Keeping your Viper alive.

[marti_cohn]

My Viper is getting fairly long in the tooth, about 14 years. There have been numerous occasions where I just wanted to toss it out for the garbage man, but my frugal nature doesn't allow me to do that. My experience has taught me that Hayward pool cleaners have problematic manifolds and valves that interfere with the automatic spin-out. On the other hand the drive train of the Phantom cleaners seem to wear out too quickly.

When it was no longer possible to service the manifold in my Viper, I just disconnected the check valve from the timer which disabled the automatic spinout. In its place I installed a Phantom back-up valve that I bought on Ebay for $40. This combination has worked perfectly for a year now and has not required any maintenance yet.

The bearings in the wheels of my Viper finally wore out and my pool supply store wanted to charge me $110 for each replacement wheel. If I had to spend $220 for wheels, I would have just thrown it away. However, I found VXB ball bearing company on the internet and ordered 4 plastic bearings for only $25. I had to do some minor modifications to the wheels with my Dremel tool to get those bearings to fit, but they work just as good as the original equipment.

Eventually this unit will completely die, but I am betting that I can keep it alive for another year or two.

[JimK]

My Viper is getting fairly long in the tooth, about 14 years. There have been numerous occasions where I just wanted to toss it out for the garbage man, but my frugal nature doesn't allow me to do that. My experience has taught me that Hayward pool cleaners have problematic manifolds and valves that interfere with the automatic spin-out. On the other hand the drive train of the Phantom cleaners seem to wear out too quickly.

When it was no longer possible to service the manifold in my Viper, I just disconnected the check valve from the timer which disabled the automatic spinout. In its place I installed a Phantom back-up valve that I bought on Ebay for $40. This combination has worked perfectly for a year now and has not required any maintenance yet.

The bearings in the wheels of my Viper finally wore out and my pool supply store wanted to charge me $110 for each replacement wheel. If I had to spend $220 for wheels, I would have just thrown it away. However, I found VXB ball bearing company on the internet and ordered 4 plastic bearings for only $25. I had to do some minor modifications to the wheels with my Dremel tool to get those bearings to fit, but they work just as good as the original equipment.

Eventually this unit will completely die, but I am betting that I can keep it alive for another year or two.

LOL.........where were you when I posted this:

http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?15409-Hayward-Viper-Repair-or-Replace

I didn't know the Viper has been around that long. Mine came with my new pool installed in 2004. I've made numerous repairs to the Viper and when I started it up this year it would get stuck in spinout mode (this has been a problem before, this time I narrowed the problem down to the manifold; see above link).

I ended up trashing the Viper and getting a Polaris 280. Had I known about your fix I could have saved a bit of money, but after having the Polaris a couple weeks it performs better than my Viper ever did, so I don't feel too bad junking the Viper.