Jump to content

Yadkin

Members
  • Posts

    14
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Recent Profile Visitors

3,693 profile views

Yadkin's Achievements

Junior Member

Junior Member (2/5)

0

Reputation

  1. Probably. The Hot Springs website has pdf manuals for each year of manufacture, down to 1999. Mine's a 2001. I haven't bothered to test it to see if it functions this way.
  2. It's not a catalog item so my dealer will have a blank stare, a confused expression, or look at me like a second head grew out of my shoulder. Ditto with Hot Springs or any manufacturer. I do turn the thermostat down manually. My goal is to turn it back up before I get to the house so it will be hot when I get there. I also have frequent power outages which will reset the spa back up to 102F even though I may not be there for two or three weeks. Mountain Electric is $0.14 per kwh and I'm a cheapo.
  3. Yeah you're probably right. I'll probably have to do this the old-fashioned way with a second thermostat and switch the line voltage leads with a relay.
  4. The IQ2020 has an optional remote control that operates via radio signals. I would assume that requires a corresponding receiver that plugs into the board, and therefore those pins include input and output. How would one go about getting a pin out diagram for this board?
  5. Very true in all sales. Then there's my dealer who I stopped buying supplies from because I wasn't buying stuff as fast as the owners manual recommended. Silver cartridges cost $45 and when I went to replace mine after a year he told me that I'd get a rash if I didn't replace it on schedule. Of course the first year my kids spent a lot of time in the spa and my wife's got sensitive skin and no-one had any problems so I knew he was FOS. I didn't bother to tell him how many graduate courses in water chemistry that I've taken.
  6. Since I'm not a computer programmer I have no interest in reverse engineering the thing. I find it hard to believe that they would name this thing IQ2020, and after naming the last version IQ2000 obviously expecting the design to last 20 years, without putting in computer interface capabilities. An other option is set the temperature to 80 degrees manually when leaving, then before arrival use an X10 device to turn power off at the spa, then turn it back on after a few minutes. That will reset the spa board to its default temperature of 102. The problem with this scenario is that we have frequent power outages, probably one every two weeks on average, and that would reset the spa to 102 for who knows how long.
  7. Wow a BBB rating of F. They should change the name to SpaCrap. Lots of issues with it that I hadn't thought of: 1. It floats on the water. What do you do when you drain the spa? 2. Potential air leaks and resultant loss of integrity when I'm not around. 3. The guy who they hired to measure the R rating says that they misrepresented his findings. Since thick pockets of air don't insulate I'd say that this is the case. 4. One guy measured the cover temperature with an infrared device and found it to be 40 degrees while his neighbor's foam spa cover was 19. 5. Guy in high wind area found that leaves and crap blew under the edges of the cover into the water. I've got to secure my foam cover at all four corners or else the wind will open it but I've never had crap blow into the spa. I almost got hoodwinked. Thanks Dr. Spa!
  8. OK I searched all over the internet this morning and couldn't find anyone who has done this. I can't imagine being the first bloke to think of this so I'd rather not reinvent the wheel. I've got a Hot Springs/ Tiger River spa with a 2001 IQ 2020 control panel. It has several places where pins are exposed; my guess is for attachment to their remote control and for diagnostics. The spa is located at my mountain cabin and I'm there most weekends during the winter. Electricity and fuel costs being what they are, I've gone to great lengths to be able to turn down the house temperature and turn off the domestic hot water when I'm gone, and turn everything back up/ on before I get there so the house isn't freezing when I arrive. I even turn the water main off in case something screws up big time and a pipe freezes. I'm no computer genius but I figured out how to do this using X10 controllers and their telephone interface. This stuff is all 1980's technology and pretty cheap, around $200 for my set-up, including a second thermostat, a sprinkler valve and the various control boxes. It's pretty neat because I can turn things on-off using my cell phone. However it's not completely dependable and doesn't provide me any feedback so this last summer my son built a computer to stay up there and monitor things. This was relatively more expensive, plus I now pay for broad band internet at $45/ month. We use Home Domination software and can log on remotely and see what the the computer is doing, see the status of temperature sensors and if the X10 boxes are on or off. Back to the main point I'm looking for a way to connect to the IQ 2020 board and read the temperature status on the computer, and turn the water temperature up or down. As an alternate I suppose I could put a second heater in the spa set to a lower temperature, and turn the main heater off using an X10 interface, but there should be a simpler way. Any gurus here?
  9. Whoever the retailer is that told you this is ripping you off. There is no reason to replace the whole IQ 2020 if the heater board is bad under normal circumstances. 99.5% of the time it is just the heater board. I agree the guy got ripped off. Hot Springs has had trouble with the heater relay frying at the connection to the circuit board. When mine fried the first time (three months after the warranty expired) I bought a new relay for about $2 and soldered it back in. That worked for three years and when I went to replace the relay again found that the burned area had affected an adjacent relay as well. I looked into it and found that they had redesigned the heater board to place the heater relay away from the others, ostensibly to beef up the connections.
  10. I just had to replace a heater for mine because that doesn't drain with the rest of the spa. I'd suggest opening up the cabinet, removing the hoses to the heater and vacuuming out the water at all four points.
  11. I'm shopping for a new cover and my primary concern is life-cycle cost, and a major impact to that is energy conservation. This spa is up in the mountains and electricity costs $0.14 per kwh. I'm looking at two options and would like some knowledgeable feedback. It is to replace a standard Hot Springs cover (2-3.5" tapered foam, I'm guessing 1.5# density) with a simple rectangular lifter that hinges on the bottom of one side, the top sits on top of the cover at the hinge and carries the folded cover up and over to one side. To open the spa you just fold the cover over the lifter bar, then use the bar to lift the whole thing over one side. I estimate my current cover is R15 before it became saturated with water. It's probably about half of that now and too heavy for my wife to lift. The first option is to get a 6-4" tapered foam cover from hottubworks.com. For "the works" the manufacturer claims R-30. This should work fine with my existing lifter. My main concern is when or if it becomes saturated It will be twice as heavy as my current one and even I won't be able to lift it. Compared with an R15 cover the payback should be about 2.5 years. The second option is from spacap.com; it is not foam but air. It floats on the water and claims to have an R value of 26. This has a similar payback period. I'm thinking that I can continue to use the lifter with this cover, since the top bar of the lifter should sit on top of the cover at the center and it should simply flop over the bar and then out of the way.
  12. I use this software to monitor temperatures in my cabin which is a two hour drive from here. http://www.homedomination.com/temp.html The sensors are little chips that carry their own serial number and have three pins that you'll have to solder onto a CAT 5 cable. They are not waterproof but you can attach them to the outside of a pipe inside the cabinet then cover with some insulation to read temperature there.
  13. I'm looking for something similar. I have a tiger river with an IQ 2020 panel and want to be able to turn the temperature up or down from my computer. Does anyone know of an interface board that can do this?
×
×
  • Create New...