A new chlorinator was due. Putting our excess solar to work was the opportunity.
Why we upgraded
We were due for a new chlorinator. That made this a good time to look at the pool equipment as a whole—and at how we wanted to power it.
At BeeHive, we have periods during the day when the house is supplied, the battery is full, and there is still solar energy left over. That excess goes back to the grid. Meanwhile, the pool has a useful, predictable job to do: circulating and treating the water.
We want to bring those two things together.
Replacing the chlorinator gave us an opportunity to overhaul the setup with that goal in mind. The new equipment includes an AstralPool CA300 filter with glass media, a Viron XT P320C variable-speed pump, and a Halo 25 chlorinator with automatic acid dosing and a pH probe.
The variable-speed pump gives us more flexibility in how we run the pool. The next step is to connect its schedule to what the house is actually generating, while still meeting the pool’s filtration and treatment needs.
Spare sunshine should have a useful job. Ours has a pool to look after.
The plan is to use excess solar after the home battery is full, with cheap overnight electricity as a fallback when there has not been enough sunshine. The replacement was due; making it work with BeeHive’s energy approach was the opportunity.
How much running does the pool actually need?
Our pool holds around 45,000 litres, so keeping it circulating and properly treated is a daily job.
There isn’t one magic number of hours. The right runtime depends on pump speed, actual water flow, chlorine demand, weather and how much use the pool gets. A variable-speed pump can run longer at a lower setting, but it still needs enough flow for the chlorinator and effective circulation. AstralPool’s guidance makes that distinction clear.
We will tune the schedule around those needs and our water-test results. Cheap electricity is useful; the pool still has to stay clean.
What makes this interesting for BeeHive is that some of that daily work could happen while we are exporting excess solar. The sunshine is already there. The pool already needs to run. We would quite like them to meet.
An app is only the beginning
The Halo Chlor GO app talks to the controller over Bluetooth when we are nearby, and through AstralPool’s cloud when we are not. What is missing is a supported way for BeeHive to join that conversation: there is no public API for the Halo.
The community has built two routes around that gap: a Home Assistant integration that talks to the Halo over Bluetooth through a small proxy near the equipment, and a newer one that uses the same cloud connection as the app.
I am grateful that people build and share these integrations. They make it possible to bring otherwise separate equipment into one household view.
But it is another example of the gap between a product having an app and a product being ready to participate in a connected home. The app gives us one way to interact with the pool. We would like the house to have a supported way to interact with it too.
Firmware 2.7: sunshine available, cooperation pending
Updated 13 September 2026: we now know where the restriction sits.
Our Halo controller is running firmware 2.7, and that turns out to be the sticking point. Since firmware 2.4, the Halo will not accept a new Bluetooth connection until AstralPool’s cloud has vouched for the official app. That closes the local Bluetooth route, and it also blocks the one-time pairing the cloud integration needs to fetch its login. The door is there; we just do not have the key.
None of this changes a fairly straightforward ambition: let the house tell the pool when there is spare sunshine.
For now, the practical fallback is a timer starting at midnight, when our cheap electricity window opens. That window runs until 6am; whether it covers the pool’s full daily needs will depend on the runtime and settings we establish.
So the plan is excess solar. The current workaround is an alarm clock.
Somewhere between a roof producing electricity and a pool needing electricity, we have encountered a software negotiation.
Watch this space. The sunshine is ready. We are waiting for the “smart” bit to catch up.