TFP has always had very good reviews of Pentair warranty claims. I seem to remember someone posting that Pentair covered a failure even when the person was a few days past their warranty (might have even been a few weeks) and they still treated it as a warranty issue. So if Pentair gave you a verbal confirmation on your warranty status, then I’d trust that. They’ve always been a good company to deal with and their technical support is helpful.
Good to know. Thanks for the reassurance. Very much appreciated by this pool newbie.
I’m always very skeptical when anyone says, “I got you a deal....blah, blah, blah.” Mainly because it goes against human nature where most people are lazy, self-centered, and out to make the fastest buck they can....but, when people actually demonstrate that they care and are conscientious, then they go into my contact list of vendors I’ll only exclusively deal with.
I can attest that my dealings directly with Pentair have been very good so far. They were very supportive about the warranty, even at the expense of contradicting one of their own dealers (I had originally called to confirm my warranty when pool-guy-snake #1 threatened to have my system warranty cancelled as part of his tactic to get me to cave on my demands he fix the plaster damage his acid washing caused. Craziness story for another day.) And the tech support guys I've spoken with a few times seem to be knowledgable, and very helpful and patient (and maybe even in the USA!). The light was fixed under warranty. No squabbles.
My main complaint about Pentair is their tech. I was expecting more for the price I paid. The programming and feature set of my EasyTouch PSL4 seems woefully inadequate for the price. It's a big, empty metal box with a tiny little circuit board inside. No breakers. No panel. Six bills plus installation. I had to have a separate breaker box installed, and a separate transformer box for the SWG. Kind'a a mess at my pad. I think that was mostly snake #1 again, and what I was sold, but Pentair's upgraded solutions go crazy in price. And then to find out my programming capabilities are ridiculously impaired, very disappointing. I still have to take that up with Pentair, but at first pass at this I think I can only program four events? What if I want my pool to circulate four times a day? Maybe at different speeds? Plus ramp up my VS for a quick skim a few extra times a day, plus lights and the vacuum cycle? And egg timers are counted in the four? It all seems a mess to me so far. That's a discussion for another day, but my cursory answer with a tech is that "Nope, you need the 8 for that." I'll get into that in another thread some day soon, so no need to chime in on that yet, but I've been led to think I have a very barebones controller and I'm disappointed in what I got for what I paid. What's most disappointing, is that the hardware is there. The VS, the actuators. Just not the capability. How much more do I have to pay to get them to do what they are capable of?
And the 5G. Another sad example. All the LEDs are there to achieve virtually millions of colors, in a free flowing, cascading beautiful show, that should be instantly selectable, and infinitely variable, with fast, easy, unlimited user control. But for six bills, plus installation, you get squat. A half dozen preset colors, and a half dozen scenes of questionable affect, that clunk from one color to the next. Oh, you can switch between them all, from your phone no less, but that'll cost you another, what, three or four bills. And I couldn't believe the user interface when I first tried it: select new color or scene, light goes out, click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click goes the controller, swimmers ponder their fate, or perhaps the meaning of life, for some extended period of time, new scene finally comes back on to restore their faith in humanity! Oops, don't like that scene? Start over! OMG, seriously? I'm picturing Pentair's industrial design department: two guys scratching their heads equipped with a soldering iron, a yellow pad of paper, two stubby pencils and one of those IBM computers in the background, with the spinning tapes and punch cards falling out onto the floor?!?
OK, harsh, maybe, but I can buy a phone, the size of a deck of cards, for a couple hundred bucks, that has over 2 billion transistors in it that can access man's entire collective knowledge base (including TFP!!) in the middle of nowhere. But Pentair can't manage to offer some electronics that feel more advanced than a set of $12 end table lamp timers? Too picky?
Don't even get me started on their app offerings. Too late! The Mac app, the iPhone app, the iPad app, all a joke. Very poor cohesive interface between the three (they all look different, and all have a different set of capabilities), and their user interface/navigation design is just awful. I mean
really bad. And seemingly unchanged for years? I design interfaces for a living, so I'm hyper sensitive to it, but still. And nowhere in forums I've pinged about it does anyone complain. Just the opposite. Everybody seems to love this stuff. So it's just me.
I don't get it. Have these automation capabilities in the pool equipment industry been so neglected that these way-too-late-to-the-party anemic offerings now seem like godsends to most pool owners? That's my suspicion. But the disconnect for me is why the pool-owning public doesn't cry out for better advancements, especially considering they are all exposed to appliances and devices that put Pentair equipment to shame. Geez, I can buy a refrigerator that can order my groceries, from a giant built-in full color touch screen!! But I can't get my LED pool light to switch colors faster than 30 seconds at a time? Oops, sorry, only six colors available!
OK, end of rant, today I gotta go sweep my pool and check my chem's! I'll fix Pentair tomorrow...
By the way, I don't expect anyone to actually keep up with me here, or read all this drivel. I just like to listen to myself babble on!!