Avoid the 5 Biggest Rip-offs in the Cold Plunge Industry
- Thomas P Seager, PhD
- Oct 29
- 8 min read
Updated: 13 hours ago
Real warranties don't deceive.
Summary
In the last six years since Morozko sold the first commercially-available ice bath that makes its own ice, a proliferation of new cold plunge equipment retailers have entered the growing market -- and their claims are increasingly outrageous.
Before you buy a cold plunge, you must learn the five biggest rip-off techniques that unscrupulous vendors in the industry use to trick you into buying their products.
The rapid growth of the industry has attracted bad acters, rewarded deceptive marketing practices, and exploitative business models, giving the entire industry a bad reputation.
To help consumers sort through the more expensive brands, Morozko prepared an extensive report documenting warranty and refund/return policies in the industry. The results were surprising.
To motivate increased transparency, better business practices, inform consumer choices, and discourage irresponsible claims, Morozko will partner with scientists, medical professionals, customer advocates, and other cold plunge and ice bath manufacturers to own and maintain the Warranty Report, hold an annual cold plunge research conference, and to guide and present the latest cold plunge research.
Rapid Growth in the Cold Plunge Industry
Morozko sold its first ice bath in January 2019. The buyer was functional bodybuilder Jerame Mudick, who had already trained with Wim Hof, and wanted a Morozko Forge so he could practice every day in his own backyard in Arizona.
Jerame has since turned his passion for cold plunge therapy into an expanding wellness business in Mesa AZ called Re|Connect.
Jerame chose well to integrate cold plunge into his wellness model. According to Google Trends, searches for "cold plunge" have grown by more than fifty times in the last six years. Searches for "ice bath" have about tripled, as Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, Mike Mutzel, and other celebrities have been documenting their experiences with their Morozko.
By 2023, it seemed a new cold plunge company was entering the market every day. Most of them advertised on social media that they had just invented the ultimate, revolutionary, innovative, breakthrough cold-plunge-to-end-all-cold-plunges machine, despite the fact that they were all buying the same chiller and attaching to the same plastic tub, bath tub, or inflatable toy tub. None of them were reputable, and it seemed like they were all named something like Polar Monkey Arctic Ice Pod Plunge, or some combination of these. For the most part, they competed against one another on price, in a race to see who could spend the most on advertising outlandish, incredible, unsupported claims.
Morozko ignored them.
Complaints About Cold Plunge Marketing Policies
Recently we've been hearing from more and more customers who bought expensive cold plunges from what they thought were reputable equipment providers, only to find out later that they weren't getting what they expected. To help educate buyers about the deceptive marketing practices, we've compiled a 25-report exposing them and highlighting in particular the exclusions to their warranties that allow some vendors to escape liability.
These are the five biggest rip-offs in the high-end cold plunge industry:
1. Deceptive Warranty Exclusions. Some companies begin the warranty period when you place your order, even though they don't deliver your purchase for several weeks -- effectively trimming the warranty period without allowing the customer to enjoy the benefit of the product! Another company shows their cold plunge in an attractive, outdoor winter setting, forgetting to mention that installation of the cold plunge outdoors will void the warranty. In other words, their product is not designed for the conditions in which they're advertising it for use. Almost all companies (not Morozko) exclude labor costs from their warranty liability, which means they might mail a customer a replacement for a defective part, but require the customer to find a plumber or electrician to install it at the customer's expense.
2. All-in-One Chillers. The cheapest way to build a cold plunge is to combine the chilling and the sanitation in a single system that uses just one pump. The problem is that a failure in the filter system, like a dirty filter, will also cause a failure of the chiller system. Without the water flowing thru the heat exchanger, especially when on the lowest temperature setting, ice will form in the heat exchanger and rupture the system.
3. Violations of Thermodynamics. Sometimes you'll see an ad or an influencer that brags that their cold plunge will go down to 28F, which is four degrees below freezing. While it's technically achievable in concentrated salt water, because salt lowers the freezing point of water, those companies do not warranty their products for addition of salt! Other companies will brag about the size of their 2HP chillers, without point out that they're not talking about the power rating of the chiller motor -- they talking about the idealized rate of heat extraction from the water. Chillers should be rated in units of heat flow, not horsepower (like automobile engines), but technically because the units of heat flow can be converted to horsepower, unscrupulous Chinese chiller companies exaggerate the size of their motors by reporting them in units that make them sound more powerful.
4. Alibaba rebrands. The most popular cold plunge companies in the United States source their "brand" from the same Chinese manufacturer, ambohr.com. You've probably seen ads for these cold plunges from US-based companies with different logos. What they don't tell you is that Ambohr has five warehouses throughout the United States and sells the exact same plunge a lower price on their own website. But Ambohr will also put any logo any customer wants on their equipment and allow other businesses to resell it as their own brand, as long as they agree to never undercut Ambohr's price. The cheapest way to get a new cold plunge is to go to Alibaba and do a search there. The search results will be a pleasant surprise, but the products will be disappointing shortly after they arrive.
5. Limited Time Offer Rip-offs. The biggest cold plunge company in the US right now is Plunge, so maybe it's no accident that they've been targeted by lawyers recruiting customers who fell for a "limited-time discount" that was in fact, available to everyone all the time. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulates these types of sales, and prohibits companies from advertising discounts as temporary, when in fact they are offered every day. In other words, when a company uses "limited time" offers all the time, they're breaking the FTC regulations. Plunge is not the only offender, they're just the largest.
Bad Business Practices
These bad business practices were news to us. Since we sold the first ice bath in 2019, Morozko has backed our ice baths with a 30-day unconditional, ecstatic guarantee that promises a 100% refund of your purchase price if for any reason a customer regrets their purchase. Our warranty is longer and more comprehensive than any other in the business, and for our business customers we offer a 72-hr on-site service guarantee.
Moreover, we eschew the extended warranty rip-offs that often cost consumers hundreds of dollars, but they are administered by third-party insurance companies that place extensive paperwork burdens on those consumers seeking to make a claim, discouraging people from taking advantage of the protection they purchased. Morozko backs our warranty without any intermediary third party interference.
When we discovered that our Warranty & Return Policy was so out of step with industry practices that we began to wonder if maybe we were doing something wrong. After all, we've spent more than a million dollars the last five years travelling to customer sites to fix, upgrade, repair, and investigate warranty claims, performance complaints, and understand how to improve Morozko. We figured that offering a robust warranty was the best way to encourage conversations with customers that would make Morozko better.
For example:
In the winter of 2020-2021, more than a dozen units installed in cold climates outdoors experienced catastrophic failure of their pumps during cold weather, when the filtration was turned off and the pumps froze solid. We replaced the damaged pumps and learned to install heat wrap that heats the pump in cold weather, so that now we know our water systems will perform well at -10F for up to ten straight hours.
We experienced dozens of weathered lids that proved our wood finishes could not withstand direct sun and rain over extended periods of time. We replaced those lids, tested new materials and finishes, and instructed our customers to shelter their Morozko from direct sun and precipitation.
A series of supply chain disruptions resulted in poor quality freezer components that sometimes wore out too quickly, and other times failed altogether. We replaced those components at our customer sites, redesigned our system to make it more robust and efficient, and changed our suppliers.
At every turn, we sought to enlist our customers as partners in improvement of the product and service, and even after five years we felt like we still had a lot of room for further improvements.
However, the complaints we were getting about our competitors, and the posts that frustrated cold plunge consumers were putting up on Reddit caused us to look more closely at our competitors' warranty policies, Terms of Service, and refund/return policies.
What we discovered shocked us.
The deceptive marketing, neglectful customer service, and in some cases, outright lies that currently plague the high-end cold plunge equipment marketplace are giving the entire industry a bad reputation.
Cold Plunge Research Institute
We compiled an extensive report documenting the abuses in the high-end cold plunge industry. You can download the full Cold Plunge Equipment Warranty Report.pdf (Seager 2025) to read it all for yourself, including screenshots that show the discrepancies, inconsistencies, and exploitative policies and practices that currently dominate the industry.
And then we took another step.
Instead of publishing the report under the auspices of Morozko Forge, LLC it became clear that we needed an objective, 3rd-party non-profit entity that would be separate from Morozko and supported backed by Universities, medical professionals, customers, and honest cold plunge equipment manufacturers to serve as an objective guide for otherwise confused consumers. So we founded the Cold Plunge Research Institute (CPRI) as a non-profit 501c3 and decided that this new institute would own and maintain the report.
CPRI has invited Desert Plunge (Phoenix AZ) and Ice Works Bath Co (Toronto ONT), as well as scientists, doctors, and practitioners from around the world to serve on a founding Board of Directors. It will host an annual Cold Plunge Research Conference that will publish and present new knowledge related to cold plunge and ice bath experiences without becoming a trade show, an advertisement, or a circus of ego-centric self promoters.
The conference will be 20-21 June 2026 in Phoenix AZ. Although the hottest city in N. America on the longest days of the year might not be an attractive prospect to many, the conference will succeed financially if only a couple hundred people decide to come. It will feature scientists who present the results of clinical trials, medical professionals who present treatment protocols and patient case studies, small business panels that discuss what works (and doesn't) in the burgeoning business of cold plunge and thermal contrast spas, and it will be open to the public so they can have direct access to the best new knowledge related to cold plunge therapy.
The conference will help sort through the cacophony of social media claims so that consumers can hear directly from the sources that possess real expertise. It will provide a forum for people to share their own protocols, practices, and success stories so that others might replicate them with confidence that what worked for someone else in their condition might work for them, too.
In our view, by sharing these results and publishing more, the CPRI conference may be the best way to institute some order in an otherwise chaotic, unpredictable, and increasingly irresponsible industry that nevertheless has the potential to help millions of people restore the natural, healthful condition they would likely choose for themselves if they were empowered to know how.
References
Seager TP. 2025. Analysis of Warranty & Return Policies in the Cold Plunge Equipment Industry's High-end Segment. Cold Plunge Research Institute (CPRI) Working Paper 2025-6-19
About the Author
Thomas P Seager, PhD is an Associate Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. Seager co-founded the Morozko Forge ice bath company and is an expert in the use of ice baths for building metabolic and psychological resilience.