Connecting a heat pump

Connecting a Heat Pump to BoPi can be either very simple or a bit more technical and it all depends on the heat pump. Some heat pumps have a dry contact that allows them to be enabled by another device. In this case, its as easy as connecting two wires between one of BoPi’s relays and the dry contact.

If your Heat Pump does not have that feature, you can still control it from BoPi but its a little more complicated. Every pool heat pump has a flow switch to detect when the water is flowing through the plumbing or not so that it knows if its safe to heat or not. What you can do is put BoPi inline with that switch so that BoPi can simulate the water not flowing to stop the heat pump and when BoPi turns on the heat pump, the switch will operate normally and still prevent the heat pump from heating if there isn’t enough flow.

The hard part is that to do this wiring, you will need to access the heat pump’s motherboard which usually means you have to remove its enclosure. Once you have gained access to the motherboard, you should see various terminal blocs that should be labeled. It is then only a matter of runnning a pair of wires from one of the terminal positions to one of BoPi’s relay and bach to the wire that was into the terminal bloc. That way, that BoPi relay is now inline with the flow switch.

You can then test that its working by turning on the pool pump and put the heat pump in heat mode. With the heat pump relay off, you should see a flow warning on the heat pump’s screen. Once you turn on the heat pump relay in BoPi you should see the flow warning disappear and the heat pump should start heating. If its not the case, please check the wiring.