I know, you are thinking, “Big deal, water drains out of
your bathtub.” But did you know that the
drain time is one of the biggest complaints about our competitor’s framed walk-in
tubs? Some framed tubs take as long as
twenty minutes to drain. Imagine
yourself cold, wet, and naked for twenty minutes waiting to be able to open the
door and get out! The complaints grew so
loud, that most of our competitors were forced to add an extra pump to their
framed walk-in tubs to literally pump the water out of the framed walk-in tub.
Now, you should be asking yourself, why would anyone add a
pump to a bathtub to get the water out?
Have you ever heard of a bathtub, which is intended to be filled and
drained daily, that drains so poorly that it requires a pump to evacuate the
water?
When your original bathtub was installed, the plumber
installed the drain pipes underneath it to match up perfectly with your drain
height, allowing for a perfect air-water mixture. This is what causes the little whirlpool
above your drain while the water is flowing out, and your tub drains quickly
and efficiently.
A framed walk-in tub has at least a 6 inch high step
in. This means that the floor of the tub
sits six inches in the air, suspended on a frame, with nothing underneath
it. When our competitors install their
framed walk-in tubs, they are raising your drain height by six inches without
changing any of the original plumbing underneath it. This design causes your air water mixture at
the drain to be slow and inefficient.
I am sure you can picture pouring a bottle of Coke into a
glass. If you hold the bottle at a 45
degree angle, the soda pours out smoothly into your glass. Now imagine flipping the Coke Bottle 180
degrees upside down and it goes, “Glug, Glug, Glug.” It pours out very slowly. This is what happens with framed walk-in tubs
because of the raised drain height and this is why they need to add a pump
where gravity used to do the trick. Not so with the Senior Safe Frameless Walk-in Tub. Our frameless design puts the drain at the
exact same height as your original bathtub, allowing gravity only to give us
the fastest drain time in the industry with no extra moving parts, no extra
electricity.
Why is this so important?
For several reasons:
- The pumps or “minute valves” on framed walk-in tubs have a high failure rate. If it fails when you are in the tub, which if you think about it, is the only time you will notice it has failed, you need to figure out how to bypass the pump in order to drain the water and get out safely. If you had trouble getting in and out of your 17” bathtub, good luck climbing over the side of a 36” to 40” high Framed Walk-in Tub. Again, a major safety issue.
- If the pump needs to be replaced, in most cases, the tub will need to be removed from the opening, the pump replaced, and then the framed walk-in tub reinstalled. This is a couple of days of work, at your expense, to replace a part that should have never been there in the first place if the walk-in tub was just designed to drain properly.
- In a lot of municipalities, pumping water out of a bathtub is a code violation. Please check your local ordinances before you allow a pump to be installed.
- All of this is a non-issue with the Senior Safe Walk-in Tub. Our Frameless Walk-in Tub was designed to drain the way that bathtubs have drained for thousands of years, using gravity, which is free, and quite frankly, far more effective. The Senior Safe Walk-in Tub drains naturally in about two minutes.
- Do not settle for a walk-in tub that is engineered so poorly, that you actually need to pump the water out of it.
The Senior Safe Frameless Walk-in Tub… It Just Works!
