 gallons.
177 gallons of water weighs approximately 1,476lb, and the tub itself weighs around 72lbs, giving us 1,548lbs in total.
Spread over 26.72 square feet, this comes out at around 58lbs per square foot, but a common rating for many buildings is that they can only support 40lbs per square foot.
This means if you took one of these upstairs into your apartment, inflated it and filled it with water, you would probably be risking the structural integrity of the building as well as almost certainly breaking the law. And that’s before anybody even gets into the tub.
So if this is something you were considering, you might want to think again!
How much do they weigh? A lot!
As we have seen, there are many answers to the question of how much a hot tub weighs and lots of possible ways to calculate it. It all depends why you want to know, but in one sense, the answer is always the same – they’re heavy!
