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Welcome to my Tinkering with Electronics blog, where I'll be posting articles related mainly to various test equipment I've obtained and pool automation equipment that I like to play around with.

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Help! My aux circuits (or valves) stopped working!!

If you run into a situation where a valve or auxilary circuit on your Pentair pool controller no longer functions at all, don't despair!  Assuming the required electrical connections are good, the fault isn't caused by a programming error, and you're trying to control the valve or aux circuit at the outdoor panel (and not using screenlogic or a remote), you may just have a blown relay driver chip... these are cheap and easy to replace. Aux circuits AND valves are actually controlled by relays which are either on-board, or in the load center.  The aux relays are the large-ish 2" x 1.25" Omron devices that are bolted to the load center/enclosure, while the valve relays are the smaller .5 x .25" relays that are soldered onto the outdoor control board (or personality board for Intellitouch). Valve relays on an Intellitouch personality board They're all 24vdc relays, which means 24 volts dc is required to "energize" their coils.  The micro-c...
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Powering a Pentair Easytouch or Intellitouch controller

One question I get asked a lot is "how do you power a controller on your workbench?" It's so simple I almost hesitate writing about it, except that folks might not try it for fear of damaging their crazy expensive system... We're all used to seeing the 12(or 10)/18/24 volt AC system transformers in our outdoor panels, but when I first started tinkering with Pentair stuff, an Intellitouch "laptop trainer system" found it's way into my possession... It's a full-fledged Intellitouch, but has different firmware and no means to power the relays and valves. And it was powered by a single 12 volt DC wall wart.  Huh??  The system transformer puts out AC volts, not DC volts! This 12 volt DC wall wart was glued onto the trainer system I noticed that the 12 and 18 volt AC inputs are converted on-board to DC (while the 24 volt AC input is left alone).  The 18vac converts to about 24vdc and powers all of the relays, while the 24vac powers the va...
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