Unknown Fiber Optic Rope Lighting

They may be Fiberstars FiberOptic Inground Pool Light. Fiberstars has changed company names and are now called SrSmith.

I've got a similar situation to you. House built in 2004, I bought it last summer. Fiber Optic rope lighting under the coving - but that's it. No box, motor, color wheel. It must have stopped working at some point and it was taken out. All that is left is an outlet that I think they added because there already was power run to that spot in the yard. The only reason I know it is fiber optic in the first place is because of the label on the circuit breaker!

I've been trying to track down some LED rope lights that might be able to be used to retrofit. Hopefully, the weather cooperates this weekend and I can get in the pool and take some measurements of the channel and the total length of the roping. My rough guess is that I have a little over 100 feet.

Does anyone else have any experience using LED lights under the coving? I've been looking for IP68. Would IP67 be ok for under the coving?

JennAZ said:

We bought our house at an auction last year. The pool was installed when the home was built in 2004. I am pretty sure all pool equipment is original. There is a fiber optic rope along the rim of our fiberglass pool that has never worked. We have been trying to find out what kind of system it is but I cannot seem to find out. I even google image searched the color wheel to see if I could figure out the brand name and it didn't work. I am sure there is a part missing or something because the color wheel was just sitting in the box with everything but we have no idea how this system is supposed to look to even begin with. Does anyone have any ideas?

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I have this system. When I bought the house only the rope lights worked but there are also fountains with lights. The fountain lights didn't work, the tower for the fountain had been bastardized for parts to make the rope light work. There was a pool guy who came to fix a broken backwater valve and he told me that it would never work again!

That's the wrong thing to say to me!

I pulled both towers over the winter and went to work finding the parts. I was careful to cover the terminations of fiber optic materials over the winter while the towers were being worked on in my shop.

Inside of the tower there is a transformer, a capacitor, and a starter along with a high intensity halide bulb and a synchronous motor and color wheel, two switches and a cooling fan. The only parts I cannot locate are the motor and the color wheel. They do pop up on eBay every so often.

I replaced the bulb, readily available. The transformer, which had overheated and shorted out and the capacitor was dead. I tracked the transformer using numbers on the side of the one which was still working. The capacitor and bulb came from Granger.

I thoroughly cleaned both of the units of bugs and accumulated debris and and then disassembled them completely taking photos of wiring and placement of the parts. Then I reassembled the units with the new parts. I then set the units up for bench testing and was quite pleased that each unit operated as intended.

That was 2015. Now, 7 years on, both units work perfectly and as you can see from the attached photos, it looks pretty darned good. Cost for materials was less than $200 plus my labor and knowledge of working on electric fixtures. It was much less costly than converting to LED's, which although I am sure they are pretty and Eco Friendly, I'm happy to know how to keep these units functioning and operating.

I have thought of advertising a Repair and Return for these fixtures as there are plenty of them out there, some working and some not. I hope this has been helpful for you!