kevink5516

Nope. I'm in Northern CA near the coast. We occasionally get below freezing at night during a few cold spells but typically stay above 40 through the winter. My concern with draining it is that I don't want seals to dry up and leak. It's an older tub (2004) and when I had the tub drained for 3-4 back during the summer it created a leak at a jet body seal that was a pain to fix. I realize that in the winter the seals would be much less prone to drying up and cracking but I don't want to risk it. If I run it once or twice a week I'd be fine to still have to drain and refill it in the spring when we want to use it again. I just don't want all the plumbing to get gross from sitting stagnant.

We hardly use our tub in the winter and with electrical rates going through the roof I finally decided just to completely shut the power to my Sundance tub off a little over a week ago. My topside panel is currently non-functional so the tub has been permanently stuck at 102F temp and in Standard operating mode. If I could drop the temp at all and put it in ECO mode I would've tried that first to save on electricity but as of right now the tub was nearing 1/3 of the total electrical usage for my house and we couldn't justify keeping it running all the time. My question for everyone is, now that it's shut off, what is the best method to try and keep it from getting gross and yucky so that it could hopefully just be switched back on in the future without needing to perform any major "refresh" of the tub. This tub is at my primary home, not a vacation house or anything like that, so I have the ability to maintain it still in it's off state. Should I power it up 1 day a week to get some circulation going and maintain the chlorine levels? Anything else I need to do to keep it ready to go once we want it hot again?

I haven't been able to resolve my topside panel issue yet. Replacing the ribbon cable connector on the main control board unfortunately didn't fix my topside control panel functionality. I haven't had the time to pull the topside panel off though to check the ribbon cable for damage and haven't pulled the trigger to spend $400 on a new topside panel since we don't know yet if we want to keep the tub long-term. It sounds like you've swapped almost all the original parts in your tub our with new ones so that's really weird that you still can't get your topside panels to work. Is the old remote panel the only piece you haven't tried replacing yet? Do any of the topside buttons on either your main or remote panels feel stuck and like they aren't working? I think that's my issue, several buttons on my topside panel have no "clicking" action anymore so I'm convinced they've broken and are stuck in a permanently pressed state. If your remote panel is still original and has a bad button that could be impacting your new main topside panel from working correctly maybe?

Not that I see. And given that the pin directly above the missing location is slightly bent I'm thinking this is more likely evidence of accidental damage than an intentional pin removal but that's just a best guess. I really wish I could find a proper electrical schematic/pinout table for this connector but I'd need technical engineering documentation from Sundance for that level of detail. Thanks for the info about the STA. In my picture taken with the flash, you can see the remains of the missing pin in the plastic connector body so it definitely was there when the connector was soldered to the board. Whether or not it was intentionally busted off later is another question. All photos I can find online of replacement PCBs show all 10 pins being present. No disrespect taken. Not trying to sound like a narcissist, but I'm a mechanical engineer that designs and builds electrical cable assemblies on a regular basis as part of my job and have a good amount of soldering experience. So I'm not too concerned about soldering a 10-pin through hole connector. If it does end up being beyond my soldering skill scope, I can take the board into my work and have my electrical engineer assist me with the connector replacement. I'll pull the topside panel off tonight and check the ribbon cable up to the panel. I haven't done this yet and the spa definitely had a rodent infestation issue with the prior owner but the panel was functional and working when I bought the spa. Might be that minor damage on the cable existed which was worsened when I moved it to my house. Yes, I disconnected the aux control panel and confirmed that it is not the aux panel causing the problem. I was able to probe the aux panel ribbon cable connector with a multimeter and verify that all 3 buttons on the aux panel work and are not sticking. Thanks for the link! This gives me some good general testing reference ideas despite it being Jacuzzi brand doc. So some of the specific electrical tests won't carry over to my Sundance board.

Well I'm hoping I just found the smoking gun of my problem! I pulled the ribbon cable connector off the main board in the spa pack and upon closer inspection found that 1 of the 10 male contact pins has broken off the connector on my main control board in the spa pack! See attached photos. I've read somewhere else on-line that these are Molex connectors but Molex has tons of different connector series and styles of connectors. Does anyone know the specific type of Molex connector used on these boards? I'm fully capable of removing the busted connector and soldering a new one on assuming I can find the appropriate connector part number to order.

I picked up a used 2003 Sundance Altamar tub and after finishing some repairs for minor leaks and replacing the flow switch I finally have the tub full and hot! My latest problem though is that the topside control panel is now not working. The display is on and shows all information I'd expect to see, but none of the buttons on the panel work at all. There is an aux panel on the other side of the tub that only has buttons for the air blower and jets and all buttons on the aux panel work correctly. Is there anything else I can do to try and further verify that I have a bad main topside panel and not a main control board problem? I really don't want to drop ~$400 on a new topside panel so I may just live with it for now since I can control the jets from the aux panel but it would be nice to be able to adjust the water temp setting! I tried disconnecting the aux panel from the wiring harness and confirmed it made no difference to the functionality of the main topside panel. I also tested the transformer per the instructions in this post (https://www.poolspaforum.com/forum/index.php?/topic/53992-sundancejacuzzi-transformer-test/) and the transformer tested good. Lastly, does anyone know where I can download or buy a copy of a complete technical service manual for my tub like is photographed in the transformer test post? This would be really handy to have for future troubleshooting but I can't find anything online about Sundance service manuals. I'm guessing they may only be available to authorized dealers?