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Thanks. I understand that the booster pump would not be needed and thus I could incur an electricity savings. For me the issue will be the effort, time and cost of having to replumb for a non-booster pressure cleaner. Like I mentioned in my first post, I am looking for next season so I have plenty of time for research.
I do appreciate all the info you have given. Thanks again.
Tom
Just wanted to jump in here. I changed over a year ago from a 2 hp whisperflo and a booster-driven Polaris 280 to a 1.5 hp Ikeric and a suction-side The Pool Cleaner. I still have to run the Ikeric pretty high in the summer to get the solar heating to work well because of the design of my solar heating system (long story...) The Pool Cleaner is on whenever my pump is on. The pump runs on high when solar or my heater is on (there is a new JVA to the heater bypass that I have to activate to send all the flow through the heater whenever I want to use the heater and when that is activated, we set the pump to high so the water doesn't come out too hot into the spa--this was a patch that I don't like). The Pool Cleaner works at high or low speed and the suction on my pump is very low.
Pros:
-Saving A LOT of electricity cost. More than $100/month all year. Sometimes $200. This was great when my pool was in "freeze protection" for a large portion of our unusually cold winter last year. Really a huge savings.
-Very simple design and pretty flexible (manually)
-My water is clean
-very quiet
-overall system pressure is much lower. I have things set so the filter pressure is 11 psi when the pump is low and 19 when the pump is high. If I were to completely bypass the heater, which I probably should do, the pressures would be much lower. This all saves an incredible amount of wear and tear on my pool equipment and allows the filter to work much better.
Cons:
-not as easy to turn off the cleaner and remove it from the pool. I used to just press a button inside my house and unplug the cleaner. Now I have to change valving at the equipment. I don't think the pool remodeler really thought this through well enough and I wish they had shared their plans with me better up front so that I could tweak them (I have an instrumentation/controls background...)
-Robs suction from the skimmer. Enough that I am not so happy about the surface circulation. The surface is never as clean as it used to be. A booster pump would eliminate this issue as it would pull (or push, as in the case with a pressure-side system) the extra needed through the pump. I now need to do more manual labor on my pool to clean the tile line. I have tried changing circulation patterns with the returns to little or no avail.
There is much more, but I am happy enough with it to wait for the payback of all my changes before making more....