Looks Like My Intellicenter and Main Filter Pump Took a Hit In a Storm

[KevMo]

We had a fast moving storm come through the Houston area this (Wednesday) evening. There were high winds and lots of lightning. When the storm had passed I went to survey the damage. We have some heavy limbs down, some furniture around the pool tumped over, and some random debris. Then I went to check the pool equipment. There was a branch laying across the equipment but did not seem to do any physical damage. The electronics are a different story.

The Intellienter control panel (i8PS) appears to be dead. The display does not work. I cannot connect to it with the app, and no programs run when I power cycle the panel. My Intellicenter load panel is fed by a subpanel right next to it. The aubpanel has a whole house style surge protector and it did not trip. I have another whole house surge protector on my main house panel that feeds the subpanel and it did not trip. I tried recycling the power to the Intellicenter load panel with no change in results.

I have 3 IntelliFlo3 (011075) pumps. One is my main filter pump and the other two are for my waterfall. I can connect to all three using the Pentair Home app's Bluetooth support. I can control the two waterfalls pumps with programmed speed settings and they respond properly. The filter pump, however, does not run. The app shows it is running. The green light comes on when I press Run in the app and turns red when I press Stop, but the pump never starts. I cannot start it manually via the control buttons either.

I will be calling Pentiar tech support as soon as they open Thursday, but wanted to see if anybody here had any ideas.

 

[BDY]

A few weeks ago in Houston we had a lightning strike a street over from us. I lost the control board on my generator (ironic..), and several network electronics in the house. I have two whole house surge protectors and neither tripped. The electrician repairing the generator said the surge probably came through the grounding rod on the gen and the data line to the house and got to the network equipment through the data cables. The whole house surge protectors only protect against surges from the power lines. A long way of saying Just because they didn’t trip didn’t mean you didn’t have a power surge. It was an expensive lesson for me and now I have data cable surge protectors on the side incoming data line.

 

[KevMo]

@BDY
Thank you for your response. I have a surge protector on my data lines between the hose and the equpment panels. I agree with you that the equipment was likely not damaged by a power surge through the power utility. It is quite possible lighting struck nearby and damaged the equipment. I suspect I will find out the price tag soon enough.The bigger question is what I have to do/spend to avoid it happening again.