New Pool Heater Controller (RS336). No longer able to turn on spa heat. Pool heat works

[russhull]

Hello all,
I have an aqualink controller and a raypak 336 pool heater.
I had to replace the control board on the raypak and that went well. From the raypak, I can turn on the spa heat on or the pool heat on without issue.

From the aqualink controller I can turn on the pool heat, but not the spa heat when in spa mode.

It seems I am missing the ability to toggle from pool heat to spa heat via the aqualink.

Any idea?
thanks
-russ

 

[russhull]

update: When I say that I cannot turn on the spa heat, I mean the temperature setting of the spa heat.

If I turn on the spa heat, it uses the pool heat setting (85) vs the spa setting (99).

Still the issue is that it does not toggle between spa/pool mode correctly with the new motherboard.

 

[cmc0619]

I have that same 3-wire system working with my pool controller minus the aqualink. It sounds like it didn't get wired back properly. The 3 wire system uses a Blue common wire from the P8 header that sends 24V AC out from the RayPak motherboard, and depending on which wire is connected to the common via a dry relay depends on which heat it selects. The Pool/Spa selector wires are black/orange and orange/black. These wires aren't installed by default, I had a baggie with the P8 header sitting in the heater. Try connecting blue to black/orange and blue to orange/black by hand and see if the heater flips between spa and pool? Then you know it's just something in your Aqualink not wired correctly and not an issue with the Raypak and you can go from there. They have a really good wiring guide in the manual that I'd use as a reference if you haven't seen it already.

 

[russhull]

Bingo. You are correct.

My orange/black wire is not connected to anything coming out of the acqlink, just sitting there waiting for a wirenut to something.

Now to figure out which wire to connect it to

Thankyou

 

[russhull]

I assume this could go in with the orange/black wire?

 

[cmc0619]

Looks like there's only two wires there. Again, shooting blind here as I have no aqualink and don't know the options for them. The way some of these systems work is the controller, Aqualink in your case, has it's own thermometer. In those cases you max out the heater temp (or as high as you'd ever want it to go), and hook the aqualink to the firemans switch and forgo the P8 connectors all together. You pick Pool heat in Aqualink and the Aqualink handles the shutting off of heat to the pool, pick spa heat in aqualink and it handles shutting off heat at a Spa temp setting. Is there a place to pick your pool/spa heat thresholds in Aqualink? If so, that's probably what's going on. The 2/3-way connectors are to let the heater itself control when it turns itself on and of.

 

[russhull]

after testing, you are 100% correct.
The acqulink assumes that the raypak only has 1 mode and thus does not distinguish between raypak-pool and raypak-spa mode.
Changing raypak-pool mode to 100 degrees and letting the aqualink do its job.

Thank you again
-russ

 

[cmc0619]

One more thing I just remembered. I know it's done and working now. You probably don't want to futz with it. But there's a potential downside to leaving it running in remote control mode on the Raypak... Manual override is a huge pain in the butt. You have to hold the correct button sequence to get it back to that REM off state to make changes to the set temp point. I, personally, could never remember what the sequence was and with the age of my Raypak (my new 406A will be here in a week! Yay!), the buttons weren't always that responsive and it can take forever to get it out of that mode. You may want to consider ditching the P8 connector all together and just using the fireman switch. That way the heater isn't in remote control mode and it's stupid simple to adjust the temp from the heater control panel should you ever need to do so. On the flip side... if you've got kids or it's a rental then the obscurity of getting it out of that mode could be a bonus. Just some food for thought. Glad you got it working!