New build - St George UT

At long last, plaster is scheduled for tomorrow. The valve pictured is a hydrant meter - standard practice around here is to fill from the fire hydrant with a 2-3" firehose - fills the pool in a matter of a few hours. The fire hydrant is on the same culinary water system that feeds the homes around here. PB is on top of the need to protect the plaster from hose fittings and the inrush of water. I should get a good read on the pool volume this way as well.

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Looks great! How did you handle the water from the firehose? I'm planning on doing that, but have wondered how to safely do it since I can't imagine having a firehose blasting new plaster is a good idea.
 
PB used two garden hoses, with ends wrapped with fabric to fill to about 1 ft deep in the deep end. Then once that cushion of water was there, turned the firehose on at a relatively low flow for a few minutes, then let it rip. 17K gallons filled in 2 hours.
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Oh, important - before turning on the firehose, he flushed the hydrant for a few minutes to get any sediment out. The pool filled crystal clear.
 
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Just a photo of the steps and L-shaped bench just outside the spa. Kind of hard to see, but the teal and blue quartz finish is really starting to show after nearly 3 weeks of brushing. Oh, and a Golden Retriever who really really wants to go swimming.694D3F5C-53B7-4020-BCA1-4D78FC702B7F.jpeg
 
I am just as curious as what type of critters you've found in that area? Don't go reaching your hand down into the skimmer opening without checking it first.

edit: However, that is a wonderful view!!!
 
Oh, bunnies, quail, roadrunners, hawks and pack rats. Rare sightings of bobcat, rattle snake and scorpion, but never in our courtyard. Frequent sightings of coyote in the desert, and often hear them celebrating their successful hunt. This year, eagles- both golden and bald.

Here’s a a YouTube of a nocturnal visit, caught on my trail cam just outside our north courtyard.

 
Well, we’ve been up and running for about a month now, and I’m continuing to tweak the system. Water quality looks great and the levels are mostly good. TA still a little high but coming down. After pursuading the PB to install VS pumps, he configured them in manual mode (data cables disconnected, pumps powered from the load side of the relay). I decided to just take matters into my own hands and rewire and reconfigure the pumps, so now have them controlled by EasyTouch. I’ve got the filter pump now running at 2450 rpm for 8 hours a day; the in floor cleaner for 4 hrs, and the iChlor is set for 15% and is holding FC around 6 ppm. As summer heat kicks in I expect to bump that up a little. Might be able to turn filter pump rpm’s down a little more too.

Now that EasyTouch is controlling the pumps, I suppose I can set the filter pump to run even slower when in spa mode, but fast enough to support minimum flow for the heater. Smaller body of water, fewer returns.

Aside from a house sitter messing with the controls and setting the pool temperature to over 100 for a couple days, (groan) all is going well…. I wish EasyTouch had password protection on the settings! The other issue is keeping the Golden Retrievers out of the pool - they love to swim!
 
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Hello, I want to make some minor tweaks to the valve actuators; I’m not finding what I need in Pentair actuator of EasyTouch documentation, and the PB is not available for reasons I don’t want to get into here.

Here’s the situation- PB set the system up so that when in pool mode, a portion of the return is sent to the spa, and the rest to the pool. Thus setting up a spillover, which is great. Suction only comes from the main drain and skimmer in pool mode.

In spa mode, the actuators flip over, and drain comes from spa only, and filtered/heated water only returns to the spa.

So, in normal pool and spa operations, everything is perfect. The complication comes in when the in-floor cleaner runs, in pool mode. Because no water is pulled from the spa drain, the cleaner jets activate in the spa, but dirt/sand remains in the spa, except for whatever is stirred up and spills over into the pool.

I would like to adjust the 3-way actuator which controls the drain to pull maybe 10% of the suction from the spa drain, and the balance from the pool, much like how the return is set up. But before I do so, I would like to understand better how the actuator limits are set up.

Per the Actuator doc the limit pins are only used for manual operation. And there seems to be no setting in EasyTouch to set a bypass or mix setting. Furthermore, it appears that the valve settings in EasyTouch are un programmed, but they are working as expected. I am really scratching my head about that.

In the attached photo the actuators are in pool mode, with return 3-way valve on far left, and suction on far right. On both valves, pool plumbing is on left side of the valve, and spa on the right.

Suggestions/advice welcome.
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Ahh I think I found it. I’ll need to adjust the cams inside the actuator. These cams trip microswitches which then stop the actuator in the desired position. There’s a bunch of YouTube vids describing this.
 
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