IP44 is not enough in a spa: where the indoors ends and the water begins

Specifications and site

An indoor fitting placed where there is steam does not fail on day one: it corrodes for months and gives up when the hotel is full. The rating is decided in design, not on site.

Two digits, not one

The IP code carries two digits and almost everybody looks only at the second. The first says how much solid matter gets in — dust, sand, insects, hair. The second says how much liquid gets in, and in a hotel those are two problems arriving from two different directions: dust from the works and from cleaning, water from the daily use of the people sleeping there. Treating them as one problem means buying a fitting that solves the wrong one.

In a lobby the first digit matters more than the second, because the fitting hangs above the traffic for years and collects everything the air carries: dust settles in the cooling fins, the LED runs a few degrees hotter and the useful life drops without anyone noticing, because the light is still there. In a spa the relationship flips, and the second digit becomes the one that decides whether the fitting reaches its third year. Copying a code from a spec written for another room is the fastest way to get both digits wrong at once.

Steam is not rain, and the tests do not know it

The laboratory tests for the second digit are run with liquid water: falling drops, angled spray, pressurised jets, immersion. Steam does not appear in that list, and this is the technical reason why an IP44 fitting can pass certification and still disappoint in a steam room without anyone having cheated. The code tells the truth about a test that room does not reproduce.

Steam behaves in a way liquid water does not: it gets in where a drop never reaches, crosses gaps through pressure difference, condenses on the cold parts and stays there until the room dries out. An electrical contact wetted once dries and keeps working; a contact in permanent condensation corrodes. The fault is not a sudden failure with a date on it: it is a contact resistance that climbs for months, heats up, and one day lets go. Whoever arrives afterwards finds a dead fitting and no obvious cause.

The zones, and why you cannot judge them by eye

Around a bath, a shower or a pool the standard draws concentric zones, and in each one what may be installed, and at what voltage, changes. This is not a convention among designers: it is the criterion an inspector uses to decide whether the installation may be energised, and it is not open to negotiation. A correct fitting in the wrong zone is still a fitting that has to come out.

The distance is measured as a straight line from the edge of the water, not along the floor and not around obstacles. A fitting that looks far away because there is a partition in between can sit inside the zone if that partition does not reach the ceiling: a zone is a volume, not a plan. It is the mistake seen most often in guest bathrooms, where the shower wall stops at two metres and the suspended ceiling with its downlights runs straight over the top.

Where hotels get it wrong most often

It is always the same five places, and none of them is the pool: everybody looks at the pool, and it is the one spot where the rating always makes it into the spec. The places left uncovered are the ones that look indoor and are not, for eight hours a day:

• the corridor leading to the spa, where the door stays open and the steam walks out with the guests
• the ceiling above the whirlpool bath, which takes hot steam from below without interruption
• the covered terrace: covered does not mean dry, because rain arrives sideways with the wind
• the windowless guest bathroom, where the extraction is almost always undersized
• the breakfast area with hood dishwashers, which release a cloud of steam twice an hour

The rating is lost during installation

A fitting certified IP65 is certified as it was tested: with its own cable gland, its own gasket, its own glass, mounted the right way round and to the torques the manual states. Swapping the gland because the cable that arrived on site is thicker than the one specified voids the test, and nobody writes that down anywhere.

The same goes for holes. A through hole drilled on site for fixing, a gasket reused after opening for maintenance, one extra screw driven into a seat that was never designed for it: each of those is reasonable on site and none of them is compatible with the code. The label stays on the fitting and keeps saying IP65, but it no longer describes that fitting. This is why a high rating has to travel with an installation instruction that the installer actually reads, not merely one that is attached.

The driver is a second fitting

In an LED the fitting is two distinct things: the body you can see and the power supply, which often sits somewhere else — in the suspended ceiling, in a panel, inside a riser. The IP rating of the body says nothing about the driver, and the driver is the part that fails first when the room is humid, because it holds electronics and capacitors that moisture ages.

If the driver is remote, the spec has to say where it sits and with what rating in that spot: an IP20 supply in a riser that takes steam is a failure postponed by a few months. If it is on board, the spec has to say whether it can be replaced without breaking the seal, because a sealed fitting that has to be opened to change the driver is sealed exactly once: at the first service the gasket has already taken the shape of its seat and does not close the way it did.

What to ask the supplier, in writing

There are four questions, and the answers change the price far less than they change the risk. They belong before the order confirmation, while the supplier can still modify the piece instead of remaking it:

• the stated rating holds with which cable gland and with which incoming cable section
• the driver is on board or remote, and at what rating in the place it actually sits
• the gasket is replaceable, and under which part number it is ordered in five years
• the warranty covers corrosion in a humid room, or excludes it as normal wear

The material counts as much as the code

Two fittings with the same IP65 age very differently if one has a painted aluminium housing and the other is stainless steel. In a spa with chlorinated water, or near the sea, the difference already shows in the second year, and it is not a cosmetic problem: the paint lifts at one point, corrosion starts underneath, and from there moisture enters by a route the gasket does not guard.

Glass blown and coloured through the body fears neither steam nor condensation, and that makes it suitable where a painted finish or a film goes cloudy within a few seasons. It is a choice made in design and not afterwards, because changing material once the drawing is closed is not a variation: it is remaking the piece, with the production time that remaking carries.

Cleaning is a load, not a detail

In the wet areas of a hotel cleaning is done with aggressive products and often with pressurised water, because hygiene rules demand it and because it is the quickest way. A fitting that survives the room but not the wash-down is a fitting that fails for the wrong reason, and the warranty almost never covers it.

It is worth writing into the spec alongside the rating: how often it is washed, with which product and at what pressure. A serious supplier answers with a precise recommendation, and that recommendation becomes part of the manual that stays with the hotel. Without it, housekeeping does what it knows how to do, and housekeeping is right.

Temperature, which nobody links to water

A steam room runs between forty and fifty degrees at a hundred per cent humidity; a sauna goes much higher and is dry. They are opposite rooms for liquid and similar rooms for heat, and for an LED heat is the most expensive enemy: a junction running ten degrees above design loses useful life in a way no warranty gives back.

This is why in hot rooms the IP rating alone is not enough to choose: you also need the maximum ambient temperature the maker declares, which appears on catalogues as a small code next to the rest and almost nobody reads. A fitting declared for twenty-five degrees ambient, installed in a room that reaches forty-five, works beautifully on day one and disappoints in year two.

What it costs to decide late

Asking for the right rating while the fitting is still a drawing costs one extra line in the spec and a few days of checking. Asking after the order confirmation costs a production change, which on a bespoke piece means putting an operation back into the queue. Asking once the goods are delivered costs the goods, because a fitting with the wrong rating cannot be upgraded: it is replaced.

And there is a cost that appears in no quotation and outweighs all the others put together: the hotel replacing twelve fittings in the spa in high season, with the area closed for two days and guests who had booked for precisely that. Neither the supplier nor the contractor pays that cost: the operator does.

How we handle it

On bespoke pieces the rating is not an accessory bolted on at the end: it is a constraint that enters the drawing together with the weight, the colour temperature and the way the piece is suspended. It changes the gasket, it changes the glass, it changes where the cable enters the body and it changes how the piece comes apart for service.

This is why in the configurator the IP band is a single choice and not one more box to tick among others: two different ratings on the same piece are two different pieces, and asking for both is not an extra option, it is an ambiguity somebody will have to resolve on the phone — usually on the worst possible day, once production has already started.

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