Thursday, February 2, 2012

Acid Pump - Continuing Drama

I had to give up and send the acid pump back to the distributor.  I say distributor because Hanna Instruments gets the pumps from some company in Romania.  Well, they're not Chinese...they might have worked if they were.  It seems the acid caused the pump electronics to rust up and corrode.  The pump body was nicely sealed except for the potentiometer.  It leaked around the shaft and things went down hill from there.

At any rate, when the new one comes back (still under the 1 year warranty), I'll try it with the new fittings and check valves.  I did find out that the check valves I was wanting to use, see here, fail after a few months.  No, the spring didn't dissolve, the valve seal started to leak.  These little check valves can be taken apart, so I took it out and looked to determine the cause.  They should be fine if you're using them for controlling water, but not acid.  I have a couple of Kynar check valves to try this time.  If they work, I'll retrofit all the valves and see what happens.  These pump systems have valves at the injection point for the pool, both into and out of the pump head, and at the pickup point (foot valve).  Lots of redundancy to make sure there's no single point of failure.  That is if it doesn't melt and leak acid all over the place.

Just waiting for the pump to come back to try again.....

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