Yearly Archives: 2011

Polaris Water Heater Error Code 1

Polaris Water Heater error code 1, also known as the Pressure Switch Closed failure.

The Polaris Water Heater has an onboard diagnostics system that will flash a red LED to indicate a fault. This LED is visible through a small window on the access panel near the bottom of the hot water tank. By referring to the Polaris manual, you can discover what each of the error codes mean and there’s also a nice flow chart that suggests what to check/fix.

Error code 1 indicates that the pressure switch has failed to close. What this means is the Ignition Control Module (ICM) is unable to test if there is fresh air coming into the Polaris water heater. Without fresh air, there can be no combustion.

Now, the flow chart in the user manual basically has one solution for error code 1 – replace the pressure switch. While that may be the final solution required, I’ve had a service technician from Direct Energy tell me that you should also check everything associated with the Polaris Water Heater Error Code 2 problem. I recently had this issue and the problem turned out to be a small piece of dirt had become lodged in the air inlet to the pressure sensor. Likely this bit of dirt was picked up from outside, through the air inlet pipe and worked its way into the valve.

Once the technician remove the clear PVC pipes, removed the bit of dirt and reconnected everything the hot water heater came back to life. He also mentioned that on newer Polaris water heaters there is an external air filter on the 3″ air inlet pipe so that small bits of dirt don’t cause issues like this.

So, if you currently have error code 1, try checking for dirt in the pressure sensor valves before making that expensive service call.

Google Delisted My Site – Now What?

By Jeff Ivany

Avoid getting delisted

The best advice I can give is to avoid getting delisted from Google. Yeah, I know that’s pretty obvious but if you are trying to run a site to make money, getting delisted from Google can get you the coffin and all the nails required to seal it up. Getting delisted from Google sucks, especially if you are relying on organic searches to find your site. I watched my traffic from organic search drop by over 98% within hours of getting delisted.

Google Analytics graph showing how our visits were impacted by being delisted from Google

Here are a few things to help you avoid getting delisted:

Monitor your site regularly
Upgrade your CMS/Blog software as soon as an update/fix is available
Use strong passwords and change them on a regular basis
Monitor your site regularly

Yes, I said to monitor your site twice. That was intentional and I’ll explain why.

Monitor your site regularly

If you’re not a full time blogger, you probably don’t login to your site on a daily basis. Heck, if your like me and just blog for the helluvit, you’re lucky to login on a weekly or even monthly basis at times. It’s important to keep track of your site. One way to do this is with the Google Webmaster Tools. Once you register your site with the tools, you can see many useful things about your site. The most important one in my opinion is What Googlebot sees. This provides you with a top 100 list of keywords that Googlebot has found on your site.

This is the one thing that I missed and what could have kept me from getting delisted. Googlebot was seeing a bunch of strange terms on my site. Words like popular drug names and related words. I ignored those warnings signs as I couldn’t figure out where they were coming from so I assumed it was something Google had messed up.

If Googlebot sees something, it’s there. You just need to look closer.

Google has a page My site’s been hacked, now what? that has a lot of different things to check on if you think your site has been hacked.

Upgrade Your Blog/CMS

Make sure you keep up to date on the latest version of your blog/CMS as older versions typically have exploitable security bugs. This is what happened to me. I had been lax in upgrading to the latest version of WordPress because it was going to require me to change some minor functionality. In the end, the days and weeks I spent trying to recover my site and get back into the Google listings was much more time consuming than the 15 minutes or so it would have taken to upgrade.

Use strong passwords

I can’t stress this one enough. Having a simple password is just asking for trouble. Make sure that all users have strong passwords, especially any users with escalated privileges (like your admin account). There are numerous sites online that will generate a strong password for you. Also, tools like LastPass make it really easy to generate and use strong passwords.

Don’t forget to ensure your database also has a strong password. Lots of web hosting companies provide web based interfaces for your databases. If your database hasn’t been configured to only allow connections from specific IPs, anyone on the net can connect to it. The problem with this is a malicious person can take random guesses at your database host name and if you don’t have a secure password, they can guess their way into your database without even having to access it through your CMS.

Polaris Water Heater Error Code 2

By Jeff Ivany

2 Replies

Polaris Water Heater error code 2, also known as the Pressure Switch Open failure.

Basically, the Pressure Switch Open (error code 2) indicates that the Ignition Control Module (ICM) is unable to test the air pressure of the incoming fresh air to the unit. This is because it is unable to close the pressure switch to perform the test. Without fresh air coming in, the Polaris Water Heater cannot start a burn cycle as it needs oxygen for combustion. It also needs to ensure it can exhaust the gasses of combustion to prevent Carbon Monoxide (CO) buildup in the house.

The Pressure Switch Open failure is supposed to be a soft lockout (SL) fault. The IGM will try again in 60 minutes and if successful, the unit will resume normal operation.

There are three noted sources of this failure:

There isn’t 24Vac across the pressure switch (no power)
The clear PVC tubing is cracked or has some sort of leak
There is a blockage in the inlet/exhaust air venting

There is now also a fourth possibility. As discovered by Steve, error code 2 can also be caused by frost buildup in low temperature environments (~ -28C or -20F ). There is a technical bulletin available for this issue which describes how to correct the issue. Steve was kind enough to forward the PDF to me that he received from the Polaris Technician.

Polaris Water Heater Technical Bulletin #5002 – Frost Buildup (PDF)

If you have a Polaris Water Heater from roughly June 2008 or newer, error code 2 can also be caused by a dirty air filter. The air filter is located in the air inlet pipe and can be removed for cleaning. An addendum to the Polaris Water Heater user manual is available on the John Wood Water Heater website:

Polaris Water Heater Addendum – Inlet Air Filter (PDF)

If you are still having problems, John Wood provides a form you can use for technical support questions. If you are a US customer you should use the American Water Heaters technical support form. Also note that American Water Heaters has a listing of some Technical Service Bulletins on their website.

Queensway (417) Carling Ave Bridge Rapid Replacement

By Jeff Ivany

Air Conditioning Hydro Usage

By Jeff Ivany

2 Replies

The hot weather started here in Eastern Ontario over the last couple weeks and up until this past weekend, it was usually quite manageable. Unfortunately on Sunday, with the humidity really high at 7am, I caved around 9am and turned on the air conditioning until about 10pm.

Thanks to the Time of Use meter we have and Hydro One’s nifty online electricity usage tool, I’m able to see how much electricity we used to keep ourselves cool(er) for the day.

Graph showing hourly electricity usage for a 24 hour period when the air conditioning is on.
Yeah, that’s a whopping 46.05 kWh used in one day. We are normally around 10-12 kWh/day. Ugh.

Now, the graph above shows the cost per hour to run the AC (and I think the dryer must have been on to cause the spike around noon) but let’s remember that these rates are not the real rates we’re paying per kWh consumed. The real rate for the 2011 Summer Season for Off-Peak is more like 12.00892¢/kWh (based on Urban High Density and before tax).

So, 46.05kWh is going to cost $5.53 (plus tax) and not the $2.72 shown by the graph. Guess we’ll be selecting our cooling days a little more diligently.

The best part of this whole deal is that it was a Sunday and thus the whole day is at the Off-Peak rate. We would have just hidden in the basement all day if it was a week day. :)