You've lost me. If you compare this unit with the costs of purchasing a propane heater and heating with propane for one season you have about the same number. That is a one year payback. Its also the same with a heat pump because the initial investment is higher. I'll post a link below where you can calculate the costs of heating a pool using oil or propane or a heat punp and you can do the math yourself. The calculations start on page 27. Its the same with any solar pool heating system except with the standard solar heaters you do not get the same cooling benefits. I'll post my results in a few months, once I have some hard data Here is a link that might be useful: Guide to pool heating

The problem with my heater was that two of the gas orifices/nozzles were clogged with spider webs, preventing gas from entering the main burner tubes. As silly as it may seem, the orifice/nozzle responsible for shooting gas into the main burner tube where the flame sensor is located was clogged. Although the other burners had ignited, the heater shut down because a flame was not present in the main burner tube near the flame sensor. I corrected the problem by removing "all" (8) or so burner orifices/nozzles using a 7/16" wrench. These can be removed without having to remove the entire burner assembly. I visually inspected each one and cleaned the clogged nozzles out with a pipe cleaner.

You are correct. Cut the 3-prong connector off and make your connection to the high voltage relay. The manual is also correct that you need a GFI (Ground Fault Interrupt) breaker feeding the transformer. You should have one installed already if you have pool lights as these need to be on one too. Depending on the total ciruit laod you may be able to share the GFI breaker. If not, it is easy to install in place of a standard circuit breaker. The power flow is like this: the line (house) power comes into your PS8 and feeds a bus into which a set of circuit breakers are connected. These circuit breakers then feed power up to the high voltage relays which the PS8 turns on/off through the control panel. For example one breaker would feed the pool pump relay, one would feed the pool light relay, etc. The installer either uses standard breakers or GFCI breaker depending one what equipment is feed. Pool pumps don't need a GFCI breaker but pool lights do. The light source/color wheel doesn't needa transformer because it is already 120V. The landscape lighting needs a transformer because the light fixtures are 12V so you are lowering (tranforming)the 120V to 12V. The number of fixtures you want determines the size of the transformer. If you have 15 lights (with 10 watt bulbs) you would need a 150W transfromer (always add 10% for voltage drop and add some extra capacity for future growth). I hope this expalination helps. I can provide a photo of my panel if you think it would help you understand but my panel is a pentair IntelliTouch (however they are all somewhat simialr regarding function).

Hey Robert, I took a look at your video and it does seem very weird that your heater will fire at the start and once it gets to temp give you an IF failure. When it tries to fire at temp do you hear the ignition clicking? It would seem to me that there is a temperature and/or humidity problem with either the ignition control or ignitor. Is the heater in an enclosed pump room? I couldn't tell. I haven't run across this problem here in Orlando yet so I am very curious as to what the culprit could be. I routinely perform heater repairs for people in Orlando. Here is an article I wrote a while back. I am working on some newer articles as well and try to post as much as I can. I do have some numbers of some pretty high up people in Hayward that could help on this but let's see what we can do together first. Here is a link that might be useful: swimming pool heater repair info