The Bad Archives - Marc's Musings

Endless Pools Fastlane: Excellent until it isn’t

TLDR; Endless Pools’ Fastlane is GREAT, until something goes wrong with it. Then the resources available to troubleshoot and repair it are lacking.

I have spent over $2,600 trying to repair my Fastlane unit this year. Endless Pools support is limited to either people reading diagnostic flowcharts over the phone or “independent service providers” who can install units but, so far, are not up to the task of diagnosing and repairing them. I am completely on my own in trying to repair my unit.

So, my enthusiasm has waned somewhat, if you don’t mind spending around $20,000 on a swim current unit and then facing the prospect of wholesale replacing it after 10+ years then maybe go ahead and get one for yourself. Perhaps you’ll be tired of your pool by then and it won’t matter.

For some background, I am a computer-guy. I’m reasonably competent in doing smaller mechanical tasks (install after-market parts on my car, diagnose and repair issues with my Polaris pool cleaner). But I recognize my limitations and will absolutely hire someone more skilled and experienced than me to do certain jobs.

When we built our swimming pool nearly 12 years ago, it was always with the intention of having the Fastlane as a key feature. So, when my Fastlane began to act up toward the beginning of last year (it was becoming difficult to adjust the current speed smoothly), I reconciled myself to getting it repaired for the new summer season. The Fastlane ultimately failed completely at the end of the swimming season last year so I was forced to move forward.

Part of my original reticence in addressing my Fastlane repairs was the complete lack of familiarity any of the pool shops / repair people that I dealt with had with it. Beginning around year 5 of owning the Fastlane, I started casually asking folks if they maintained, or knew of anybody local who maintained, these units. The most frequent response was always, “What is that?” and, after describing a Fastlane to them they usually knew what I was talking about but did not deal with them in any way. So it was not until the unit started exhibiting issues that I really started getting serious about getting help. I honestly did not want anything to do with fixing the unit myself.

Anyway, in speaking with Fastlane’s support line last November, we agreed that it was probably the impeller motor that had seized and that replacing that, along with the hydraulic fluid, should correct the issues I was describing. I ordered the parts in February with the intent of doing the work as soon as the weather became agreeable enough to do so.

Well, after swapping out the old impeller motor and not only purging out the old hydraulic oil, but also opening up the reservoir and completely cleaning out any traces of debris or the older fluid, I topped up the device with fresh new fluid and installed the new filter and turned it on. The hydraulic pump made all the normal sounds it used to make, but … no movement whatsoever on the impeller motor. Which is where I was when the unit failed last fall. This was in March of 2023.

Since then I have been on the phone with Endless Pool’s tech support for HOURS over multiple sessions. These are hours where I had to take the time off work because, you know, I work for a living and the support folks are only available during business hours.

The main issue that I encountered is that there is absolutely no provision for any kind of video call with them so that they can get a real feel for the context of the issue. I had to resort to taking many pictures and the occasional video and sending these to the techs. Each one in turn (I believe I dealt with 5 different techs in total over those weeks) managed to latch on to some irrelevant aspect of my description and insist on performing whatever flow chart diagnostics they had in front of them.

“It’s your impeller motor it must be seized” – “It’s brand new as I have already said”

“Your hoses must have a leak in them” – “Well, when we disconnected the hoses we could see that there was a lack of pressure coming from the hydraulic unit, so pretty sure the hoses are not the cause.”

“Your Proportional Relief Valve is seized” – “You can see from my purchase history that I have already bought a new one and replaced it.”

“Your Pressure Relief cartridge is seized” – “Same as the relief valve, this has also been replaced”

And on and on. I know that these techs deal with loads of customer repairs each day but none of them seemed to be able to listen to what was being said. I can’t tell if they were really making notes on my file regarding troubleshooting that was done, but if they were, subsequent techs whom I spoke with were certainly not reading these.

I’m a bit gobsmacked, my teenaged nephews and niece all have access to any number of video calling technologies: Zoom, Facetime, Teams, WebEx, Bluejeans, etc.

Likewise, in the course of my job I regularly need to use most of these tools every single day.

Yet Endless Pools somehow feels this technology is either unnecessary or inaccessible for them.

If you’ll recall, shortly after installing the Fastlane, Endless Pools support were completely clueless regarding a rather basic issue I was having with staining of the Stainless Steel handbar on the unit. Frankly, anybody familiar with pools (which I was not at the time) should have been able to point me to the solution within 5 minutes. So I am not at all sure what to say about the folks manning the support line.

A couple of months into this process, I submitted my name and location to Endless Pools to get an “independent service contractor” to help me. The fellow whose name popped out was really nice and tried to be helpful, but it seems that his expertise is exclusively in installing nice new units and maybe changing out the hydraulic fluid for customers. But he was utterly out of his depth in trying to troubleshoot my unit’s issue.

I tried again in late June but the “independent service contractor” I reached was going on vacation for the month and wouldn’t be able to help until late July or August.

In my latest call to Endless Pools, the tech agreed that the symptoms being exhibited were not being addressed by their diagnostic flow charts and promised to have one of their engineers contact me as he was certain the engineer should be able to identify and help address the issue. Shockingly, the engineer never contacted contacted me.

I have since been out of the country and had several other pressing personal issues that prevented me from actively pursuing this repair. But it’s looking like the only solution will be to pay Endless Pools $20,000 for a brand new unit. Which seems to be the only thing they are capable of helping with?

It is now September as I write this. Pretty much the entire summer has now passed without being able to use this very expensive paper weight. And I am disappointed.

AAA Shady Automatic Renewal Practice

I like the AAA, I was a member of CAA when I lived in Canada and like having the safety net of having a trusted entity that can be called if I run into issues on the road.

With the purchase of my Tesla, I’m less certain the AAA will be helpful (they are still ramping up EV benefits) but there is a measure of comfort available for my wife having this resource available to her for her ICE car.

Also, there is usually some small price advantage available when booking hotels with the AAA rate.

This morning I received an alert from my credit card (you really need to set up these alerts) that AAA had charged it for the amount of my renewal. I was a bit surprised as I don’t need to renew until late next month and I ONLY renew things like AAA manually.

They’ve been trying to get me to join their auto renewal program for years with tiny incentives (“Save $4 if you set up auto-renewal!”). But I prefer taking a moment to consider if it is still worthwhile to me each year before deciding if I’m going to renew.

Well, last year, it seems they got tired of the tension and just went ahead and set me up anyway, without my knowledge or permission. Believe me, I carefully scan the checkout screen before I submit payment to prevent exactly this kind of nonsense.

I went back and checked my confirmation email from last year’s payment and, sure enough they have a blurb at the very bottom informing me that I’m now automatically renewing.

Paragraph at the bottom of my renewal confirmation email from last year

I checked on the website and the ONLY way to change this back is to now call them on the phone. I mean, who does that in today’s day and age?

“Convenience” Billing, unless you want to stop it

I did call (wait time was exactly 10 minutes with another 12 minutes after that on the call) and intended to get them to refund my payment and disable the automatic renewal. However, I was told that:

They could not disable auto-renewal with the charge pending
If I would give them my full credit card number they would put in a request to refund the already paid fee. But could not guarantee this would work.
I can always call back later if things don’t work as expected.

So I went ahead and cancelled my membership (confirmed by email) and I will dispute the charge with my credit card company if the pending authorization does not go away.

AAA, I am disappointed.

Wemo Smart Plug – Not there yet

I have a love/hate relationship with Belkin’s Wemo products. When they work they work very well but when they decide to misbehave, they are miserable to get working again.

I already have 9 Wemo switches in my smart home. These took a long time to settle down but back when I first got them they were at the “bleeding edge” so, like everything else at the time, things were expected to be somewhat rough around the edges.
I credit creating DNS reservations on my router for most of their current stability and improvements in device driver code for much of the rest.

When I added the first of these new smart plugs to the Wemo app it seemed to work perfectly. So I went ahead and added the other two and had them distributed throughout the house.
By the next morning I found the first one was no longer responding (just flashing orange LED) and it had to be reset – after that it worked perfectly, it even integrated with IFTTT just fine.

The other two were not so good, they just kept losing connectivity, regardless of where I located them in the house.

A real deal killer for me, and something I had not initially considered was that these were not recognized by SmartThings (which is not a problem for the Wemo Smart Switches). Likewise, Hubitat Elevation – which was going to be my primary hub for these new plugs – only has a user supported device driver for Wemo switches, dimmers, etc. and these new ones apparently do something funky (respond unexpectedly or on random ports, who knows) such that they cannot be identified for use as a device with this hub.

The real kicker is that, in introducing these to the Wemo app, it started doing all sorts of interesting things both with these plugs and my existing stable of switches. Random switches / plugs would show up as disconnected at different times. Never less than two and typically no more than four even though the switches were still working just fine with my existing hubs.

So I have returned these and am going to instead use Ikea’s Tradfri Wireless Control Outlets. I have 5 of these controlling various lighting fixtures in my house already and do you know what has never given me any problems? These Tradfri outlets! They are somewhat more limited in that they do not have an on/off switch on the unit to override them if things go awry or if you just feel like manually turning something on or off. But I’ve ordered a bunch more and am unlikely to look back at the Wemos for a long long time.

Even now, days after removing these Smart Plugs from my Wemo app, one of my Smart Switches still shows as disconnected, even tough my SmartThings hub can still control it just fine.

tldr; don’t use with SmartThings or Hubitat Elevation and beware the Wemo app. If you do get these working, don’t ever, ever change your setup…

Intune – Send Custom Notifications – but not to too many people

I’ve been wrestling back and forth with Microsoft on this for the past few weeks. I’m able to use Intune’s “Send Custom Notifications” feature to send messages to a very small number of people.

But, recently, I wanted to notify just under a couple of hundred of my users that the version of iOS they are running will no longer be supported by my system. I thought this notification feature would be a neat way to reach out directly to them so they knew that I meant *them* specifically and not *them* generically as tends to happen with email communication of this sort.

So I sent my notification to a tiny number of people (me especially) to ensure that the message being sent looks good for the target folks on the mobile platform. Works fine.

Sent the identical message to a single group of 171 people (again, including me) and… nothing.
The next day I sent it again after confirming that, not only did none of my half dozen test mobile devices receive it, but NOBODY received it. And… again… nothing. This time I verified that the resulting Intune notification (bell at the top in Intune) confirmed “Success”.
Sent another notification to just myself and a coworker and…. works just fine.

Well… crap. So I sent off an email instead to the users to give them their warning and opened a ticket with Microsoft regarding this.

Basically Microsoft is telling me that I must have missed the dozen or so notifications across my devices, as did all of my users. They took pains to explain to me how end users sometimes don’t notice notifications when they come up and that must be the situation… on both days.

Long and short it turns out that there is no real auditing or logging of this feature so Microsoft cannot tell the notification disposition beyond the original “Success” which apparently only means Intune has acknowledged that I’ve submitted the request.

I wanted to put this warning out to you. Not only should you not be using this feature for time-sensitive information, but also there appears to be a threshold number of people – certainly in my case – to whom it can be sent before it will give up the ghost and just not do anything.

Be absolutely certain to include yourself and some sympathetic coworkers on ANY Intune Custom notification that you send out if you want to have any assurance that it actually made it to your audience.

In my opinion Microsoft needs to update this feature so it:

Logs all sent messages,
Provides a disposition for the message as to whether or not a device has acknowledged receiving it.

I don’t imagine there is a lot more I could ask for. The end user is welcome to ignore the message after delivery. At that point my goal has been achieved.

I would be interested to know if there are any other folks who have run up against this issue.

So my Tesla Model X has a Little Known Bug

Back in early December (2019) I noticed that the regen on my Tesla was not what it should be.

Basically, after overnighting in my garage on a 63 degree F morning, it would take about 25 minutes of my 40+ minute commute before I had full regeneration restored.

On a cooler 37 degree night, I ended up preheating the car for *54* minutes (miscalculated departure time) and, for that 32 minute drive I NEVER regained my full regen.

I contacted Tesla to have them take a look-see, after all, not a couple of weeks earlier they had replaced my Battery Coolant Heater (coincidence?).

Regardless, in spite of what seems like an obvious connection between a battery coolant heater and my battery heater not activating properly, Tesla came back and initially informed me basically that “battery packs are big and can be slow to warm up” and, when that didn’t work they then let me know that there is a firmware bug that is preventing the battery heater from activating.

Below is the transcript of my conversation with Tesla. I’m still waiting for the “future firmware update”.

Basically I’m seeing that Tesla Model X (Premium car) has now become so niche that it basically is not getting much attention at all. And I frankly believe that Tesla service is so overwhelmed that they can’t spend the time on customers such as myself, the earlier adopters who helped to fund the whole enterprise, to ensure that our vehicles are running correctly.

Color me disappointed. I can’t wait to see where I end up on the list of HW 3 upgrade recipients.