Moved into new house - Cannot figure out how to turn on the spa for the life of us

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Kristentar

Kristentar

0
Jun 30, 2016
5
Ny
Hi! We just moved into a new home, and the owner passed away very shortly after the sale. Because of this we were never fully taught how to turn on and work the pool, we figured some stuff out just from lot of trial and error. We can get the skimmers going, and one main pump pushing into the jacuzzi which is built into the pool, underground - but can't get any of the jets going or even the air bubbles at the feet of the jacuzzi. I've only had an above ground pool before, so all of this is new to me.

If anyone one has any insight to this, it would be so helpful. The two pool guys we called in were useless and pretty much kids, no help there. heres some pictures I took of the system. I use uploaded them to imgur for just easier viewing - the album is here. There is also a button on the deck of the spa that when I click seems to do absolutely nothing.

Or here they are in post:
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Thanks in advance, this has been driving me crazy for months.
 

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Ok, I'm no expert on this, especially when we're talking that style of spa.

My eyes go immediately to the two black pumps. One has the pump strainer basket (round clear dome) on it - that's obviously handling the pool. The "OP" line going into that pump is confusing me a little - not sure what that is for. The other two are skimmer and main drain. Got those two.

So the other pump just has a line in and a line out. I suspect this may have something to do with the spa. Either a blower or a supplementary pump. Have you gotten that pump to make any noise, or does it just sit there dead?

Over to your returns (the lines on the other side of the big brown heater box). There is a jandy valve (black valve with the handle) that has a line that is in the off position. I'm wondering what that line does. Meanwhile, the pipe that is "on" continues into a three way split with ball valves. One is off (top), one is partly on, and one is fully on (in line with the pipe). One has got to be for returns, but I'm not sure what the other two are doing.

What kind of features do you have on your pool? Obviously wall returns, is there a water fall, or fountain, or bubblers, etc? What are all of the things that you have where water comes out of them into your pool?
 
Okay let's see how many questions I can answer here.

  • The pipe that says OP is a mystery to us, we could faintly see "open" on it from the last owners, so my dad wrote that on there.
  • The other pump is a Polaris booster pump, which we assume works with the Polaris pool cleaner which was left by the previous owners. Could this pump have anything to do with jets for the spa? I've done some reading and am not seeing that it could be a blower or anything, but I could have missed something.
  • That pump is very loud when we get it on, but we don't see it doing much to be honest.
  • The three way Jandy splitter seems to control if water is going to the jet ports into the pool - we can get them to trickle out very slowly if we have that in the open position and both of the Orange ports below it closed.
  • The two Orange valves control the flow of the main two wall return ports in the pool, the top orange port controls the main port which fills the jacuzzi up with water. We can get that at a decent pressure but nothing to call home about, only if the other Orange valve is closed.
  • What we have is 3 wall returns, one return port that is dead (we assume this is for the Polaris cleaner) and the jacuzzi which overflows into a waterfall into the pool.

Since i posted this I did a lot of reading and found out that we have an air button on the jacuzzi which when pushed activates a Len Gordon air switch control panel. When we click that air switch we hear a click
near the pool equipment to a control panel near our equipment, but nothing seems to happen. I assume this gives power to the jets - possibly a blower or the sort, but we don't see what pump this should be turning on? Perhaps the Polaris pump? We hit a dead end with the button - but it does work fine!

Thanks so so much for trying to help, even the smallest insight is appreciated. I've been doing a lot of research and learned a lot already but not the answer Ineed of course.
 
The OP pipe has to be the suction line from the SPA
The booster pump would have nothing to do with the spa, that is for the cleaner in the pool.

To run the spa you have to get the valve in front of the pump to rotate 180 degrees (that is the suction line) and you likely have to turn the black valve by the heater 90 degrees clock-wise to force all the water to return to the spa (and not the pool, which I assume the red valves near the heater are controlling various returns to the pool, like water features or something).

The "top" orange valve as you call it likely allows you to always have some flow into the spa to keep the chemistry mixed, the water will overflow back into the pool.

I think the air button would flip a relay to turn on a blower that may not exist any more.
 
I appreciate your help! We are going to try it tomorrow morning and I'll update you, fingers crossed. Perhaps the air button's blower broke and was never replaced? It's possible, as they left a lot of their stuff in the snow without a care as they had deep pockets.

Thanks again, will update!
 

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