this morning i've been called out to this newly refurbished swimming pool it was all working
a few days ago and now nothing's working what has been done you've got this little box there
that's a vacuum switch to operate the pumps and various other relays and heaters and stuff
um i'll take you down to the control room and we'll have a look and see what we found there
and we've got a couple of pumps and filters got pump number two pump number one pump switches
there and then we've got the main control board here first of all we go to the consumer unit there
and i've just tested to make sure there's power there and everything and there's a light
there's a light in here as well that's working so obviously i found the
the breakers and just check those first and again there's power going through
to each one i've then found this armored cable here that then i thought was a feed for the
control box and it's not actually a feed for it if you look it follows it goes out outside there
so i'm just looking at that because i didn't know what that one was
wrapped up behind here was in a plastic bag and that's what i found so straight away
i was thinking that doesn't look very good again that's just a switch that apparently when the
pool was refurbished a couple years ago and the new building was done this was just left up in a
plastic bag switch was left in the on position and just tucked behind there there's various contacts
a couple of MCB's there some contacts down here and all i did is twin and earth cable here i just
tested power there just put my probes on there and again that was live so that was all okay i then
looked at the the control board and again found this cable here again this cable here
is this one here so all of these controls here and then various red wires come off there control um
cables for various things in here these three contacts are the three pumps so we've got pump
down there we've got a little pump here and we've got a pump here and it's these things that
aren't working and they are controlled from this control panel here i can just override this so
you can hear one pump is coming you can hear another pump has come in
and again so all three motors or pumps whatever you want to call them all three are working
the thing is that's not working though is a1 and a2 on each one they are the
there they can the coil controls and in these case they're 230 volt or 240 volt coil controls
so again it's these things that you need to operate from say for example that board
the coil will energize and pull the contact in so it's this this is a1 which is the
um i need to work out why that's not working to make sure that the a1 and a2 are okay well we know
that a1 looks like it's the um it's the live side and it looks like a2 is the neutral side that's
not necessarily the case so i had to check that so i just probed on between a2 and the incoming
live and again i've got 230 volts there i know that the coil the neutral to the coil is okay so
straight away i'm looking at a1 on each one and i can we need to basically get those live i tried
not to take too many cables out because it just it just becomes really messy and stuff like that
so again we've got all these covers here and all of these covers obviously clip on and it all looks
nice and neat and you can see i've pulled a couple of cables out anyway now we've got this cable here
and again as soon as i opened the box up this was this goes on to one of these
contacts here but it wasn't it wasn't connected and so i haven't bothered trying to reconnect
that because it wasn't connected before and it i didn't think that was what the problem was again
we've got the wooden box the other side by the swimming pool and this is the um vacuum switch
that's can be operated from from that pump there to bring on
the um the the pumps as well that works on a vacuum again it just makes the contacts there
which then controls everything else but that wasn't really the issue so what i've done then
is i've traced the cables so i've i know i've got power here it goes into there so um basically i
checked this fuse and i well i basically i just checked whatever power was coming through
and so i just probed onto the other side and yes it was coming through
and then you can see i've been tracing where the wires go foolishly as i was looking at this
and it's a mistake i've made because they haven't got wires there's no feeds going into the tops
i then foolishly assumed that these three contacts weren't working
and so i've been doing all this everything else and then it then suddenly occurred to me that
maybe all of these ones are working and um and maybe that what the pot that's what the problem is
this one was in there just like that and so when i probed onto that one wasn't live nothing was there
i pulled it out and had a little three or five amp i think it's a it's a 3amp but actually it's a 15
amp fuse it was my mistake i wasn't um paying attention too much so had the system running
nicely just testing it making sure everything works and then suddenly pop it goes wrong again
so i've just changed the fuses around now so i have put a 15 amp fuse back in here
and i've just put the five amp fuse back into this one on the control circuit
one of the things i did pick up with the customer this morning is if you look at
this cable and this cable not so much on these ones you can see they're quite um they're quite
dark they obviously use quite a bit of current so these are the contacts for the pool heaters
and again they're both controlled by individual 32 amp circuit breakers so we've got the pumps
this is a manual automatic it was on auto and then you've got the two heaters you've got a
spa heater and the pool heater so again if we just operate the system and that's the pumps you'll see
that brings on these three contactors
and again you'll see you'll notice before i manually overload those which you can do but
it's the that that button there is controlling the coils the coils a1 and a2 on each contactor
so if i press the spar heater the pumps have to be running so if i press the spa heater
and you'll see that that contact now comes through against a1 and a2 controls the 240 volt coil
brings in the main contactor that's the spa heater turn that off now turn on the pull heater
and again that rips that off so it's the control
i'll turn them off at the moment everything seems to be working