Yet another blinking cell light

[harrat]

I hesitate to post since I haven't read ALL the other threads, but I'm noticing something that I'm not sure if anyone else has seen.

I notice that when my starts pool starts running and the cell comes on, everything starts up ok, and I even see chlorine bubbles coming out of the returns. Then about 5 minutes later, I'll go check again and sure enough, blinking light of death comes on. I thought it might have something to do with automation I have to turn the cell production to 0 every hour to inject acid, (works great btw!), but even when I disabled acid injection, no bueno.

I'm wondering if there could be other factors impacting cell operation. I cleaned the cell (the plates look nice and clean, but did it anyway). I tested my pH thinking that maybe operation is out of norms, and it IS low, but 7.2 should still be ok

I dunno. I just don't want to plonk down $1200 so I'm holding out hope. Someone just put me out of my misery!

 

[mknauss]

I assume it is the CELL light blinking.
What is the age of the cell?

How often are you 'cleaning' the cell with acid?

 

[harrat]

Yes - the cell light is blinking. July 2021 I believe (2021 for sure) is the MFR date. It's been in service from Mar 2022. Just outside of warranty period.

I sucked at cleaning/maintaining in my novice first year, and I have very hard Arizona water, with some novice pool balancing for the first 1.5 years where calcium built up on the plates pretty badly the first few times I cleaned it. I would say I cleaned it 1 time the first year, 2 or 3 the second and 1 time this year. The last 6 months, once I got the acid demand dialed in and my pH regularly maintained around 7.4-7.5, I wasn't getting any build up. I check the cell when I clean/swap the cartridge filters now, which I try to do 4 times a year. Last two times there hasn't been any buildup, so I didn't do any acid cleaning.

 

[Jimrahbe]

H,

I have three pools and have been through three IC40 salt cells. All three had the same basic failure mode. The Cell light would start flashing.. At first, just rebooting the system would get the cell running again. Sometimes for a couple of days, then it became a couple of hours.

Just based on my personal experience, a flashing cell light means your cell is dead.. It does not matter how many hours it was used..

I have seen @JamesW say you can try increasing your salt level, and it might make the cell start working again, but I have never tried that.

Let's see if James has any other ideas..

Just for reference... One cell lasted about 9 years, one lasted about 7 years and the last one lasted about 5 years..

Thanks,

Jim R.

 

[JamesW]

Check the amperage going to the cell.

What is the salinity reading from the IntelliCenter?

What is the actual salinity?

 

[harrat]

So, I don't have an amp meter to look at the amperage, but I have one coming later today or tomorrow.

Intellicenter is saying 4200 ppm
Taylor test says 4400ppm
(IC reported 3800 in July, so it's been steadily climbing)

Now that I'm keeping up with the acid demand, I'm (now) realizing that my salt levels are increasing pretty dramatically. I may have to re think how I'm maintaining levels in the pool a little bit.

 

[JamesW]

So, I don't have an amp meter to look at the amperage, but I have one coming later today or tomorrow.

Make sure that it can measure DC Current.

Check the cell temp reading.

 

[JamesW]

You can change the salinity reading by replacing the temp sensor with a resistor.

The lower the temp reading, the higher the salt reading.

Try using a 6,000 ohm resistor to make the water temp read 99 degrees, which will lower the salinity reading.



The cell will stop generating chlorine when water temperate is below 52° F, ±3° F (11° C, ±1.67° C) degrees.

How Do You Display IntelliChlor Cell Water Temperature?​

Version 3.1 on adds the ability to determine system temperature. Pressing the “More” button after the display shows 1,000s of hours of usage, will show temperature as follows:[5]

Lights	Temperature
No LEDs	Below 30F
40%	36 to 45F
40% and 60%	46 to 55F
60%	56 to 65F
60% and 80%	66 to 75F
80%	76 to 85F
80 and 100%	86 to 95F
100%	96 to 99F
100% blinking	over 99F
All LEDs blinking	Sensor bad

Press and hold the More button until the lights scroll and note which % light lights up. Then, immediately press the More button again and see which % lights light up.

Pentair Intellichlor ICXX SWG - Further Reading

www.troublefreepool.com

 

[harrat]

I think this is showing that the cell thinks that it's 46-55F (Intellicenter says it's ~82F at the time of the test). So for some reason, it looks like the cold water light won't blink, but it's doing the test. My current clorination value is set at 80%. does that mean a bad thermistor?

 

[harrat]

I wasn't satisfied with how that came out and looked into things a bit more. For some reason my cold water light doesn't blink in diagnostic mode (Maybe an indication of something fried in there?). So, I paused for roughly as long as was demonstrated in the video, and pressed the button again, and I got a steady 80% light before flashing off. So I think it's reading temperature correctly at between 76F to 85F

 

[harrat]

So - to close out this story a little bit and ask for your opinion @JamesW...

I had some difficulty with the Amp meter testing. I checked for AC/DC amp metering when buying like you suggested, and missed some marketing speak that it does voltage metering on AC/DC, but not current. So I sent that back, and then it was going to be another few days for testing that. I decided to go ahead and get a replacement SWG, and found an open box one for $900 and full warranty, so I went with it.

New SWG worked immediately upon install.

A few days later, I decided to finish up some things on the pool that I wanted to do (swap/clean my filters and other cleaning/maintenance tasks) when I noticed that the new SWG was all dark. No lights on it at all. Of course I panicked and started looking into a few things. Ultimately, when I started looking at the surge board, I noticed that there was no power to it. After looking at that for a bit, I realized that the AC wire was completely disconnected from the board altogether. I haven't been mucking about behind the easytouch control panel in at least months, if not a year or two, so it's baffling to me that it would just be loose off of the surge board.

In thinking about how all this must work, I can't imagine that a loose or problematic connection to the surge board would cause the blinking cell light I had, but I thought it was worth throwing the scenario out to the group. Could the blinking cell behavior that I saw before be due to some sort of problem on the surge board that had a less-than-stable connection to the power source?