Question about proper 6100 maintenance

[pmrogers]

Is it bad for my 6100s to let them run until they start locking up before cleaning them?

I get between 2 and 4 months of run time before calcium deposits build up enough to start tripping the multicontroller alarm. Since I'm lazy, I'd prefer to continue with this maintenance as-needed approach, but it recently occurred to me to wonder if letting them get to the point of actually locking up is going to dramatically shorten their life.

So, can I continue to wait until the alarm goes off before cleaning, or is it important that I clean them every two months or however often is necessary to prevent the lockup condition?

Thanks!

 

[rvitko]

The problem I have seen is that if they were to lock up and remain unattended for an extended period maybe a weekend or even a week. The computer program attempts to restart the pump every 10 seconds and this generates a great deal of heat in the transistors when the start up fails. Sometimes the transistors will fail, they crack and smoke a little and that is it. In the case of the non electronic pumps like the 6060 and 6080 the problem is that the thermastatic switch will cycle and after a few thousand consecutive cycles the pump will no longer work as the switch will be destroyed since the bimetallic element inside will melt from the arcing of opening and closing repeatedly. Paul, you really should get the new drive units, we improve them all the time and you can see in the forum that such complaints have diminished greatly, I would say they are nearly nonexistant with regards to pumps made in the past 6 months and the few I have seen were stopped by fine sand and not lime build up. The problem we had initially was we knew that the lime precipitation occurs because of temperature. We made several changes to negate any temperature increase inside the pump while it was on. We have the coolest running pumps on the market. The problem remained and we since learned that a vacuum was forming inside the cavity and degassing CO2 the same as temperature would and the increased pH causes a precipitation. We changed the design further to brake the vacuum and increase the turbulence and give a sort of self cleaning effect.