AboutChris Thornton Expertise I can answer most any portable hot tub question. I specialize in electrical questions and I am most familiar with spas that were manufactured by NEMCO, Regency, Hydro Spa, Gulfcoast Spas, Leisure Bay, and Premium Leisure. I have been servicing spas for over 20 years and can answer technical questions for most major spa control systems such as Balboa, Hydro Quip and Gecko. You can also check out my websites at http://sparepair.freeservers.com if you need troubleshooting help or if you need spa parts go to http://spaparts.freeservers.com
Experience I have worked for a leading spa manufacturer and have been servicing spas for over 20 years.
Education/Credentials I am a High School Graduate with 2 years of college majoring in computer programming.
Expert: Chris Thornton Date: 7/13/2008 Subject: hot tub surging
Question QUESTION: Hi Chris , I have just come across your web site and think you could be the person that will be able to help me as i am at my wits end with my hot tub. We purchased it in November last year ran it in our garage for 4 months without any problems . Then we shifted it to our back garden filled it up and now when we run it the pumps are surging we can run any combanation and it is working fine its only when we run the two main pumps together that it starts surging . we have canged the pump , a new complete contols unit checked that the water is flowing free from every pump the water level is above normal just to rule out that being the problem .It is sitting level on a concrete base. Had the eletric supply checked and tested with a meter the filters are all clean and when we were using the tub for the 4 months i cleaned the tub and filters every week faithfully . Because i live in the far north of Scotland there aint anyone in my area that deals with hot tubs so we are kinda stuck , we have had a plumber and sparky to look at it and they dont know what the problem is so i would be very gratefull if you could maybe shed some light as to wot the problem might be. Further to that when i turned all the pumps on yesterday just to give it a run they all worked fine for about 15 min turned them off and on and they still worked fine then the surging kicked in again and today i have gone out to run the pumps and when i turned it on it started surging straight away. THANKYOU FOR YOUR HELP SHIRLEY
ANSWER: Shirley,
It sounds like some kind of power issue if you say the pumps surge only when you have both of them on. Perhaps when you moved the spa and it is still on the same breaker as it was in your garage, the wires that were used to run it was just lengthened to go outside. This can sometimes cause a problem if the wire size was not increased due to the amperage it takes to run the spa from a longer distance. When you have both pumps running, that is when the spa will be at its peak amperage, so if the wire gauge that was used to run it in the garage is the same size now that the spa is further away, something like what you describe could be happening due to the fact that the wiring cannot handle that much amperage. So to solve the problem you may want to increase the wiring size that runs to the breaker. For example here in the US if we have a spa 25 feet away from the breaker we can use #8 gauge wiring but if you move it 50 feet away you have to use #6 gauge wiring. (The smaller the gauge number the larger the wire.) So check with an electrician about the correct wiring size needed for the breaker being how ever far away it is from the spa.
Other than a loose wire connection on the breaker or the terminal block of the spa, this is the only thing I can come up with that would be causing your problem. Hope this helps you out.
Chris
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QUESTION: hi chris, just a quick e-mail to let you know what cable we are using . while the tub was in the garage we were using a 10 ml 3 core cable which was 15 meters in length when we moved the tub outside we used a 16 ml 3 core cable which was 23 meters in length . we also swapped the cable back to the 10 ml and joined on more 10 ml cable to the original cable to make up to the length we needed to reach to the garden but it made no difference to the problem either . why is it running ok for a time and then surging ?? surely that wouldn't happen if it was a electrical problem !!! .
THANKYOU FOR YOUR HELP SHIRLEY
Answer Shirley,
As long as the cable that you are using now is larger than the one that was in the garage, that should be fine. Also make sure that is direct connected from the breaker to the spa and not spliced in anyway, as splicing the wire can cause a bad connection and loss of amperage. But as I say, if you can run each pump individually with no problem and the surging only happens when both are running, then there has to be a loose connection somewhere to where the power cannot handle the load of both pumps running at the same time. So double check all connections at the breaker and at the terminal block in the spa pack. It could be just a bad breaker or even a bad solder joint somewhere on the PC board, so sorry to say this will be a trial and error thing to where you will just have to possibly try replacing the breaker first and if that don't work you may have to replace the PC board. Good luck and I hope you can find it.
Chris
