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Sundance vs Caldera

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CanadianSpaTech:

warranties are set by the manufacturer, so anything that is pro-rated is coming from them and not the dealer...trip fees have been pretty much standard in this industry for well over a decade now, they cover costs for the business....I can't send out a well qualified technician who I'm paying $26 an hour + insurance + pay $4 for gas and drive 60 miles each way and stay in business without covering some of those costs, it's simply not feasible especially in big metropolitan markets where customers are spread out over a 40,50,60 mile radius.
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And if you ever have to make a second or third trip out to complete the repair then you are really loosing money. Why I don't do warranty work anymore.

bud16415:
We have a Caldera Geneva for the last 7 or so years and only had a couple issues with it. I believe it is the upper tier of their product line and that was a question you asked about. IMO in the long term some of the features and build quality of that step up are worth it.

If I remember correctly the upper models have a circulation pump and for me that’s a pretty big deal. The other models run the main pumps to do cleaning and with a circulation pump it cleans slowly but all the time.

The upper models sometime will let you run all the pumps at the same time or have dual speeds. Some don’t have a base pan ABS and the upper level does.

The only major problem we had was a pump leak on the motor side and I called my service dealer and they gave me some wild number or 800 bucks to replace motor and pump. I bought a wet end replacement pump for 70 bucks and DIY in about 2 hours. So if you are handy you can do some of the work yourself.

Caldera had two things I liked. One was their insulation was packed in and had a very high rating and can be removed and replaced if something in the walls needs repaired. The second thing is some of their upper models use a double GFCI breaker that they provide and it has the tub and the heater on different GFCI breakers. If your heater fails in the winter the tub will still run in survival mode slowly moving the hot water that’s in the tub to keep the pump side from freezing up. It also alarms you to the problem. That takes the time to service the tub from maybe a day to a week depending on the weather.

I would say if you are planning on having the tub for 20 years the extra cost stepping up is worth it.   

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