Hi Dirk thanks for the reply but the controller should last more than 13 months certainly. I'm not going to buy anything form SunPlay anymore and suggest others do the same. The intelliPH controller costs $304.00 from my locally owned pool equipment dealer so it's worth the extra $50 to buy it from them. Shame on SunPlay for misleading customers.
Just to be clear when I called Pentair they said it's tied to buying it from a brick and mortar store versus over the internet... Has nothing to do with the installation to get the year warranty as far as the tech support operator stated.
As far as I recall the manual mentions nothing about requiring professional installation. It's plug and play no wire splicing or anything like that required as long as you have a Pentair controller and IntelliChlor.
Well, it certainly is a bit grey. Not sure Pentair tech support always knows all their own details, I've run into that before. And as I said, I couldn't actually find any documentation about the IpH warranty (duration or installation caveats). Just a general sentence that (paraphrasing) most Pentair equipment requires professional installation to extend the warranty past 60 days.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending Pentair's product: the unit certainly should have lasted more than 13 months, nor SunPlay's lack of clear warranty information. But I'm not sure I'd call that misleading, nor declare it "boycott worthy." Whether your warranty was actually 60 days or 1 year, your unit still failed out of warranty. And from Pentair's/Sunplay's point of view, the IpH does, in fact, require wiring and is not "plug and play." Pentair/Sunplay would have no way of knowing that you had an IntelliChlor previously installed, which must be hardwired to a controller and/or power source. The IpH cannot be installed without that PowerCenter/IC combo, or an ET/IC combo with built-in transformer. It's not a stand-alone plug'n'play unit. Unless you find documentation that a unit can be "customer installed" without voiding the warranty, like you can find for the replacement cell for an IC for example, then you shouldn't make your own definitions and assumptions about that.
You're disgruntled because you didn't get a good value out of the unit, and I agree, you didn't, but you can't really blame that on the warranty situation. It is what it is, and you assuming it was other than that, sorry to say, is kinda on you.
I don't mean to beat up on you over a lousy situation, but more to warn others to make sure they know what they're getting, in both product features and warranty, before they buy. I'm still steaming over the ET I was sold. It was not what I later found out I needed. But I never researched it properly, trusting in the dealer instead. That's kinda on
me. That said... 300 bucks for that controller really stinks, but that is Pentair's business model, also worth knowing up front. Their gear is all proprietary, and very expensive for both startup and replacement parts. Once they got you, they got you.
I'm very interested myself in running an IpH without the controller, because cold water brings down both my IpH and my IC. With the alternative suggested, at least I could continue to use the IpH in the winter, so thanks for that info everyone.