yep, brushing every day, but quickly....I can just feel the heat leaving the pool when water is heated to 65-70 and air temp according to pump is in the 50's or lower....and in fact, in early evening, I can sometimes see what appears to be water evaporating into the air.

OK, it's been about 3 months since we installed intellichem and I thought I'd post an update and some new suggestions for those setting one up:

We're running the ph mgmt with ph set to 7.6, low sensitivity, and a maximum of 4 ounces muriatic acid injected every 45 minutes. The main benefit to the ph management seems to be that it lets me know when I screw something up (e.g. forget that adding cya drops ph....thank goodness for those alerts...has saved me on a few occasions). Also, for a new pool that needs constant acid injections, this is a huge time saver (no having to worry about dumping acid into pool or brushing floor after acid in). Plus I can get a 2 month record/graph of ph via screenlogic and see trends. That said, our pool needs much less acid now and I suspect that in a few months, the only real need for acid will be to counteract swg ph increasing due to chlorine. The ph reading has been relatively accurate, and usually doesn't disagree by more than 0.1 from the tf test kit.

ORP has been another story. It is extremely fragile. The more you run the SWG, the more depressed ORP readings get. Weather, sunlight, and water temperature greatly impact orp readings. That said, I think I may finally have it configured and mostly working properly so that it ensures the pool is keeping a FC of 3.5-5.0 even on hot days and when pool cover is opened.

My best suggestions for setting up the ORP is to not use the default config which just runs the SWG at 100% until ORP level is reached. Odds are you can get a major negative feedback loop in that case. It also is just incorrect if your ORP setpoint is for pool when it is covered. You do not want SWG running 6hrs straight at 100% if you open up the pool for most of the day as opening up cover automatically drops ORP readings between 50-150 pts.

So, what needs to be done is a) get a larger swg than you think...I have an ic60 for 24K gallon pool. b) manually configure intellichem to use dose by time value (a time setting of 18 minutes swg on followed by 20 minutes swg off cycle works for me in keeping the SWG running until FC reaches correct point, while not depressing ORP values due to over running, or causing FC to go too high when cover is opened for an extended period). c) despite the warnings that pentair gives you, cya is needed and a value around 35 seems to give the best results. If the system seems to be running the swg more than needed, double check that nothing has been eating your cya....this confused me for quite awhile (cya had disapeared from pool).

Most days, the pattern is that SWG does not run until the pool cover is opened (as FC is stable in covered pool)...than while swimming the SWG begins to run and keeps running for 3-4hrs after swimming is done and pool is re-covered. On a particular hot day, SWG may need to run for an hour or two in the afternoon. But in general, SWG is dormant in morning and may not run at all on some days, but goes on when it should and keeps running until FC is brought to right value (it can tend to overshoot, but by limiting the runtime that isn't as much of a problem now).

So, I think the intellichem can meet its general selling value of controlling ph/swg and providing excellent/data reporting via screenlogic, but it certainly isn't plug and play and can take a long time to find the sweet spot config. It certainly provides some extra protection against messing up the pool by accidently impacting ph (it caught when the plastering company came out while I was from the house to fix some tiny defects in the pebble sheen, they put some acid on those spots..tech left, but when I got home I saw an alert on the main intellichem panel and that ph was 0.5 less than it should be..might not have caught that for another 24-48hrs without the intellichem).

One still needs to take regular manual readings of FC to verify the orp readings are correct, but I'm hoping this will only be a few times/week rather than daily. It would also be nice if pentair supported allowing a ph setpoint of 7.7. Right now, 7.6 is the max.

My greatest concern is the acid canister and piping...a leak in those can really pay havoc and potientially damage other pool equipment nearby. My pool builder cut a pipe in half to form an aquaduct to catch any acid that might break free from the main unit and redirect it away from the main pool pump/etc. I'm still nervous about anticipating having to change the canister, acid pump, and tubing every few years. This seems quite a hassle. When our pool ph stabilizes a bit more, I'll probably begin to use diluted acid to make the equipment last longer.