Heaters are the one piece of pool equipment most techs ignore until it fails. By then you're looking at a 3–5 day no-heat service call and, often, a component replacement that could have been a cleaning a year ago. Five minutes per visit and one annual service keeps a heater alive for 10–15 years instead of 6–8.
Homeowner or tech? This is the checklist our techs run. The outside-only items (drips, noise, the display, a gentle coil rinse with the breaker off) are fine for you. Anything that means opening the cabinet, working at a gas valve, or touching a burner tray or a capacitor is tech work.
Every service visit: the 90-second heater walk-around
- Look for drips or stains under the heater and at the inlet/outlet unions. Dried green or white salt residue = small leak, intermittent.
- Listen when it fires. A change in flame noise (on gas) or compressor sound (on heat pump) is the first sign of trouble.
- Check the display for fault codes. Every modern heater logs its last few faults even if the pool is currently running fine.
- Check for insect nests (wasps, lovebugs) around the vents and cabinet from the outside. Florida pests love the warmth; a nest in the burner tray is a no-start fault waiting to happen, and looking inside the cabinet is tech work.
- Look at the bond wire at the lug. Corrosion here is a safety risk and a common code deficiency on older installs; if you see it, a tech fixes it.
Quarterly: the deeper pass
- Heat pump evaporator coil— with the breaker off, hose off the aluminum fins from the outside (gently) to clear pollen, grass clippings, and dog hair. A restricted coil is the #1 cause of heat-pump capacity loss.
- Condensate drainon the heat pump — clear the drip trough and confirm water is exiting, not pooling under the unit.
- Cabinet screws— your tech puts a drop of penetrating oil on any rust-fused screws so they come out when needed, not after they're stuck.
Annual: professional service
- Heat exchanger cleaning. Hard-water Florida pools scale the inside of the tube bundle. At about year 3–5, capacity drops noticeably and the fix is a descale — muriatic-acid flush or professional exchanger removal and soak.
- Burner tray and venturi cleaning: spider webs, dust, and debris cleared by a tech. Dirty burners run rich, sooty, and fail to sustain a flame in gusty weather.
- Gas pressure test at the inlet. Confirms the heater is seeing the BTU it needs. Low inlet pressure is the most common cause of “it used to heat faster” complaints.
- Combustion analysis (optional but diagnostic) — reads oxygen, CO, and flue temp. Flags a heater running rich, fouled, or mis-oriented before it fails.
- Thermistor/thermostat calibration check against a reference thermometer.
- Amp draw on heat-pump compressor vs. nameplate. Rising amp draw is the earliest signal of compressor wear.
The three replacement items on a Florida service schedule
- Pressure switch(gas heaters): 5–7 years. Fails as intermittent ignition lockouts.
- Header gaskets(gas heat exchanger): 7–10 years. Fails as visible water drip.
- Capacitor(heat-pump compressor): about 6–8 years on average, and hot Florida equipment pads can cut that to 4–6. Fails as a “won't start” call, often on a hot summer morning. A tech replaces it.
The homeowners whose heaters die at year 7 and the ones whose heaters last to year 14 are usually running identical hardware. The difference is ten minutes a quarter and one proper service annually.
Rather have a pro run the checklist?
We check flow, the heat exchanger, and the error history on heaters across Palm Beach and Broward, and we catch the water chemistry that quietly eats them. Any repair is quoted in writing first.