heater question- what's your take?

i have a new jandy lite 2 heater. it has the option to use it's own internal timer to control a pump (but you need to add their relay apparently, which is special order and i don't have) or you can use an external timer to to control it pump and not use the internal timer. as my electrician is going to provide a nice neat timerl unit to control everything anyway, that's why i didn't bother with getting the jandy relay as i still would have likely needed a separate timer system for my swg i'm installing.

here's my question or questions.

i read the heater manual and it does talk about how you can bypass the in heater timer and program the heater to slave i guess basically to an external timer..but it doesn't say whether that means i should still hook up the pump via the heater..or hook it up directly to my external timer.

at this point, my belief is that the pump would then be hooked up separately as the external control unit will be controller for all 3 of the items. i don't in any way want the pump slaved to the heater.

right or wrong, a good electrician should be able to figure out how to hook it up best, right? (i hope) and yes, i do have a good electrician..the best in town (master grade electrician consults..journeyman or the master grade guy himself do the work) and that's why i pay him 150 per hour to do more electrical work:)

Tenax, glad to see you're getting closer to completion of your project! We use Intermatic timers to control our pools, they slave the heater to the pump run time. They also allow for a 'firemans' switch which disables (or shuts down) the heater within 20 min of start up or turn off, to protect the unit from over heating and being damaged from the heater turning off before it has adiquately cooled down or firing without proper flow (these things have many redundant protection switches). It's senseless to have the heater run independantly of the pump, without enough flow the heater shouldn't fire anyway. So have your electrician slave the heater to the pump timer.

thanks waste.i bought an intermatic 2 line/2 load timer with this in mind, but i think the electrician for the sake of cleaning things up and keeping it together wants to put in some other kind of timer with a relay relative to shutting down the heater. i've decided i'm going to take the day off and be here so i can "check in" on how things are going:) it will be some kind of panel with a more sophisticated timer..not a big deal as i can use the intermatic elsewhere around round my home and not a lot of money put into it. the timer will have an adjustable relay that will allow me to change the heater shutoff time as i want to.

challenge around here is not a lot of pools are put in so no one really has a ton of experience with pool heater hookups...i'll be there manual in hand.

my main thing is i want to be here to ensure everything works as it should when the guys leave..to hard with our economy to get these guys back in for callbacks these days:)

the best thing for the money i'm spending is that i've had these same guys do my 2 ngas heaters, a sump pit and a ngas fireplace in my house. i had a problem with the ngas fireplace not being capped quite right that caused a water leak only in heavy rain. i called them and they came out within 2 hours of my call during a 4 day-230 mm rainfall that was keeping them busy with putting in sump pits, securing fireplace flashings,and they came out and during heavy rain rebuilt my cap (wouldn't have caught me on the roof at that time!)..really good service if needed after. i was impressed considering they were going nuts fixing everyone's heavy rain issues that week.(they installed over 1500 sump pits and ran out of pumps! (1500 houses in a community with about 25,000 houses..pretty amazing:))

the guys i won't use that are the next "biggest" electrical/plumbing/heating contractor in the city were about 20% cheaper, but the horror story is one of my employees furnaces dies in the dead of winter in january when it was -25C. his wife has an in home daycare so they had to really get a rush on to replace. the company comes in, puts in a new furnace..but for some reason. no new ducting so it's just blowing heat out a small stack into the basement! the owner calls the salesperson who comes out and looks at it,calls the crew back and instead of fixing properly cause they say they are too busy..they literally take ducting and run it up his stairwell and into the rooms across his floor with a promise to come on the monday to fix it up properly. no show from the crew on monday..he calls the salesperson again....sales person demands the money for the whole job up front..owner gives in to giving them 50%..he never sees that crew again and goes to small claims court..meanwhile, has to spend more money with the contractor i use to fix it and in the end will have spent more than he would have him with them in the first place to do it right.