Shelly1 Pool Pump Controller

Hardware
1

Hi all,

I have an Equilibrium EQ25 pool controller which powers a pool pump. I have recently installed a Madimack pool heater. At the moment, my pool controller comes on for four hours in the morning and another four hours in the evening, at which time, if the pool heater is turned on (the heater is hard wired into power, and i can turn it on or off from the power button on the heater), it will sense the pool temperature and activate if the pool temperature is below a certain value.

I would like to be able to control when to heat the pool without having to have the heater ‘on’ all the time and in a waiting state (waiting for the pool controller to turn on).

The diagram below shows the current configuration of the pool power (I have left out the pool heater as this is hard wired into power). Astral EQ25 is plugged into the power outlet, and the pool pump is plugged into the underside of the Astral EQ25 pool controller (where i have circled in purple)

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I am in the middle of incorporating a Shelly1 into the mix as per the diagram below: Again the Astral EQ25 is plugged into the power outlet, but this time, i have the ACTIVE wire (only) of the power cable which comes out of the underside of the EQ25 (where the pump plugged into on the first diagram), going into the SW port of the Shelly1 and then have the O port of the Shelly1 connected to a powerpoint, which the pump plugs into.

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This allows the pump to be powered by the EQ25 by triggering the Shelly1 (SW), just like a mechanical switch.

My issue is, I have tested the connections on the Shelly1 before plugging them in, and found that the SW port has a constant 120v running through (I am in Australia, so we run at 240v). Given this, I am hesitant to plug it into the Pool controller (EQ25) because i don’t want to feed in 120v (over the ACTIVE cable) constantly and potentially damage it.

I guess I have two questions:

  1. Is the 120v constant on the SW port correct? I have tested on three other Shelly1 devices and have found this to be the case on all of them.
  2. Is there anything else someone knows of that i can use to sense whether the EQ25 is pushing out 240v (that will not send back 120v like this instance) so i can then trigger something like a shelly1 to power the pump?

Thanks in advance

2

I’m interested in whether you ended up deciding if this was needed. What’s the drawback to having the heater ‘on’ more than needed? In the idle state does it consume much power?

I assume another option is to use the Tuya integration to turn it off in one of those 4 hour slots if you only wanted it to be heated in one of them?

3

Hi,

The issue wasn’t so much that i wanted to turn the heat pump off (I have control over the heat pump using the LocalTuya integration), but more that i wanted to turn it on manually. I needed a way to turn the pool pump on, so that the heat pump would sense that there is water flowing through the pipes, which would then activate the heat pump if the pool temperature was below a certain value

In the end, I did two things.

  1. Added an ESP32 board into the controller.
    So I opened up the controller unit and added an esp32 so that I can turn control the state of the controller whenever I wanted. The controller is always powered and runs on a schedule, ie 8am-11am and 4pm-7pm. The esp allows me to cycle through its settings of off-on-auto/scheduled with buttons i have created in HA. When the controller is set to on (either manually On or in a time bracket that signifies it is automatically/scheduled On) and the temp of the pool is below 30, the heat pump will come on automatically (the heat pump will turn itself off if the temp reaches above 30).

  2. Added a (Tasmota) Shelly1pm to the controller circuit
    The Shelly1pm comes with a power meter which captures how much current is running through it at any time. I am using this value in a template to identify when the controller is in an On state (thus the pool pump is on and pushing water through the system), to give a visual indication on my screen. When i want to heat the pool, I can see if the pumps are running, and either let them run, or manually turn them on by setting the controller to a manual On state.

Hope this helps. let me know if you need more info