Are you experiencing issues with your Pentair pool heater? Don't stress! Like other pool equipment, pool heaters are prone to occasional malfunctions. Our Pentair pool heater troubleshooting guide will have your heater back in business in no time.
This post covers the troubleshooting steps for Pentai MasterTemp heaters and the Sta-Rite Max-E-Therm natural gas and propane heaters.
Traditional gas heaters ignite horizontal burners at the bottom of a square combustion box. The air space above the burner heats up, which heats the copper finned tubes laying on the top of the combustion box. The water circulating through the copper heat exchanger tubes absorbs the heat, and exits the heater a few degrees warmer than when it entered.
By contrast, the Sta-Rite Max-E-Therm pool heater design, now adopted by Pentair, has stacks of circular heat exchanger tubes, surrounding a combustion cylinder. Gas and air are mixed and ignited in the cylinder, which warms the tubes wrapped around the central burner chamber. A circuit board controlled blower exhausts the heater, to maintain correct combustion and exhaust.
Troubleshooting the stacked exchanger type of heater is not much different than other electronic or digital pool heaters. The controls and circuit boards for the Max-E-Therm and the MasterTemp are fairly identical. Even the new MasterTemp above ground pool heater has the same design, and the same troubleshooting procedure. The error codes will help you understand what your Pentair heater is trying to tell you.
Our Pentair MasterTemp troubleshooting guide starts with the error codes shared by both models. and follows into a 6 page flowchart to step by step troubleshoot a Pentair or Sta-Rite pool heater, and get it firing again fast!
