Sundance Optima 850 - Solid FLO

[wastedthelight]

Hello!

I first started getting a FLASHING FLO error and found out my Circulation pump died. After installing a new one, I now get a SOLID FLO error.

I've tested the flow switch and when no power is going to the spa, I get a reading of 1., same as if I don't have the probes touching anything at all. When turned on, it changes to 0.00. So By this, I'm guessing the Flow Switch is working?

I do not seem to get the solid flo error until after the spa has reached it's set temperature. It ran all day after refilling the hot tub until it reached the set temp, then solid flo error.

I also changed out the filters before refilling and filled through the filter intake.

It shouldn't be a stuck relay since it's working for so long before acting up, right? And the 850 uses a 24/7 circulation pump.

The Flow Switch was also cleaned off when I had it emptied, removing build up, so it's pushed up even better now to make the connection.

I also found this post (http://www.whatsthebest-hottub.com/forum/index.php?topic=16407.0), would this work for the optima 850? If so, I have no clue what wires they are even talking about. They say move the black wire and white where but there are so many and not sure where to. My board looks exactly the same.

Also, during the solid FLO error, the circ pump never stops, still keeps going but of course I'm locked out of all controls.

Looking for any suggestions at all. Thank you!

[clover]

Welcome aboard, please save me the time of repeating what you need to know by reviewing Drewdman's thread on the same/similar problem.

Let's cut to the chase, when the symptoms recur to a solid flow, and nothing works, remove the sensor loom from the board by pushing the pegs to the left and right of the plug and it will pop out.  Then put it back on.  If that corrects the issue, replace the flow switch for the reasons explained.

You meter readings of 1 leave me in question, but your explanation confirms that the switch seems to be open, but I would expect no reading whatever, and then closed when you have the 0.00 reading.  You symptoms seem to be intermittent, and I believe your switch is causing the problem.   Your explanation indicates that it appears to be working, but then your symptoms indicate it is not working.

I am concerned when you say the switch was "cleaned off" to remove build up, please explain the procedure you used to accomplish that?

Your circ pump is 24/7 if you program it as such.  When you set your filter cycles 1,2,3,& 4 the next press takes you to the Circ pump that starts when you set it to start, and runs for the duration you set, such as 12:00 midnight, press and set the run time for 24 hours.

The photo you are looking at, bottom right, 2nd grey terminal block with the single black wire is the circ pump.  The white wire used to be in the opening next to it, but was reassigned to the incoming neutral wire on the incoming power block center bottom where you see 2 white wires with slide on connectors just left of the blue disc.  ONE of those white wires goes to the circ pump.  Those are the only 2 wires related to this discussion, so I will  leave it there.

[Levelheadsteve]

I've been going back through the forums, page by page, for the last few weeks. I'm now back to 2010, page 168, and still have a long way to go to read up on hot tubs.  I've noticed quite a few threads about problems with the FLO system/sensor.  Is this a typically problematic system or are there just so many out there that there's bound to be a number of problems found?

[wastedthelight]

Clover, thank you for your reply. I didn't want to high jack another thread, as that gets confusing. So I'll continue on with this one.

It does appear that we are having the same issue though.

Removing the loom and putting it back on: Solid flo comes back within a few seconds.

The Multimeter: Cheaper multimeters don't display OL, they display 1 when not touching anything. 0.00 is showing continuity.

Cleaning off the flow switch. While drained I took the hose off and rubbed the build up off of the part the sail touches to make connection (forgot it's technical name). I used a Q-tip.

Circ pump timing: Turns out it was set to start at midnight and only run and hour, good advice! So I corrected it to 24:00 duration. That being said, I fired it up, raised the target temp to 98 (was currently 97), once it hit 98, the heat turned off, circ pump still running, then about a minute later solid flo came back. Really thought this was going to be the issue, crap!

For the part of swapping wires around, is this image correct of what to do (and this is safe?):

[wastedthelight]

Another quick note, my filter door actually has issues too. It gets caught and won't go down. I have it jammed so it's pretty much wide open right now so that there's no water flow issues into that area.

[clover]

The purpose of the filter gate is to prevent backflow into the spa, like leaves etc.  The gate should float to the surface preventing such actions.  At the top of the filter gate, there are either small stainless steel screws holding each cap on, once removed, you can pull the gate up and out.  OR, it may have plastic stoppers preventing the gate from coming out take some needle nose pliers and remove the plastic stoppers, they will probably break in the process.

Either way, you will find 4 holes in the gate in which the Sundance dealer can provide clips that are referred to as bearings that will clip on, and then reinstall the gate, the screws, or get new plastic stoppers.

[wastedthelight]

My hot tub is in doors, but I still see the point of the gate now. I'll see if I can repair it once the rest is fully working

Speaking of which, I may have finally found the issue.

The 24/hr circ pump is programmable as you stated. The time starts at midnight. The circ pump will run no matter what if it hasn't reached the set temperature. When you lose power for a long time, the settings reset, mine go back to 12am start time with a duration of 1hr vs 24hr. So if the tub reaches the set temp before 12am, it trys to shut itself off, but it's a constant on pump, it can't be shut off without turning off power to the spa, there for, it freaks out and gives a solid flo error. I found two other posts stating this same thing when they had the EXACT problem.

To test, I turned on my hot tub at 2:50pm and the temp was 88, I set the target to 98. I also adjusted the circ pump time to start at 3pm instead of 12am, and changed the duration to 24hr. At 5pm, it reached 98 degree's shut off the heater but the circ pump continued to run and for once DID NOT give a solid flo as it previously did every time. At 6pm the scheduled cycle kicked on.

This is all a great sign that the issue is a bug with the programming of the spa's board. Once it passes the first circ time, it's fine after that according to the other posts...we shall see!! So far so good.

[Dewdman42]

interesting, this might line up with the information my guys were trying to tell me about power outages causing a problem.  I don't entirely understand this, but I do know that when I got the tub the circ pump had the 1hr setting, is that the default?  That's stupid if so.  we get occasional power outages here that last 10-15 minutes and so from the sounds of it, every time that happens, it is going to reprogram the hot tub?  Eeks, that alone sucks.

But I don't entirely understand this software glitch you are mentioning...can you try explaining for a dummy?  Has Sundance come out with any kind of fix for this?

[wastedthelight]

I am the dummy. Ha!

Mine defaulted to 1hr as well after off for a long period of time. Short periods, the 24hr I programmed stuck.

So here we go.

- You turn your hot tub on at 3pm after being off for a long period of time and set it to 100 degrees , it's currently 80 degrees .
- No matter what, your circulation pump will run if it has not reached the set temp, bypassing any programming of time duration set (1hr vs 24hr)
- At 8pm it reaches the 100 degrees that you told it to go to and the heater shuts off.
- The circuit board then says "hey, you reached the temp, now we are going to see what programming wants to do next...oh, the circ pump shouldn't run until 12am, okay I'm going to turn it off then cause it's only 8pm."
- At this point the board can't shut it off because the 850 circ pump is designed to run 24/7 from my understanding, regardless of the programming from the cycle setting so it doesn't have the ability to shut power down to it, can't control those points on the board, I guess.
- The system then says, "oh crap, something;s wrong, I can't cut the power, error error, oh god we are all going to die, RUN!" And Solid FLO appears because it wants to do something it can't and shouldn't do in the first place.

So, to get around this:
- Turn your hot tub on at 3pm and set to the temp you want (higher than it currently is, if you already have the solid flo, you have to do this quickly upon rebooting the system or it will go back to the error state).
- Now that you have the temp sent higher than current, it won't error yet. So hit cycle 5 times to get to circ pump programming, and set the time to start at 3:30 (since you started the tub at 3pm), you'll know it will reach this time before it reaches the set temp. Now the system has it's orders to be 24/7 because it got those orders before it went into an error state, when you turned it on, it never had a chance to get these orders.

Hope that makes more sense. If not, I'm afraid I just suck at explaining it, haha.  Good luck! Mine has been at the set temp since 5pm (now 10:14) and no solid flo. I'm semi optimistic.

I've read of no permanent fix for this issue, IF I'm correct on the cause. I'd say the board's programming needs flashed to correct the bug. But there's no way that would ever happen on such an old system now. Again, if this is truly the issue.

[Dewdman42]

So you're saying Sundance put in a circ pump that can't be shut off, and if the motherboard tries to shut it off, but it can't, then the motherboard freezes up the system with FLO error?  And the only fix is to reprogram the circ pump cycle time to 24 hours every time there is a power outage in order to make sure the motherboard will not try to shut it off?

Anyway, how long off is a "long" enough time to reset the programming?  its pretty much unacceptable if a power outage can cause this problem, what if I'm out of town for a week or two, and I live in a sub freezing environment.  I can't be having to reprogram the stupid thing every time the power goes out.  That's just ridiculous.

[Dewdman42]

The manual I have for this hot tub states that the default circ pump programming is 24 hours.  But you're telling me if that if power is off for a while (how long?) it does not revert to this default, it reverts to 1 hour.

I will have to try to some tests later this week.  Sounds like either vary bad oversight by Sundance to put out a hot tub that when the power goes it causes the settings to even revert to anything at all, much less the wrong default.  Are you sure the motherboard doesn't just need a battery or something replaced on it? 

[wastedthelight]

I think it's a weird bug because you don't see thousands of people complaining about it, again, if this is indeed the case. As someone who works in the IT field and a programmer, I can totally see and understand the logic in this issue.

And yes, the manual does say 24hr is the default, so why the heck is it going to 1hr? I had mine off for 24hrs and it retained the 24hr setting. I had it off for weeks, that's when I noticed it went to 1hr. This proves that something isn't right with the programming. There is no battery.

The best thing I can come up with is that something went out like relay that controls the circ pump based on the timer. Instead of having control over it, it's just wide open now. So when the board goes to say "turn off circ pump", that relay or whatever that's suppose to control it is dead and can no longer do so, so it's just stuck on, which is good. If it died and wouldn't allow it to come on at all, that would suck. I think the way it is, we have a fighting chance to out smart the bug in the system. (for the millionth time, if I'm correct, haha)

I'm a total newb, please be aware of that. I've simply been doing a lot of reading. And while everyone wants to say "the flow switch is bad, the flow switch is bad" the fact is that EVERY post where someone had this EXACT issue, they replaced the flow switch and it NEVER once fixed the problem. I realize solid flo points to the flow switch, but it's simply not the flow switch, other posts have proven that. There's a bigger issue going on here.

[Dewdman42]

Interesting.  Well I'm a lot less concerned if it is able to retain the settings for 24 hours.  Strange that it should retain them for 24 hours, but not for weeks and yet no battery.

I know my non-Sundance tech that I bought the spa from was trying to tell me that some Sundance spas have some kind of problem when the power goes out while the pump is running.  They haven't really pin pointed as well as you have or figured it out, but it does indicate some kind of common theme.  Perhaps there is another component, or a component on the motherboard that goes bad, as you suggest here.

Well I am not about to leave the power of mine off for weeks to find out, so I'm not sure of any test I can really do.  Now that I fixed the filter door, it seems to be working fine.  But I would definitely like to understand what this power outage thing is about and whether its possible to fix that problem

[wastedthelight]

I'll report back if it comes back, or if it stays on for a few days or a week, I'll report that too.

As far as the power goes for retaining the settings for a short period of time, residual power is what does that.

[clover]

Sometimes in life, things are not what they "seem to be".  Being there to correct the problem is definitely an advantage.

A Solid flow is a circuit board message that commonly indicates a bad flow switch, or at least it is recognizing something is NOT working and it is "expected" to be working.  The first thing the tech should do is to test the conductivity of the switch, then temporarily install the 2 leads into the sensor loom to verify the results.  I would speculate 95% of the time, the switch is bad.  But then of course, when testing the flow switch as indicated would have revealed, or lead us to "other issues" that are not necessarily common, nor can they be assumed.  I will be the first to tell you, with all of the variable manufacturers methods of electronic programing, some of which are proprietary, it is easy to overlook the uncommon, and suspect the obvious.

The circulation pump operation is a matter of programing the spa, however there are times it will not work during normal operation, even though it is programmed for continuous 24 hour operation, it is subject to temperature control referred to as summer logic, something we are not dealing with at this time of year.  With 30 years in this industry, I admit to having some "head scratching" moments when something unusual arises.  That's when someone not familiar with Sundance, or any other major brand having unusual troubles prompts a call to technical support.  The end result of that call is usually embarrassing, as it is something that we already knew, but didn't think of all things that effect the logic of operation.

The electronics are well designed in all of the major hot tubs that I know of.  While all tubs started out with basic simplicity, some can be complicated in understanding.  I have never had a power failure cause a 24 hour cycle become a 1 hour cycle.  And, IF I experienced that, I would replace the e-prom logic on the circuit board. IF the time goes to odd minutes while programing the start time, I would replace the Dallas Time Chip.  There are serviceable issues that can be corrected, but it does take some analysis that we all try to think of here, while others as familiar may have additional comments.

It seems that we touched the "red wire" (a bomb squad term) when the circulation issue was mentioned that took us into how it was programmed.  Well, just for kicks, if your water temp is set for 100 degrees, bump it up to 102 degrees and notice the ozone doesn't work and the circulation pump shuts down which does not seem to be "a normal" operation. 
It's a lot easier when you know what your doing, and what you are looking for when you have the parts on hand, and can confirm on sight the problem is corrected.

Years back, Sundance changed the application and operation of the "Standard mode, and Economy mode"  So, up to a certain year of production, and thereafter Economy became Standard, and Standard become Economy.  I still struggle with that at times when looking at unusual operations, and it is even worse when I am looking at something that I am not "totally familiar with". 

It is important that any service tech have access to technical support, especially about other manufactures who may be competitors, and even then, they may choose not to help you. 

Your first line of defense is from whom you bought the spa.  They competed for your money, and they have an obligation to provide to your satisfaction. But then, we are always here to help.  Sometimes we get it right.