What hot tub removal costs in Tampa

The short answer

$322. That is the flat price to remove a hot tub or spa in the Tampa Bay area. Related outdoor items on the same list: a cold plunge tub is $271, an above-ground pool with frame and liner is $145, a patio table $89, patio chairs $30 each.

The price covers the breakdown, the carry-out and the disposal. It does not change because the tub is inside a screen cage, on a raised paver deck, or behind a side gate that is narrower than the tub.

What it does not include is electrical disconnection. A hot tub is hard-wired to a dedicated circuit and a licensed electrician should kill it properly before removal day. That is a separate trade, and it is the one thing you need to arrange yourself.

The screen enclosure problem

This is the defining Tampa hot tub issue and nobody thinks about it until the day.

Most Bay area backyards with a pool have a screened enclosure over them — a cage, a birdcage, whatever you call it — and an awful lot of hot tubs live inside one, on the pool deck. The tub went in either before the cage was built, or through an opening that has since been rescreened, or it was lifted over the top by the installer.

Getting it out means one of three things: out through the cage door if the tub can be broken down small enough, out through a removed screen panel, or over the top. Screen panels come out of their channel and go back in, which is normal maintenance work, but it needs doing deliberately rather than discovered at four in the afternoon.

Tell us at booking that the tub is inside an enclosure. The price is still $322 — we just bring the right plan.

Why so many Tampa hot tubs go unused

Nobody says this in the showroom: a hot tub in a subtropical climate is a winter appliance, and Tampa's winter is about eight weeks long.

From roughly May through October, a 102-degree tub in ninety-degree air with saturating humidity is not an appealing prospect. So the typical Bay area hot tub gets genuinely used for a couple of months a year, sits covered the rest of the time, and still draws power and still needs chemicals and still needs the cover replaced every few years as the sun destroys it.

That is why so many of these get removed rather than sold. The buyer pool for a used spa in Florida is thin, and the honest calculation for most households is that the tub costs more to keep than it returns. $322 ends that.

What the sun and salt have already done to it

Before you try to sell it, look at it properly.

Florida sun destroys acrylic shells and cabinet panels faster than most climates — chalking, crazing, fading, and covers that have gone waterlogged and split at the fold. If you are near the bay, on the beaches, on Davis Islands or anywhere the salt air reaches, the metal in the equipment bay corrodes on its own schedule. And in this humidity, an equipment compartment that has had a slow leak for a season is usually growing something.

The giveaway is the cover. A hot tub cover that has absorbed water is enormously heavy and cannot be lifted by one person. If yours is like that, water has been sitting in the foam for a long time and the tub underneath has almost certainly been neglected for as long.

At that point it is a removal, not a listing.

Hurricane season and the tub you never use

A hot tub is not going anywhere in a storm. The cover is.

A spa cover is a large, light, flat object, which is the exact description of a dangerous projectile in high wind. Every hurricane-prep checklist in this city says to secure or store loose items, and a cover is one of the more awkward things to find room for — especially if the garage is already full, which in a city with no basements it usually is.

If you are strapping down and storing a cover every June through November for a tub you use eight weeks a year, that is a good moment to price the removal. $322 now is one less thing on the list next time a cone shows up on the forecast.

Our prices do not change during storm season either — $322 in September as in February.

How the removal actually works

Straightforward, once the power is off.

• Drain it first. Do this the day before — a full spa holds a great deal of water and it takes hours. Run the hose somewhere that will not flood a neighbor's yard or wash chemicals into a storm drain.
• Electrical disconnected by a licensed electrician, at the breaker and at the tub.
• Access checked. Side gate width, cage door, paver deck, screen panels. Tell us which apply.
• Breakdown and carry-out. The shell is cut down and the cabinet, frame and equipment come out in pieces. This is loud and it is not subtle.
• Deck left clear. What is underneath is usually a paver pad, a concrete pad or a stained patch of deck that has not seen sun in ten years.

What else usually goes at the same time

Nobody removes a hot tub in isolation. The back of a Tampa house tends to hand you a list.

Patio table $89. Patio chairs $30 each. Charcoal grill $59, propane grill $71 — take the cylinder to a household hazardous waste collection rather than putting it on a truck. A chaise lounge is $93. An above-ground pool, frame and liner, is $145.

A full lanai and deck clear-out of the hot tub, a patio table, four patio chairs and a propane grill is $322 + $89 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $71 = $602. A full truck is $732 and a seven-eighths is $661, so on that list the itemized price is the better buy — and you can work that out yourself before booking.

HOA and community rules

Out in Wesley Chapel, Lutz, Riverview, Apollo Beach and the Pasco developments, and in many of the Pinellas 55-plus communities, the association has rules about work in the backyard: permitted hours, no debris staged at the curb overnight, sometimes advance notification.

Check before you book, because hot tub removal is noisy for an hour or so and it produces a visible pile of cut acrylic and framing. Everything leaves on the same truck, the same day — nothing is staged at your curb — but a neighbor who was not expecting the noise is a neighbor who calls the association.

Same price either way. $322, in Seminole Heights or in Sun City Center.

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