Hi all-
Last month I replaced an old single-speed pump, ancient Aqua-Rite (pre-2006) and Compool CP3800 with a Hayward OmniLogic, new SWG cell, and an Ecostar VS. The cell and pump do exactly what you'd expect, but the OmniLogic has some pros and cons. Here's my review so far. I'm assuming you have the 1.40 interface firmware. If you don't, upgrade -- 1.40 is much better than older versions.
Programming:
Programming the OmniLogic is relatively painless. There's a series of menus that you can go through to add equipment and configure everything. For a single-equipment system (like mine), you configure the pump and heater for each body of water and add other "features" associated with each body of water. You can also add "backyard" features like lights that aren't associated with any body of water.
The variable speed pump control is flexible enough but a bit confused. If you have an EcoStar VS (the best-supported pump with full percentage control), you get to define a minimum and maximum RPM (unclear what those do -- shouldn't the controller just ask the pump?), a minimum and maximum user-settable percentage (affects the custom pump controls), and a "low", "medium", and "high" speed. You can do these separately for the pool and spa. You can also set a minimum pump speed for the heater -- if the heater turns on, the pump will speed up to that speed if needed and, when the heater turns off, the pump will slow back down.
The heater control is missing a feature, though -- you can tell the OmniLogic to keep the pump on for five minutes after the heater turns off, but you can't tell the pump to stay at full heater speed for a few seconds after the heater turns off. I want the latter to prevent a jet of too-hot water in the spa when the heater cycles off.
The integration between the pump and the chlorinator is bad. The built-in chlorinator is tied to a flow switch, and the OmniLogic will complain at you if you have insufficient flow when the chlorinator wants to turn on. This makes sense, but there should be a minimum pump speed for the chlorinator, and it should not complain if the flow switch doesn't trigger when the pump is below the specified minimum speed to operate the chlorinator.
Using the OmniLogic also seems to disable the standard EcoStar VS feature that will run at high speed until it detects that it's primed.
Scheduling:
You can set multiple scheduled on times for basically everything. When scheduling a pump, you can set the speed. Some of it is glitchy, though. For example, when scheduling the chlorinator, it asks you to set a percentage even if you're using ORP control, which is probably a bug. If you actually enable this, the UI gets very confused.
General use:
Honestly, just using the OmniLogic is a step down from the ancient CP3800. With the CP3800, if I or a guest wanted to use the spa, we'd push the "spa" button and it would light up. Then we'd set the spa temperature setpoint, which was always displayed. That was all. When we were done, we'd push the spa button again. If we wanted jets, we'd push the jet button.
With the OmniLogic, to get to the spa mode controls, you look at the left side of the display, which pointlessly cycles between "pool" and "spa". (This is a single-equipment set up -- it's either in pool mode, spa mode, or neither. Trying to show both is silly.) If it shows "pool" and you want "spa", then you swipe. Where do you swipe? Somewhere on the left side of the screen. Which way do you swipe? Unclear. Does it do a nice swipey animation like any modern phone to make it clear what's happening? No. Once it shows "spa", you tap the temperature. (How do you know to do that? Trial and error.) This gives a display where you can activate the pump (but you have to choose a speed -- why should my guests have to do that?) and optionally turn on the jets (and chlorinator, etc.)
When you're done with the spa, you can either guess what settings to change to put everything back, or you can press the "power" icon, push "features off", and check the check box. (You can also screw up by pressing the "power" button and turning the whole system off. That shouldn't be allowed unless you're doing it from the main control box.)
The upshot is that it takes way more taps to do anything that the number of button presses needed on the CP3800. This is too bad.
You can try to configure "favorites" and "themes" to help out. It's unclear to me that this is useful.
Service mode:
Service mode is basically useless. It takes too many presses and too much searching to enable it. Once it's enabled, the UI is nonsensical. You can directly control the "filter pump" or the "filter pump". One is the pool filter pump and one is the spa filter pump. Unfortunately, the display doesn't distinguish them at all, nor is it clear what it even means to control them separately. Trying to drain or fill the spa is even worse. On the CP3800, there were buttons for everything you'd likely want to do.
Mobile/web control:
This is kind of neat. Unfortunately it's unclear how the mobile UI works, it's incredibly buggy (the set of controllable options is flat-out wrong -- I'm currently on hold w/ Hayward to see if they can figure out why), and it has ludicrous options like "Power Off: System shut down". If you do that while you're on vacation, you have a problem.
The web UI is better, but it still makes things too complicated. There's also a bit of confusion between "Pool", "Spa" and "Backyard". Backyard appears to be a selection under "Pool" or "Spa", but, once you choose it, the "Pool" and "Spa" toggle goes away. There should be a choice of "Pool", "Spa" or "Backyard" -- they're all disjoint sets of settings.
Also, there's no API as far as I can tell. iAqualink offers an API, and that would be a really nice feature.
Finally, a word of advice: don't even bother buying the wireless network link. Either hardwire it for real (like I did), get your own wifi bridge (way cheaper) or use Ethernet over powerline (also way cheaper).
That's all. I'll try to keep this updated.
Last month I replaced an old single-speed pump, ancient Aqua-Rite (pre-2006) and Compool CP3800 with a Hayward OmniLogic, new SWG cell, and an Ecostar VS. The cell and pump do exactly what you'd expect, but the OmniLogic has some pros and cons. Here's my review so far. I'm assuming you have the 1.40 interface firmware. If you don't, upgrade -- 1.40 is much better than older versions.
Programming:
Programming the OmniLogic is relatively painless. There's a series of menus that you can go through to add equipment and configure everything. For a single-equipment system (like mine), you configure the pump and heater for each body of water and add other "features" associated with each body of water. You can also add "backyard" features like lights that aren't associated with any body of water.
The variable speed pump control is flexible enough but a bit confused. If you have an EcoStar VS (the best-supported pump with full percentage control), you get to define a minimum and maximum RPM (unclear what those do -- shouldn't the controller just ask the pump?), a minimum and maximum user-settable percentage (affects the custom pump controls), and a "low", "medium", and "high" speed. You can do these separately for the pool and spa. You can also set a minimum pump speed for the heater -- if the heater turns on, the pump will speed up to that speed if needed and, when the heater turns off, the pump will slow back down.
The heater control is missing a feature, though -- you can tell the OmniLogic to keep the pump on for five minutes after the heater turns off, but you can't tell the pump to stay at full heater speed for a few seconds after the heater turns off. I want the latter to prevent a jet of too-hot water in the spa when the heater cycles off.
The integration between the pump and the chlorinator is bad. The built-in chlorinator is tied to a flow switch, and the OmniLogic will complain at you if you have insufficient flow when the chlorinator wants to turn on. This makes sense, but there should be a minimum pump speed for the chlorinator, and it should not complain if the flow switch doesn't trigger when the pump is below the specified minimum speed to operate the chlorinator.
Using the OmniLogic also seems to disable the standard EcoStar VS feature that will run at high speed until it detects that it's primed.
Scheduling:
You can set multiple scheduled on times for basically everything. When scheduling a pump, you can set the speed. Some of it is glitchy, though. For example, when scheduling the chlorinator, it asks you to set a percentage even if you're using ORP control, which is probably a bug. If you actually enable this, the UI gets very confused.
General use:
Honestly, just using the OmniLogic is a step down from the ancient CP3800. With the CP3800, if I or a guest wanted to use the spa, we'd push the "spa" button and it would light up. Then we'd set the spa temperature setpoint, which was always displayed. That was all. When we were done, we'd push the spa button again. If we wanted jets, we'd push the jet button.
With the OmniLogic, to get to the spa mode controls, you look at the left side of the display, which pointlessly cycles between "pool" and "spa". (This is a single-equipment set up -- it's either in pool mode, spa mode, or neither. Trying to show both is silly.) If it shows "pool" and you want "spa", then you swipe. Where do you swipe? Somewhere on the left side of the screen. Which way do you swipe? Unclear. Does it do a nice swipey animation like any modern phone to make it clear what's happening? No. Once it shows "spa", you tap the temperature. (How do you know to do that? Trial and error.) This gives a display where you can activate the pump (but you have to choose a speed -- why should my guests have to do that?) and optionally turn on the jets (and chlorinator, etc.)
When you're done with the spa, you can either guess what settings to change to put everything back, or you can press the "power" icon, push "features off", and check the check box. (You can also screw up by pressing the "power" button and turning the whole system off. That shouldn't be allowed unless you're doing it from the main control box.)
The upshot is that it takes way more taps to do anything that the number of button presses needed on the CP3800. This is too bad.
You can try to configure "favorites" and "themes" to help out. It's unclear to me that this is useful.
Service mode:
Service mode is basically useless. It takes too many presses and too much searching to enable it. Once it's enabled, the UI is nonsensical. You can directly control the "filter pump" or the "filter pump". One is the pool filter pump and one is the spa filter pump. Unfortunately, the display doesn't distinguish them at all, nor is it clear what it even means to control them separately. Trying to drain or fill the spa is even worse. On the CP3800, there were buttons for everything you'd likely want to do.
Mobile/web control:
This is kind of neat. Unfortunately it's unclear how the mobile UI works, it's incredibly buggy (the set of controllable options is flat-out wrong -- I'm currently on hold w/ Hayward to see if they can figure out why), and it has ludicrous options like "Power Off: System shut down". If you do that while you're on vacation, you have a problem.
The web UI is better, but it still makes things too complicated. There's also a bit of confusion between "Pool", "Spa" and "Backyard". Backyard appears to be a selection under "Pool" or "Spa", but, once you choose it, the "Pool" and "Spa" toggle goes away. There should be a choice of "Pool", "Spa" or "Backyard" -- they're all disjoint sets of settings.
Also, there's no API as far as I can tell. iAqualink offers an API, and that would be a really nice feature.
Finally, a word of advice: don't even bother buying the wireless network link. Either hardwire it for real (like I did), get your own wifi bridge (way cheaper) or use Ethernet over powerline (also way cheaper).
That's all. I'll try to keep this updated.
