{long and painful}
I'm happy to announce that after a purchase off ebay 4 months ago my reborn spa is in action !
My fiancee and I had our first spa last night with an outside temp of about 4deg and 35deg in the water. Even had a full moon and some racing clouds about to help make the shampoo taste even better.. it was truly awesome !!
Remote power controls :
The remotes work a charm for the supercharger, blower and ozone. I'm going to use a left over one for the icicle lights hanging under the gazebo.
To help with the description I'll post a pic when I get a good one.
The objective of the project was a spa, gazebo and landscaping for less than $2000 and it made it !
The heater + wiring :
Had some dramas when the sparky wired up the heater (vintage 6kw FPI model) to stay on (regardless of flow!) + we suffered an airlock from not having the spa full enough. This caused the heater balloon like an egg and spring a small hole.. which was pretty freaky...(and annoying) even though the power had been off for 5 mins !
It gave me a new respect for how hot (and dangerous) these buggers can be !
All was saved when the sparky found a WORKING heater of identical spec at a recycling depot for supercheap (<$10) !! Talk about lucky. All wiring and controls tested fine and it was actually in better condition than the one that came with the spa. yay !
The upside is I now have spare electrics and element if the current one ever fails.
Total draw with everything on is <30a
Heater performance :
With outside air temp of about 12deg it took 3 hours covered (soft cover) to go from 10deg C to 27deg C. Then open with occasional supercharger use took a further hour to get to 35deg C with outside air temp of 4deg.
Will be interesting to see how this goes when its additionally heated thru the day by the passive solar setup coming soon (check writeup in another thread).
The connections :
After a visit to Bunnings (hw place) for $50 worth of 32mm class 18 pvc junctions and a couple of 90deg elbows a new connector was made for the motor. Plenty of head scratching with a friend was required to get it right. Only a couple of pinhole drips to fix now - nothing major or dangerous I'm happy to say.
An additional adapter was needed to move the filter away from the heater (about 15cm) as the new screw on connector to the top of the heater interfered with the filter. The previous heater just had two glued on elbows.
A trap for young players (like me!) is the mongos at FPI used 32mm unions with a non-standard thread with 40mm pipe WTF ?!?! U can get the connections online or do like my mate and I did and modify the existing connections to fit new standard 32mm. This makes life easier and cheaper down the track if things need maintenance/alteration.
Another good trick we learned from my mate's plumber : if you make a mistake with recently glued pvc fittings glue just coat the pipe with pvc glue (the blue stuff) and light it with a match.
It burns just long enough to heat and soften the glue and you can seperate the pipe and reuse it. We needed to do this once and it worked great !
Power :
I ran my own 4mm flat cable through the roofspace to the gazebo and it hooks into the exiting 40a RCD at the fuse box. The sparky put in a 25a breaker on it's own rail. Total cost for the sparky after running my own cable was <$200
The sparky wired a board with a waterproof switch and waterproof dual outlet to go under the spa. He also relocated the waterproof contactor housing onto the board to make it easier to access and get it away from all the mechanicals.
The contactor :
All were amazed that the spa EVER worked... early on the sparky discovered the spa had a
three phase contactor which, not surprisingly, wasn't activating getting only 240v instead of 415v !! Once a single phase 240v contactor was installed it worked like a charm. Very odd as all components are single phase...go figure !!
Ozone :
The $70ebay 200mg/hr CD ozone unit goes through one of the air mixers and really cranks ! With the cover on it really does its job. With the scuminator floating around it should stay pretty clean and hygenic 9along with the usual chemicals of course)
Ph:
First ph reading was waaaay low so after a good hit of soda ash its a lot happier.
Gazebo :
All out of 4x concreted treated pine logs with black plastic sheeting roof for waterproofedness and 2x 3mx1.8m brush fencing panels for the native feel. A gable roof out of treated pine 4x2 planks. Plenty of strap nails and gal timberlok nails.
Landscaping :
$36 worth of river stones chucked on the garden (after pulling a few weeds out). One 6x4 trailer load was enough to do the half of the graden the Gazebo occupies and the surrounding concrete. Gave quite a good effect for very little effort. Just gotta do a bit more weeding now !
Next :
next challenge is to get the motor+heater on a timer (ozone is already on one) so it can retain the heat.
Build and install the passive solar heater on the roof.
[disclaimer - please note all actions described here were done were my own choice as a home DIYer and I accepted any inherent problems or danger. all Electrical connections were performed by a licensed electrician.]
