Low Voltage Landscape Lighting powered by Pentair IntelliTouch

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goposey28

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Mar 24, 2018
3
Rocklin CA
I have an unused power relay in my Pentair IntelliTouch panel and I want to wire my landscape lighting transformer into this relay so I can control the lights from my pool remote. I know the line pole of the relay needs to be powered by a circuit breaker but I am unsure what wire/wires from the transformer need to be connected to the load pole of the relay. Obviously the ground wire just needs to be grounded but what about the other two wires. I am planning on just cutting off the male plug from the transformer to expose the wires.
 
gp,

Welcome to TFP.. A great place to find the answers to all your 'Let there be light" questions... :shark:

The cable coming out of your landscape transformer/controller should have three wires... a green ground, a white neutral and a black hot wire... Inside the IntelliTouch you would connect the green ground to the ground bus with all the other green and copper wires.. The white Neutral goes to the Neutral bus with all the other white wires. The black wire goes to the output or Load side of your unused relay. The only thing you need to do next is find where you plan to get the 120 volts that will power the landscape lights. I would run a jumper from the Line (Input) side of one of your pool light relays to the Line side of your unused relay. Closing the unused relay will then apply 120 volts to the landscape transformer and Wa-La.. you have light..

Thanks for posting,

Jim R.
 
gp,

Thanks for the feedback...

My only other advice is... if you don't already have ScreenLogic2, get it ASAP... It will make using your IntelliTouch about 10 x easier and you can control everything from your PC, Phone, or Tablet.

Thanks,

Jim R.
 
Are any of those landscape lights near the pool, within 5 ft? If so, then I believe the latest NEC pool code requires that they be on GFCI breaker. If you don't want to buy a GFCI breaker (although, in reality, they're not that expensive), you can power the relay using the load side of the courtesy outlet in the panel as that should be a GFCI outlet.

No one's going to come and inspect your work, but best to follow code whenever you can....
 
Matt,

The reason that I told him to jumper the input voltage from the line side of one of his Pool Lights, is that I was "assuming" that this would already be a GFCI protected circuit...

But, you know what assuming can do to ya...

Jim R.
 
Understood Jim!

Just making sure that the power is being pulled from a protected circuit. Wouldn’t want some poor squirrel getting electrocuted to death when it chews on the light wiring...
 
goposey28 said:
Do you know if it would be possible to wire a photocell into the panel so the lights turn on when it gets dark?
Click to expand...

If you have a knock-out in the panel you can use a standard 120VAC photocell wired between the relay load side and primary side of the stepdown transformer. That way you can schedule the relay to turn on, say, from 5pm to midnight and just let the photocell cut in the power as needed. Or you run the schedule from 5pm to 8am if you want dusk-til-dawn operation.
 
goposey28 said:
Do you know if it would be possible to wire a photocell into the panel so the lights turn on when it gets dark?
Click to expand...


gp,

Does your landscape lighting transformer/power pack have a built-in photo cell? If so you can use it... just set the ET to come on at noon and turn off at whatever time you want the lights to go off..

I suspect you could add some type of external photo cell, but I am not really familiar with them..

Thanks,

Jim R.
 

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I’m planning on doing this in the spring also... I want to wire all my 12v landscape lights to an intellitiuch isn’t the output 12v? I thought I would be able to use the timer on the intwlitouch to control the lights... so what the purpose of connecting a landscape transformer to it then?? Just to get 110v?
 
The Pentair relays switch standard 120V AC so you need the landscape transformer to step-down the voltage to 12VAC. So you wire the primary side of the landscape transformer to the load side of the Pentair relay. If you want photocell control (dusk-dawn operation), then you’ll need to wire a 120 VAC photocell in between the hot wire running from the load side of the relay to the primary side of the transformer.
 
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