Intellitouch install

[Lershac]

Hi every body, Lershac for the red stick thread here...

I am setting my equipment and need some input and hopefully guidance.

So I have 2 intelliflo pumps vs3050s one to drive the. Spa jets and one for circulation and filtration and heating.
I have one pentair 400k btu heater, and one pentair heat pump w/cool option.

I have 1 pool and 1 spa led lights from pentair.

The pentair load center and intellitouch housing has 8 breaker slots. It is situated within 10 wiring feet of all equipment.

Now the questions....

Wire each pump to its own 2 pole breaker? From reading the manual, the pumps stay energized at all times an are controlled via the communications cable I connect to the intellitouch controller? Correct?

If so this will free up all my relays?

More questions to come but I want to take em a couple at a time.

Thanks!

 

[JasonLion]

Yes yes and yes.

 

[Lershac]

Jason, THANK YOU!

The lights... I just pick a couple of relays and wire em to those, with those relays being fed by the same breaker? 120v LEDs. The color changers.

 

[bk406]

Jason, THANK YOU!

The lights... I just pick a couple of relays and wire em to those, with those relays being fed by the same breaker? 120v LEDs. The color changers.

Yep. Run the hot wire from the breaker to the line side of each relay (use a pigtail to power both relays) and run the black wire from each light to the load side of each relay. White wires goe to neutral bus, green to ground bus.

I know you didnt ask, but I run my box transformer off it's own breaker. Some people power the box off the pump, but i wired it up at 120V and used a separate breaker. That way, if I turned to power off to the pump i can still use my other relays. To save breaker space, i used a a mini breaker set, one to run the box, the other to power my convenience outlet. That way i only use one breaker slot instead of two. You can pull the intellichlor and the heater power off the pool pump feed. They only use a couple amps a piece wired up at 220 VAC.

 

[Lershac]

Yeah I was eyeing the fact that I have 8 breaker slots. I can't seem to find the mini (single slot) double poles locally, so my breaker box is full already! 2 pumps is 4 slots, heat pump is two slots and a couple of 20 amp single poles for lights and swg, full! Thinking about the backplane setup inside the box, I don't see how single slot double poles are even possible! I know I have a simple to medium simple setup so what do folks with complicated setups or more pumps do?

 

[Lershac]

Has anyone had any experience with Pentair Intellitouch and dual heaters? Heat pump and gas? How does it work in practice?

How does it choose the heater to use? Can I override the choice? Say if it chooses the heat pump but I want to heat faster can I switch it to the gas heater?

Also how does it handle cooling?

I understand the heat pump connects to the solar input and there is a flag in the software to tell it its a heat pump and not solar, and so the control just switches it ON when the water gets out of specified range or I change the range... does all the programming happen in the heat pump then? I will need to set heat and cool parameters in the heat pump?

Just a lil confused and wanting some clarification and help.

Thanks!

 

[chem geek]

I can tell you how it works with solar vs. gas as that is what I have in my system and you can presume that it works the same with a heat pump vs. gas. The gas heater is set up to a high temperature on the gas heater itself since it's on/off control will come from the IntelliTouch which has its own temperature input instead. The same is true for the solar using the temperature difference between the solar panels and the water temperature. For a heat pump, the ambient air temperature is used as the cutoff for when the heat pump is used. In the IntelliTouch, the "Heater" is the gas heater while the "Solar" is the heat pump (under Menu - Setup - Equipment - Solar you set "Solar is a Heat Pump" to Yes -- the name "Solar" probably changes to "Heat Pump").

Then in the "Heat" menu you have two setting options, one for "Hi-Temp Mode" and another for "Lo-Temp Mode" (in your system this would be called "Spa Mode" and "Pool Mode"). This is normally designated for Spa for the high temperature and for the Pool for low temperature, but in my case since I don't have a spa I set the Hi-Temp Mode to Solar and the Lo-Temp Mode to Heater (i.e. gas) so that I could have a program for each (one called "Pool" and the other called "Gas") so I could manually turn on the gas when I wanted to do that. In your situation, you would likely use the classic settings Hi/Spa and Low/Pool so would not be able to manually select your heat source from the main menu, but would need to go into the Heat menu to set the type of heat you want to use.

For each of these two modes, in the "Heat" menu you can set the heating mode to Solar Only, Solar Pref. or Heater. In your case, solar is a heat pump so your options are to use only the heat pump, to use the heat pump if it can heat (otherwise use the gas heater), or use only the gas heater. For solar, the ability to use solar is determined by temperature in the panels relative to the water temperature in the piping near the pump. According to the Pentair IntelliTouch manual, the heat pump will run until the ambient air temperature is approximately 50ºF at which point the heat pump will switch off and the (gas) heater will switch on and take over. This air temperature threshold is not adjustable.

One thing you cannot do is to set both heater types on at the same time -- so you can't have solar and gas heater at the same time nor heat pump and gas heater. There are times when I wanted faster heating where I wanted both on at the same time until some temperature and then the solar only after that point. That isn't possible with IntelliTouch (though you can manually do this at the main control panel in service mode).

 

[Lershac]

Chem Geek... thanks!

Any idea how it works for when I want to cool?

 

[chem geek]

In the Setup for Equipment, you can set the heat pump for heating, cooling, or both. I'm not sure, however, if that only works with the Pentair UltraTemp heat pump since it uses the COM port for communication (similar to connection to the IntelliFlo pump). See p. 72 of the manual I linked to in my post. I suspect that with a standard heat pump, you only get a single on/off switch-type control out of IntelliTouch. Since you have a Pentair heat pump, you should be OK if it has an RS-485 cable connection (see p. 112 of the manual).

 

[Lershac]

Yeah but when you use dual heaters you don't use the serial connection for the heat pump, you use the spade (on off) connectors

 

[chem geek]

Oh, so for the 520403 Dual Heater Kit, its instruction manual says that the kit will disable use of any solar heating controls, but that shouldn't be a problem. As for the connection to the heat pump when a gas heater is present, the manuals are confusing since on p. 74 of the main manual under "Setting up a heat pump and gas heater" it implies that the heat pump is connected normally (i.e. via the COM data lines). There is no mention of requiring the Dual Heater Kit and that kit sounds like a simple relay switch between two heaters and is connected as you described via an on/off relay switch, not COM data lines. The Dual Heater Kit instructions say that "this enables pool/spa temperature control by alternate use of gas heaters and heat pumps." You should probably call Pentair to get clarification.

 

[Lershac]

Which manual is that? None of mine are that long! I would love a detailed manual

 

[chem geek]

It's the IntelliTouch Pool and Spa Systems User Guide I linked to in my earlier post. They actually have two on their automation manuals list. The second manual that appears to be the same except for some minor copyright and trademark symbols (and somewhat different cover page) is this one.

 

[Lershac]

I see, I think I got two install manuals, and no operations and users guide... printing that sucker out now. I was dreading figuring out the programming... this looks ok for that!

I havent called pentair yet but I plan to

 

[Lershac]

Gah. Pentair tech support closed on Saturday! Dangit.