If you’ve had a bear tear through your hot tub cover, you’re not alone. It’s one of the most common reasons mountain hot tub owners end up calling us for a replacement cover, sometimes more than once.

Foam and vinyl covers are an easy target. The vinyl skin is thin, the foam underneath is soft, and a bear can claw or bite through both in minutes. Once a bear gets curious about the smell or warmth coming off your tub, a standard cover has nothing to stop it. Most owners find their cover shredded, punctured, or dragged off entirely, often after just one encounter.

Smartop is built differently. Instead of a foam and vinyl sandwich, Smartop uses a rigid, hard-shell deck reinforced with a ribbed panel design and aluminum support channels. There’s no soft top layer for a bear to claw open, and the shell is rated to hold up to 800 to 1,000 pounds, so it doesn’t give way under the kind of pressure a bear puts on it. Add in the steel cable lock system with a combination padlock, and you’ve got a physical barrier that’s a lot harder for wildlife to defeat than a zipper or a strap.

No cover can promise a bear will never bother it. But a hard-shell Smartop gives a bear nothing to grab onto and nothing to tear through, which is more than we can say for the foam cover it’s replacing.

**If bears have already gotten to your cover, you don’t have to just replace it with another one that will fail the same way.** [Get your Smartop quote](#smartop-inquiry-form) and stop the cycle.