In case you haven't read my green pool thread, a little background info. I bought my first house in November of last year, and it came with an inground pool. I had not been looking for one, but I loved the house and thought it would be a nice little bonus. Fast forward to now, and I opened the pool for the first time and got everything up and running. Pool is finally starting to look great after being a swamp, thanks to all the fantastic advice from here.
I decided to test out the heater, and noticed some weird behavior.
First the specs, it is a Hayward H-250, probably about 7-8 years old. I believe it has the millivolt ignition, as it is plumbed in to my breaker box and I never lit a pilot light. My filter is a Pentair Clean and Clear plus 4 cartridge monster, which is a pain in the but to clean, but thats beside the point. I unfortunately don't know any other details about the repair history of the unit, as the previous owners did not leave any documentation. I did find a partially melted electronic igniter unit in the pile of random pool stuff they left, so I am assuming they had replaced it with a new unit, but I have no way of knowing if it even came from this heater. It is plumbed into the natural gas line, and has a switch for pool or spa mode. My pool technically has a spa, but it is a little 2 seat unit that is part of the main pool, and so the spa part of the heater is not hooked up to anything. If I want to heat the spa, I just set the valves so the returns empty into the spa instead of the pool. The pools is an 18x32 vinyl in ground, and the water temp is roughly 50-60 degrees right now. The pressure in my Filter when clean is about 10-15psi depending on what valves I have set where, and right now is about 12-17.
Now for the odd behavior. When I set the switch to Pool, and turn the temperature dial up, it reaches the point where it is supposed to ignite. I hear the gas come on, and I hear the buzzing that I assume is the ignitor sparking. About a second later I hear the whoosh of the gas lighting. So far so good. The problem is, about 1-3 seconds later, the buzzing stops, and the gas shuts off, putting out the flame.
If I turn the dial down and then back up again, it does the same thing, though it ignites faster this time. However, once again, when the buzzing stops the gas turns off. If I do it a few more times, eventually the fire will ignite correctly, with only a split second of buzzing, and the gas will stay on. The heater will then happily burn away my money heating the pool until I shut it off. The longest I have had it on so far was 3 hours, but it seemed to be working perfectly as best I could tell.
I am planning to burn it long enough at the start of this weekend to finally be able to get in my pool for the first time, but I wanted to see if you guys had any idea what could be causing this, and if there are any problems with letting it burn. It will heat the pool if I babysit it till it ignites, but it will not be able to light itself unattended to keep the temp up. Could it just be the coldness of the water/air causing some temp sensor to not think the unit is lit, and it shuts itself off?
Thanks again for the great advice.
btw here is a pic of the pool, so you can see what I am talking about with the "spa"
The water is now bluer and clearer then this pic, but you get the idea.
I decided to test out the heater, and noticed some weird behavior.
First the specs, it is a Hayward H-250, probably about 7-8 years old. I believe it has the millivolt ignition, as it is plumbed in to my breaker box and I never lit a pilot light. My filter is a Pentair Clean and Clear plus 4 cartridge monster, which is a pain in the but to clean, but thats beside the point. I unfortunately don't know any other details about the repair history of the unit, as the previous owners did not leave any documentation. I did find a partially melted electronic igniter unit in the pile of random pool stuff they left, so I am assuming they had replaced it with a new unit, but I have no way of knowing if it even came from this heater. It is plumbed into the natural gas line, and has a switch for pool or spa mode. My pool technically has a spa, but it is a little 2 seat unit that is part of the main pool, and so the spa part of the heater is not hooked up to anything. If I want to heat the spa, I just set the valves so the returns empty into the spa instead of the pool. The pools is an 18x32 vinyl in ground, and the water temp is roughly 50-60 degrees right now. The pressure in my Filter when clean is about 10-15psi depending on what valves I have set where, and right now is about 12-17.
Now for the odd behavior. When I set the switch to Pool, and turn the temperature dial up, it reaches the point where it is supposed to ignite. I hear the gas come on, and I hear the buzzing that I assume is the ignitor sparking. About a second later I hear the whoosh of the gas lighting. So far so good. The problem is, about 1-3 seconds later, the buzzing stops, and the gas shuts off, putting out the flame.
If I turn the dial down and then back up again, it does the same thing, though it ignites faster this time. However, once again, when the buzzing stops the gas turns off. If I do it a few more times, eventually the fire will ignite correctly, with only a split second of buzzing, and the gas will stay on. The heater will then happily burn away my money heating the pool until I shut it off. The longest I have had it on so far was 3 hours, but it seemed to be working perfectly as best I could tell.
I am planning to burn it long enough at the start of this weekend to finally be able to get in my pool for the first time, but I wanted to see if you guys had any idea what could be causing this, and if there are any problems with letting it burn. It will heat the pool if I babysit it till it ignites, but it will not be able to light itself unattended to keep the temp up. Could it just be the coldness of the water/air causing some temp sensor to not think the unit is lit, and it shuts itself off?
Thanks again for the great advice.
btw here is a pic of the pool, so you can see what I am talking about with the "spa"
The water is now bluer and clearer then this pic, but you get the idea.
