Automation - Intellicenter Price Quotes

[wogster]

Understandably, most folks are interested in the easiest most cost effective solution to their pool automation. The current state of the art, however leaves much to be desired, particularly if you're some kind of science or technology buff and are more aware than your average consumer. I believe that is where the DIY home automation industry comes in, where several highly developed open source software projects have complete integrations with numerous pool automation controllers, including Pentair's Easytouch, Intellicenter, etc. Autelis comes to mind.

In any case, the pH sensor I'm sure is fine with the Pentair system. It's the ORP sensor that is a crude approximation of chlorine level - I personally would not jump for a system that automates dosing using an ORP sensor and I feel that I'm not alone, particularly in regard to the very knowledgeable group of pool experts on this forum. That being said, I'm totally unaware of ANY automatic chlorine dosing system that uses an actual free chlorine sensor.

One sensor I've been looking at for some time is the Chemtrol PPM sensor suite (measures PPM of free chlorine directly using amperometric sensing): CHEMTROL CHLORINE SENSOR - PPM Sensor. A system would have to be designed to use this sensor instead of an ORP, but the sensor cost is still rather high (although cost has come down considerably). One very positive aspect of this PPM sensor however is that it's almost maintenance free, which is amazing.

In the end, I'm still dumping liquid chlorine in myself when needed.

Edit: I just read through the brochure for the Chemtrol 265 PPM/pH Digital Controller and it looks like this is the thing you would want to have for your own pool. It's a digital controller that allows setpoint control for both pH and chlorine adjustment. You would need to provide the sanitizer and acid/base feed tanks, along with the chemical pumps, but the controller will do the work for you. It's not cheap, at around $3000, but this would be the way to do it, for sure.

ORP is miles from where we really want to be..... SPAs are the biggest pain, in this regard, because getting a low TA is deceptively easy to do, turn the jets on for 20 minutes. The pH probe will see a rising pH and feed acid to keep it in range, which causes your TA to drop. TA will inversely affect ORP, as the TA drops the ORP goes up. They calculate the FC based on ORP and pH, so now we have a high ORP and a correct pH, and your FC now reads very high, but isn't. I've seen in a Bromine pool where the automation calculates a value of 20, and on a drop test (FAS/DPD) it tests at 2.0 because the alkalinity is 40 instead of 100. What I do, is a test each day, if anything is off, I will turn off the automation and fix it manually, then when the numbers are all correct, re-calibrate the automation and turn it back on. People who think they can turn on the automation, and let their pool go all summer without testing, will likely end up with a nice green monster.