New Pump Selection with Solar Panels

[dtarantino]

Before going down a road hours of research, I was hoping someone on here could answer a few questions with regards to selecting a replacement pump (as my current one is on its way out).

I currently have a 1.5hp single speed pump for an inground 18000 gallon pool with 2nd story solar heaters. The solar heaters are also pretty far from the pool so it is a long pip run over to them and therefore quite a bit of head.

The questions I have are
1) Is it worthwhile looking into a VS or 2 speed pump when I want to be running my solar panels the majority of the time? Or will I need to have the pump turned all the way up to get the required head?

2) Should I be looking at a much larger VS pump (maybe 3hp?) so that I could just run it at a lower speed (reduced power) and therefore reduce my operating costs?

3) Or should I just be replacing it with another higher efficiency single speed 1.5hp pump since I have the solar panels?

Thanks
Dennis

 

[pooldv]

There are two benefits to going with a 2 speed or VS pump. One is you can run it on low or at a low rpm while on standby. I run my 3hp VS pump at 1100 rpm on solar standby and it only uses 150 watts. And then it will also be more efficient at higher rpm, I run mine at 1950 rpm for solar and it only uses 550 watts which is a lot less than a 1.5 hp single speed pump uses. So, a 3hp Intelliflo VS pump will save a lot of electricity for filtering, skimming, making chlorine with the SWG and it will also still save some electricity running solar. And you can set it to the flow you need.

 

[JamesW]

If your controller can adjust the pump speed for solar, then you can set it to low speed and it will only go to higher speed when solar turns on.