Saratoga Spa - No 110 Power

[amesdenis]

I have been reading as much as I can and I am very grateful for all the helpful posts. But I am still uncertain how to proceed in my hot tub repair. It is a Saratoga spa manufacture date is 1998 – Controller is Balboa SAR200. The initial problem was the absence of 110 power to the circulator pump and the Ozonator. On initial hook up I had the neutral wire going to the neutral lug on the tub – after reading the forums I realized that the nutral and the ground need to be tied together so I placed the neutral on the ground lug…. The tub came to life – blowers worked both pumps worked on low and high settings – the light even worked. So I proceeded to find out why the circulator pump and Ozonator were not working – I measured the black and white going to the circulator and found that 0 Volts going to the circulator pump – but strangly 115V measured from Black to ground on the circ pump socket – Black to neutral was 0V.

After further reading I decided to Hot wire the circulator pump and the ozone to 110V permanently… I connected to black L1 for black and grounded the neutral – When I turned the spa on the large motors struggled to come on so I killed power and change the wiring back to original - and now I see Sn1 error – Bad High limit Error

Has anyone every experienced any issue with not getting 110 power components to work properly – Was the board shot from the beginning or did I just cause irreversible damage to the board. I am very depressed about the whole thing - I will remove the board from the enclosure and looked for and charing or damaged sections

Thanks -

[Dr. Spa]

You "realized", that the neutral and the ground need to be tied together ???

For Gods sake, AND the sake of your LIFE, get a qualified electrician. Electricity and water are NOT something to be playing with.

[amesdenis]

You "realized", that the neutral and the ground need to be tied together ???

For Gods sake, AND the sake of your LIFE, get a qualified electrician. Electricity and water are NOT something to be playing with.

The tub was free and the original understanding was that the circ pump was the issue - So was I wrong... My first try was hooking the neutral to the crew labeled netral to the tub - but GFI kept tripping - Tested continuity across Netral and L2 - They are the same ---

After diconnecting the nutural and grounding it the spa came to life -

[ChaiSTi]

I'd listen to Dr. Spa. The ground and neutral should be seperate. The ground can be on the ground bar but the neutral to the spa should be on the neutral load. I'm surprise the spa isn't tripping as is. This is a 240V spa, correct?

[amesdenis]

Good to Go... The problem was the Square D Breaker - I upgraded to a GE panel - Here is what I learned from my talk with an electrical engineer....

Because of the reactive loads that spa motors present along with the resistance load of heaters, and the fact that parts of the spa including ozonators may run on 120V, common GFCI breakers sometimes react to a normal spa condition as if it were a ground fault. They can be very unreliable.

The GE breaker has a specially-shielded GFCI to prevent false tripping due to RF interference. It is also engineered for low-voltage stability to prevent tripping due to brownouts, fluctuations and mixed loads.

THAT IS THE REASON FOR THE PRICE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BREAKERS