Pentair IC60 and Easytouch8-SWG cycling on/off

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xyz

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Sep 8, 2016
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Escondido/CA
I'm hoping someone here is familiar with Pentair troubleshooting.

So similar to a recent poster, my pool guy has been dumping tons of chlorine into my SWG pool. The unit (IC40) was ~5 yrs old, and not making FC, so I figured it didn't owe me anything. I wish he would have told me.

So I replaced it with a new IC60. I also added an IntelliPH (if I can automate I can get rid of pool guy altogether thanks to TFP!).

Now, the SWG restarts or stays in startup mode pretty much all the time. Starts up for about 2 min, then is green/green for about a minute, and then shuts off, goes blank for a second or two (no lights at all) then restarts for 2 min, and repeats this cycle, etc.

I poked around the block diagram in the manual, and it seems the IC60 is driven and powered by the:

Pentair 520723 Intellichlor Printed Circuit Board Assembly.

So I ordered a new one.


I definitely feel like I'm doing this by Braille without enough diagnostic info.

The Easytouch diagnostics say the intllichlor is ok and that the salt is at 3300.

Another possibly unrelated symptom is that the screenlogic intellichlor values have gone

from...

Pool: 7%
Spa: 0%

to...

Pool: 7%
Spa: 127%

That is not a typo. (I -may- have swapped pool and spa, but the 127 is accurate. This happened 3 times. I thought it was a startup anomaly, so I didn't think much of it). Now i wish I had taken a screen shot. I was able to reset these values and they seem to remain correct now.

When I had the intelliph in line with the IC60, and checked the intelliph history, it showed it had achieved about 120 successful doses and slightly more failed, and it won't dose if the cell is not green/green, so im assuming this is somewhat intermittent, or. It took a while to finally fail completely. I disconnected it, but am thinking about reconnecting it to gather more info.

So im assuming a questionable power supply, since I -believe- (but am not sure, there are power transistors and a heat sink on it) that the board mentioned above creates the IC60 power.

So, any thoughts, insight, advice, or troubleshooting options?
 
OK, so I replaced the circuit board. Other than the LED being brighter, this did not resolve the problem. It seem others have had this problem, but no one ever published the resolution.

Help! ;-)

Any ideas on what my next troubleshooting steps will be?

I put a voltmeter on the red and black lines, and measured a pretty steady 17.7v. Every once in a while, it would drop to 16.9 for an almost unnoticeable amount of time. But this does not coincide with the unwanted restart, and I didn't notice any appreciable voltage change before, during, or after the restart.

What could this be? Could it be a software glitch that is sending a restart command?

It seems all there is to it is an RS485 connection an power. Or am I wrong about this?

Signed, at wits end.
 
OK, so I have learned more.

It appears that the only thing going to the IC60 is power and RS485.

Power appears to check out good, so I'm at even more of a loss.

More interesting symptoms thought.

When I run it up to 100%, it works. It does the 2 min startup dance, goes full green, and then just stays on. And seems to be OK.

This is not useful to me, but interesting.

I also learned there is a new revision [same part number -I think-] that Pentair just released last month that has 2,4,6,8% numbers on it for when you dial down the percentage to single digits. Supposed to have a few improvements beyond just this too.

I put the old IC40 back in. It works perfectly [except that it doesn't make chlorine any longer!].

So I dialed it back to 31%, and one restart it seemed OK, the next restart, it went south and exhibited the random restart issue. Seemed to take 20 more seconds to get there though.

So I dialed it up to 51%. That seemed to be OK through multiple restarts, except for one time.

Then I dialed it to 16% and it worked OK for a while, but eventually did a ramdom restart.

Could it be that I have 2 bad units? Is this possible?

I see that 4 other people have had these same symptoms, but no one has responded to those threads, and they never published the resolution.

If I ever get this fixed, I promise to put the resolution here. ;-)
 
Ocgasman said:
What happens if you take the IntellipH out of the system? If you connect the Intellichlor directly to the Easytouch, do you get the random restarts? Any correlation with going into spa mode?
Click to expand...

Someone to help! Thanks.

I get the same behavior with or without the intelliPH.

I'm going to try doing some more experiments tonight though. Maybe something might click. Pentair seems to be stumped. They are leaning toward me getting 2 bad units. I find that hard to believe; but not impossible.

And if I'm right about it just being power and rs485, and the old unit works fine, it must be the new unit. I can't find any evicence that my 4 year old easytouch has won't work with a new IC60. There seems to be plenty of people that have upgraded circa 2012 units with new versions of IC60s.

Keep the questions and thoughts coming! I'm at wits end. Tough problem.
 
xyz,

Does your IC60 have a cable that screws into a plug on the bottom of the EasyTouch? I can't remember if your IC60 was too far away or not.. are you using some type of extender cable?

Do you have ScreenLogic2? If so, I'd try turning it off and see if that has any effect..

I think your logic is sound.. if the IC40 appears to electrically work, then it does not make sense that the new IC60 will not work, unless it is bad. The only thing I can think of is that the IC60 probably uses more current and maybe the power supply inside the EasyTouch is weak and can't support the new SWG. But.. I see you have checked the output voltage and it was about 18 volts.. I have no idea if that is the correct output or not. Did Pentair tell you want to expect to see?

I'll check mine tomorrow afternoon, as I'm out tomorrow morning.

I suspect the reason you are not getting much help here, is because no one knows the answer and we are waiting on you to figure it out.. :)

Jim R.
 
xyz said:
Someone to help! Thanks.

I get the same behavior with or without the intelliPH.

I'm going to try doing some more experiments tonight though. Maybe something might click. Pentair seems to be stumped. They are leaning toward me getting 2 bad units. I find that hard to believe; but not impossible.

And if I'm right about it just being power and rs485, and the old unit works fine, it must be the new unit. I can't find any evicence that my 4 year old easytouch has won't work with a new IC60. There seems to be plenty of people that have upgraded circa 2012 units with new versions of IC60s.

Keep the questions and thoughts coming! I'm at wits end. Tough problem.
Click to expand...
I installed an IntellipH and for 6 weeks it worked perfectly. Then my Intellichlor started randomly restarting just as you described. At first, it was intermittent and then the Intellichlor starting powering off and on every minute. It was driving me crazy as the IntellipH will not dispense during the 2 minute startup to check salt level. As a last resort, I took the IntellipH out of the system, hooked up the Intellichlor directly to the Intellitouch as it was before the IntellipH was installed, hit reset, and Intellichlor worked perfectly again. Called Pentair and told them about the problem and they thought it was a bad PCBA on the IntellipH. They sent out a new IntellipH PCBA and I changed out the PCBA. All was well for awhile and then the restarts started happening again, but this time it was random. I also noticed it happened when I went into spa mode. During the last time it was restarting, I forced a manual acid dispense on the IntellipH right after a random restart and acid dispensed during a coincidental restart. For some reason, after the manual acid dispense, the Intellichlor stopped restarting. I'm not entirely sure what's going on but my guess is that we both have something wrong with our automation someplace, but I can't figure it out either. If it happens again to me and my workaround doesn't work anymore, I think Pentair will have to come out and troubleshoot my Intellitouch. Good luck and please keep us updated.
 
Jimrahbe said:
xyz,

Does your IC60 have a cable that screws into a plug on the bottom of the EasyTouch? I can't remember if your IC60 was too far away or not.. are you using some type of extender cable?

Do you have ScreenLogic2? If so, I'd try turning it off and see if that has any effect..

I think your logic is sound.. if the IC40 appears to electrically work, then it does not make sense that the new IC60 will not work, unless it is bad. The only thing I can think of is that the IC60 probably uses more current and maybe the power supply inside the EasyTouch is weak and can't support the new SWG. But.. I see you have checked the output voltage and it was about 18 volts.. I have no idea if that is the correct output or not. Did Pentair tell you want to expect to see?

I'll check mine tomorrow afternoon, as I'm out tomorrow morning.

I suspect the reason you are not getting much help here, is because no one knows the answer and we are waiting on you to figure it out.. :)

Jim R.
Click to expand...

Thanks!

i don't have an extender cable. I've -mostly- ruled out power supply issues because when I power it done normally, there is so much PS filtering/energy storage that the unit continues to operate for a few seconds. So I'm assuming any power supply glitch , spike, or dropout would not cause a restart.

Said id another way, when the IC resets itself, it is just about instant, not a slow loss of power and a slow dimming of the LEDs like when it is powered down. It is a blink off completely, and then starting up as if it were just powered on. Seems much like a reboot command or a reset signal is getting sent, vs a power cycle.

Also, what is swaying me away from a PS issue is that I can't get it to fault when set to 100%. It would seem that the most aggressive use of power (100%) would worsen any PS-related issues. Or am I not thinking about this in the right way?

Im not -sure- what you mean by screenlogic2. I -think- the answer is yes. I also -think- I have eliminated this as follows: I unplugged the RF receiver--so that there is no outside connection to the system. Just the Easytouch-intellichlor (I think the pump is also on this 485 bus). Still has the same issue.

But it you just gave me an idea. If I can disconnect the Rs485 from the intellichlor power supply board, and it still faults out, this kind of proves it is the IC unit, right?


Oh, and I appreciate the note about no one helping yet. I did find 3 or 4 others that had very similar symptoms in the past, but none published the resolution.

I have a third third unit coming in tonight to try. But my expectation is that this won't resolve it either.

Again, thanks. Any help here, even if it is an opinion on my thinking (or lack thereof!) is helpful, and I appreciate it.
 
More info.

I ran ran last night without the intelliph, tonight WITH it. The reason is the history function. When the cell is constantly cycling, the intelliph fails the cell, does not dose, and records a dose failure in the history. Since it doses once per hour, this gives me a rough idea of how it is performing. Last night it had 8 dosed, and 12 fails. This am, it had 10 doses, and 12 fails. (it starts at 4am). So at leas during The minute or so it was supposed to be working (on the hour), it was.

When I went out to look at it, it was in the reboot (blinking red green) mode though.

Im crossing my fingers tonight when I get the third new unit.

I don't hold up much hope for that though. So my next step will be to set up my DMM for had and min hold on the power supply. Maybe I'm getting EMI? Maybe a spike? Maybe a short that is momentarily pulling the internal supply to zero?

eh, long shots.
 

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bdavis466 said:
Out of curiosity, what percentages are you and the gasman running on the ICs when this occurs?

I have noticed this exact assumption in my setup but it seems to only happen at very low percentages.
Click to expand...

i have not had the time to really figure out the threshold. However, at 6% it happens almost continuously. And since my back of the envelope says I want to be running at 15-20' I also tried this, and it almost always fails out at this level. At 100%, I have not yet seen it fail. At 51, it fails occasionally and more so at 31%.

In summary, it -seems- to be worse at low percentages, and mild at higher percentages.
 
Brian, interesting observation. I went back to my records and saw that the original restarts were occurring when I was at 17% on the IC. Since that time, I have decreased my pump time and increased my IC to 30%. But at 30%, I still had random restarts, but not for awhile.
 
I found it odd when I first installed the IPH that I had any missed doses and that's what led me into looking for an issue.

I like having the acid pump but not with the intelligent logic Pentair gives it. The pump heads also don't last very long. My first didn't last a year and my second one just now died at 6 months. I'm replacing the entire motor assembly to try out the new style pump head. If that isn't any better, the IPH will find a new home in the trash when the pump quits.
 
bdavis466 said:
I found it odd when I first installed the IPH that I had any missed doses and that's what led me into looking for an issue.

I like having the acid pump but not with the intelligent logic Pentair gives it. The pump heads also don't last very long. My first didn't last a year and my second one just now died at 6 months. I'm replacing the entire motor assembly to try out the new style pump head. If that isn't any better, the IPH will find a new home in the trash when the pump quits.
Click to expand...

Hmm. So now I have 3 people that I -think- have this similar problem, and 3 that -may- have the same problem. Well at least it is not unique. I think I will tell the Pentair guy that is e-mailing me that this is not unique to me.

Also, what other option is there to IPH? I REALLY like the idea of keeping my PH level stable, given that my pool is riddled with calcium deposits after TWO acid wash/refills. I finally realized [thanks to TFP], that with high CH and high PH, well, you get a lot of calcium deposits. Once I get this under control, if I do have a refill, at least it will stay nice.
 
bdavis466 said:
That's exactly what I've experienced but I don't run on the very low percentages all that often

I think I recall the cell resetting as soon as it triggers an acid dose?
Click to expand...

This is not my experience. I'm getting restarts every 2.5 or more minutes. 2.5 when the level is below 15% or so. 2 minutes to restart, ~30 seconds of green/green operation, then off it goes.
 
I'm considering bypassing the controller and hardwiring the IPH to a relay/48v power (i think I recall that being the voltage), powering the relay via the "F" relay and scheduling it to run for X minutes per day to achieve the daily dose I desire. The controller is the weak link in the whole setup.

A Stenner is another option and would operate in a similar fashion to how I described above.
 
xyz,

When I measure between the black and Red wires in the plug on the left side of the picture, I get about 38 Volts DC. Is this where you were getting 18 volts??? Or were you measuring AC volts?

SWG Power Supply PCB.jpg

Jim R.
 

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