EasyTouch with gas heater and heat pump

[wireman805]

Hello, I’m a licensed electrical contractor (we mainly do solar and service upgrades) and just installed a significantly oversized solar system at my mom’s house to help her heat her in ground pool and spa combo at a lower cost than what she’s paying now in natural gas.

She has a sta-rite natural gas heater with manual valves to heat/control either the pool or spa. It’s costing her $400 a month in natural gas, so my approach was to plan the install of a heat pump as well to serve as the primary heater and only fire the gas heater to keep the spa temp up, realizing that the heat pump won’t be able to keep pace. I planned to do this by plumbing the heat pump in-line with the gas heater.

In researching this, it looks like an EasyTouch control system will make using her pool and spa much easier. The manual shows that the solar heater control can be changed to heat pump control, and I could put the pool and spa into solar preferred mode. This would make sense since both heaters just need a contact closure to run.

I wanted to see if anyone else is using that application and to confirm that it works using a heat pump instead of a solar heating system with the EasyTouch automation system. The solar preferred logic hopefully still works so the heat pump is primary?

Thank you!

 

[Rocket J Squirrel]

Do you intend to have three heat sources: gas heater, thermal solar panels, and heat pump? I don't think the ET can handle all 3 simultaneously. I infer from the manual that you can use gas plus either solar or heat pump, and that involves manually changing a setting on the ET. Also, according to the manual, the location of the solar temperature sensor is different for a HP than it is for panels, which means you'd need to switch between 2 sensors when switching between solar and HP.