I love the Chinese!
My hot tub went down at the beginning of December. I had a power outage and when I tried to re-start it when I got home, I found that it wasn't moving water into the tub during heating. Eventually I disassembled the control unit (after getting GREAT instructions from this nice lady from China) and found out the circulating pump wasn't spinning the impellor. I turned it on, and watched the rotor and nothing was spinning.
Result? I needed a new circulator motor.
The lady from China referred me to a 'US Parts Super Store' What a waste of god damn time that was. They had no replacement parts for what i wanted. From them, my only option was to buy a WHOLE NEW control unit, basically replacing the whole damn hot tub.
I finally got someone from work to unhook the existing pump/heater unit from the control module just before Christmas. (Thanks Tom) I took it to some hot tub dealers here in Saskatoon to find someone that could sell me a replacement circulator pump. They basically treated me like I'd just asked for a plutonium core for a restricted weapon and would sure like it if I left their store as quickly as possible. It was extremely frustrating.
So I went back to my contact at Mspa, back in good ol' China. I explained what I'd been through, and asked if they could sell me one straight from the factory. Only a few hours later she gets back to me, says she'll look into it. Not another hour after that she sends me another email saying that she may have one for me, IN CANADA!
Emailing the woman in China was at least 17x more useful than talking to live people in Saskatchewan. I love the Chinese!!