We did not make these. We choose them, and we will tell you which one suits your garden even when the answer costs us the sale. Judged on what they cost to own rather than what they cost to buy, and introduced gradually.
It is called an ice bath and the manual tells you not to put ice in it: bags of ice block the internal pipes. It chills the water itself, and on the defrost setting freezes its own ice against the tank wall. You set a temperature and it holds it.
Our range is introduced in stages. We list a product only once terms are agreed with the people who make it.
How we chooseCold plunges are hard to compare, because the figures everyone publishes are the ones that are easy to publish.
Temperature is the number every maker prints, and the one that separates products least. Almost everything here reaches three degrees. What differs is what it takes to stay there: on a still October morning, and again in a heatwave, with the cover off while somebody decides whether they are getting in. That is a compressor working against the air around it, and it appears on no specification sheet.
The rest are quieter. Whether the shell still looks like itself after five British winters. Whether the pump is a part or the whole unit. Whether nine hundred kilograms of water can reach the spot you have in mind. Whether the warranty starts when the tub arrives or when the invoice was raised.
None of it is specialist knowledge. It is the set of questions somebody has to ask before the answers matter. We did not make these and we do not own a factory, which is what makes asking them straightforward. Every plunge goes through the same three.
The same three, in the same order. Most things fail at the second.
What it is made of, how the cold is made, what it draws, and which component needs attention first. If we cannot explain how something works without reading the brochure back to you, we do not understand it well enough to sell it.
Against a wet British garden rather than a Nordic summer. A figure measured in a warm room, or quoted as a peak, says little about February. Most products stop here, and usually not because they are bad. It is because nobody measured the thing that matters.
Warranty terms in writing, parts held in this country, a repair route that does not begin with a shipping container, and access agreed before dispatch rather than discovered on the day. Nothing reaches this page until somebody is on the hook for year five.
None of them is how cold it goes.
Which figures predict how a plunge performs in a British garden, and which are there to fill a table.
02 Whether your space worksSeven questions on access, ground and load. It will tell you plainly when a plunge is the wrong answer.
03 The Tarnfell PrinciplesFive commitments governing what we list, what we write and who we work with. Public, so you can hold us to them.
04 Delivery, warranty and returnsWhat happens after the money changes hands, written down before it does.
The buying guides as they are written, the comparisons once there is something to compare, and the reasoning whenever a plunge passes the gates or fails them. Occasional, and worth the room in an inbox.
