There has been very little content added here in the last year or so, and I guess I can blame that mostly on the COVID Pandemic (amongst other distractions).
But today, I want to start writing about a personal pet project: The Digital Pool.
Frankly, I have been pondering and planning this for a few months now, and it comes out of my frustration with my current pool control systems. We live in Florida, and in fact have two homes here, one of which is a vacation rental home. When we built the pool at that house about 4 years ago, I decided that I needed automation, and I needed remote access to that automation. I searched around, and settled on the Jandy equipment, which included their AquaLink control center, as well as their AquaPure chlorination system. As this was an “infinity edge” pool, I also decided to install an automated filler, which is the Jandy Levolor II K2000.
I guess my frustration started with the chlorination sub-system, but it has grown to other elements of the system as well.
We have now had two failures of the salt chlorination system, which appear to be failures of the Power Interface Board due to excess salt added by our pool service company. Needless to say, we are changing pool maintenance companies.
But I am fairly handy, and I typically dive in to diagnose and fix most of these issues, and I have even gotten to the point that I am developing prototype (modern day) replacements for some of the functions of the Jandy automation system.
I can’t speak for the other companies that supply these things (like Hayward and Pentair), but I can tell you that the Jandy equipment is very outdated, and it appears to be one “add on” pasted on top of another. Most of the design appears to date back to the 1990s, when they had developed their own (radio frequency) remotes, and provided wired interfaces as well.
The “modern” interface is also a kludge. The mobile app gives you basic control over the various devices, along with temperature readings, but if you want to see or set details on the schedule or salt cell, you have to go into the “web view” to access those, which brings up an embedded web page viewer for these features. That same web page is accessible through their iAquaLink web page.
In other words, they simply “pasted on” a mobile interface on their old web interface instead of trying to develop for the modern mobile platform.
The issue is that many of these components are glued together in such a way that it is hard to diagnose and troubleshoot when there is a problem. For example, the flow sensor for the chlorination cell is wired to the same Power Interface Board (their term, not mine), in the same wire harness as the salinity sensor.
And replacement parts are expensive because they have a “lock in” through their dealer network. Very few pool owners would be capable of diagnosing the issues with their pool when it starts “going green”, and based on my experience, very few pool maintenance companies can do this type of troubleshooting. And lock-in pricing means that if you need to replace the water depth sensor on your Levolor automated filler, you are forking over about $100 each time. I saw a post this morning from a pool owner who is on his third sensor, and is not pleased about it.
And if you need to replace the PIB, you are talking about $125 and if it involves the (antique) wire-wrapped transformer, you are at around $500.
I have come to the conclusion that the pool control industry, much like the sprinkler control and home security industries before it, needs to be “digitalized”, and it needs it now.
In my next post, I will talk about the initial pieces I want to develop (and why).
Hope you find it interesting.
John
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