Pentair ScreenLogic Alexa Skill GONE

[GDN]

Thanks for all that continue to check on this. I think the part that really doesn't sound good as part of Pentair's story, is the fact that they should have never deleted/removed the old skill until this one was ready and approved. Typically a newer copy would approved and just overlay the old one. Or if they truly needed a new one from the ground up, then once the new one is deployed, you can remove the old one. The state of their IT house is quite the dissarray.

 

[Thomas8879]

For those who reached out to Pentair, can you provide the email addresses or contact details you used? I feel like I'd like to register my dissent and dissatisfaction with Pentair on how this was handled, and it'd be great if I can consolidate this feedback among similar lines as everyone else has already done. Thanks in advance!

 

[Cood]

Glad I found this post, was just trying to get my Alexa skill working again. Thanks to everyone for the heads up that it is coming back. As a fellow IT person, I totally agree this is not how you do change management.

Wish the Pentair protocol had a published standard so I could make my own skill and tie into platforms like SmartThings. Been years since I have looked, but assume there is still no documentation on it?

 

[guinness]

@Cood There's an open port on the Intellicenter that uses the telnet protocol to exchange messages in JSON. There's no documentation, but using the web client you can determine the commands needed to activate circuits and get probe readings. I plan to put some basic code on Github that should give you some pointers on the communications required to create your own skills.

UPDATE: Code was posted to GitHub in the IntelliCenter Gateway repo.

 

[Snedabyte]

I bought this system so the kids and I could control the pool with Alexa. Now it’s summer time when I use pool the most and Pentair decides to remove the skill without any reason or notification. I’ve been waiting since May 10th (see image)for the skill to come back. It worked flawlessly for 4 years and we used it all the time
They must have removed the app because of security issues, a data breach or patent infringement that brought liability to Pentair. Or hired a team that truly really does not know what they are doing along with incompetent software managers that think months of downtime is A ok because they have an excuse.

Why else would anyone want to turn off a feature that customers paid for and they actively advertise on their website unless there was some big problem, or bad under qualified development team that does not even know how to plan a release.
I had always thought Pentair was top of the line, but top of the line companies would NEVER do this, and if they did they would have sent an email prior to removing instead of us trying to figure it out, wasting our time.


Hopefully the manager in charge of this gets no bonus and they saved a lot of money in development of the Alexa service and Mac support that they advertiseat all of our expense.( see images). Nothing worse then a smart device that works sometimes, well except one that stops working for months at a time!!!!!!!!!!

I just hope that what Pentair Alexa users experienced last couple months is not a sign of massive down time ahead and bugs that make the product unusable, or basically more hassle then just doing manual.

Last this is what kind of sucks about smart services. Spend a ton of money for advertised service and then one day, the company decides to just turn it off without even notifying me the customer of what happened. Turning it off sounds crazy but that is exactly what Pentair did.
Or worse, maybe they make it where every update all customers can’t use the smart service for a couple of months.