What hot tub removal costs in Miami

The short answer

A standard hot tub or spa is $322. A larger six-to-eight person spa is $390.

That is the whole price. It includes cutting or breaking the shell down to pieces that will move, carrying those pieces out of a screened enclosure or a fenced pool deck, loading, and disposal. There is no charge for stairs, for distance from the curb, for the crew disconnecting the panel, or for a same-day slot.

Related outdoor items on the same list: a cold plunge tub is $271, a one-to-two person barrel or infrared sauna is $293, and an above-ground pool with frame and liner is $145. The minimum visit is $75, which is not a number you will ever hit on a spa job, but it is the floor if you add a couple of small things.

Why so many Miami hot tubs are dead weight

Two reasons, both local, and between them they explain most of the calls.

Nobody uses a hot tub in a Miami August. A spa in Colorado runs eleven months of the year. A spa in Coral Gables or Pinecrest gets used for a handful of weeks around the turn of the year and then sits heating water to 102 degrees in ninety-degree air for the rest of it. A great many are switched off after the second summer and never switched on again.

The climate takes the cabinet apart. Salt in the air near the bay and the beaches goes after every fastener, hinge and clip. Ultraviolet exposure chalks the acrylic and makes the synthetic cabinet panels brittle. Wooden skirting in a screened enclosure absorbs moisture and softens. And a tub left full and unchlorinated through a wet season becomes a mosquito problem the neighbors will mention before you do.

By the time most people call, the shell is intact but the cabinet crumbles when you touch it. That is fine. It comes out either way, at the same price.

What the crew actually does

A hot tub is not lifted out whole in most Miami back gardens. It is dismantled where it stands.

• Drain. You will want it empty before the day. A garden hose on the drain valve will do it overnight; a submersible pump does it in under an hour. A full spa holds several hundred gallons and cannot be moved with water in it.
• Disconnect. The electrical supply must be isolated at the breaker and disconnected by whoever is qualified to do it. Gas, where fitted, likewise. This is the one part of the job that is not ours to improvise.
• Strip. Cabinet panels, cover, steps, cover lifter and equipment pack come off first.
• Cut down. The acrylic and foam shell is cut into sections sized to clear the route out.
• Carry and load. Out through the gate, the screen door or a removed screen panel, down the side of the house, onto the truck.

Budget half a day. It is loud, and it is best done in the morning here for reasons anyone who has worked in a Miami back garden after noon will confirm.

The access questions Miami adds

Three things worth checking before booking, because they change the plan rather than the price.

The screen enclosure. Most spas out here sit under a screened cage on a pool deck. Cut-down sections come out through a removed screen panel or the enclosure door. Tell us which, and whether the panel can be taken out and re-fitted — plenty of homeowners have a screen contractor coming anyway.

The side gate. On the typical single-story Kendall, Westchester or Miami Springs lot, the route is the side yard between the house and the fence. Measure it. If the gate is narrower than the AC condenser pad beside it, the sections get cut smaller. That is a note, not an extra charge.

Rooftop and terrace spas. In Brickell, Edgewater and along Collins, a spa on a private terrace is a different job: everything goes through a service elevator on a booked window, and the association will want a certificate of insurance naming it before anyone starts. Start that conversation with the management office before you book the date.

Prices for spa and outdoor items

Most people clear the deck in the same visit. A spa at $322 with a patio table at $89 and a corroded propane grill at $71 is $322 + $89 + $71 = $482.

If a concrete pad is coming up too, that is masonry debris at $219 per quarter truck, and the pad usually needs a separate contractor to break it before we carry it.

Doing it before the season, not after

A hot tub is not going to blow away. What it does in a storm is fill with rain and debris, and what its cover does is become a large flat object in high wind unless it is strapped.

The practical argument for clearing a dead spa in the spring rather than the autumn is the queue. After a storm, every crew in the metro is on debris for weeks and every municipal bulky program is backed up behind vegetation. A job you could have booked into an open Tuesday in April becomes a job you are chasing in October.

The same logic applies to the rest of the deck. If the spa is going, the sun-wrecked lounge chairs and the rusted grill should go with it.

What you are left with

An empty pad and a disconnected electrical whip. We take the tub, the cover, the steps, the cover lifter and the cabinet panels. We do not touch wiring beyond what has already been isolated, and we do not break concrete.

Most people either have the pad broken out later, or leave it and put a table on it. Either way the deck is usable again the same afternoon, and in this climate a deck you can actually use for eight months of the year is worth more than a spa you use for three weeks.

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