Pentair Intellibrite 5G Retrofit/Upgrade: 26W->40W, WLED, and Wifi Control

My father's Pentair Intellibrite pool light has been gradually fading for the past 5 years so we finally decided to replace it this summer. The Youtube channel "The Hook Up" has a great video on rebuilding the Pentair Intellibrite, and this guide is primarily based his work. Make sure to watch it here before following along:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJoWJOY6IR4

Also, please note that this tutorial will be working with Mains voltage. Always check that your breakers are off and you know the potential risks when working with high voltage. 120VAC is enough to seriously injure or kill you.

Pool Light:

1. Donor Pentair Intellibrite pool light
2. Replacement Intellibrite silicone gasket
3. Aluminum sheet: 12x6 inches
4. WS2811 (or other compatible) high-power addressable LEDs
5. Thermal paste and/or pads

Control Electronics:

1. 120VAC to 24VDC power supply
2. DC-DC step-down converter (24V to 5V)
3. ESP32 microcontroller
4. Weatherproof housing for the above electronics

Also needed, depending on your model light:

1. Marine sealant/adhesive, we used 3M 5200

Pentair sells their Intellibrite lights in 120VAC and 12VAC models. In actuality, both models use 12VAC circuitry, with the only difference being where the transformer used to do the step down from 120->12 is mounted. With the "12V" model, the transformer is housed in an external box wherever your pool electronics are located. The 120V model is more compact, as Pentair has glued the big transformer directly inside the light housing with high strength marine potting compound.

With the 12V model, it is possible to simply remove the transformer and access the wires going through the light housing. We unfortunately had the 120V model, which required drilling out the transformer from inside the housing to enable us to run DC along the original pool light wires.

It took around 3 hours to drill, clip and pull out the windings before we were able to lever out the iron transformer core, all while making sure to not greatly damage the metal housing. This is still doable but it was a nasty surprise, and we needed to shell out an extra 26$ for the white 3M 5200 sealant to re-waterproof the cable inlet to the housing.

Although the original Pentair light was rated for 26W, we wanted to upgrade the power and chose to use two 20W modules for a combined 40W. These were purchased on Aliexpress for a combined 28$.

There is a lot of flexibility with such addressable LED modules; just make sure to choose the right voltage and power for your application. It would be a good idea to stay at or above 12V, as using lower voltages could result in a limited max power from the long cables' voltage drop.

The aluminum sheet was cut to fit the mounting holes of the original copper PCB and serves to conduct heat away from the new LED modules to the casing/outside pool water. We bought a 12x12x0.019 inch sheet from Home Depot for 12$ and used half of it.

An exact template for this was made in CAD to make sure the measurements were correct. The outline for this was printed out on printer paper, stuck on the center of the metal sheet with glue stick, and metal shears were used to cut along the outline. Do make sure to drill on top of a piece of scrap wood when drilling the bolt holes and socket access holes to avoid the sudden torque from tearout.

The file is available below and sized for US letter-sized printer paper; the aluminum sheet will be slightly longer than the paper, so just center it length-wise. Cut along the solid lines and fold along the dotted ones.

Neither the LED modules nor the aluminum sheet will have perfectly flat surfaces. The Pentair light already has heat-conducting pads between the copper circuit board and housing, so they can be reused between our aluminum sheet and the housing. The LED chips and their attached PCBs were different heights in our case, so computer thermal paste was used under the LEDs and 0.5mm thick thermal pads were used under the PCBs to attach the LED modules to the aluminum.

This section on control electronics will only provide a cursory overview of how we set things up, as there are already many relevant resources on the web. For beginners to ESP microcontrollers and WLED, it would be highly advisable to experiment first with lower risk and lower voltage circuits, and watch some tutorials such as this one from the "Core Electronics" channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYxctjukehY

For our setup, we chose an ESP32 with an external antenna for the increased range and got a compatible distribution board with screw terminals to securely fasten wires. This also allows us to easily disconnect the ESP32 when flashing or updating the WLED firmware via usb cable.

Since our LEDs could use anything between 12-24VDC, we went with a 24VDC power supply from Meanwell. Although expected power would only be at 40W for the LEDs + ~5W for the microcontroller, the 75W power supply we bought gives us a generous margin for safety and potential for adding on other circuitry in the future.

The 24VDC is stepped down with a separate converter to the 5V input required for the ESP32 board. The one used here can also regulate current between 0-3A, but we just set the current to maximum as this feature is not needed.

All the above electronics were mounted in a waterproof enclosure next to the original switch box for the lights; the three mains wires as well as the three pool light wires were passed through a cable gland to that box.

The antenna was simply left in the enclosure box and not mounted outside as planned, as our home wifi was discovered to be strong enough for a reliable connection in that position.

The electronics in this step were bought from Aliexpress, adding up to 24$. The 220x150mm enclosure was bought on Amazon for 15$.

Make sure to close up your electronics enclosure and the pool light properly. It would be a good idea to test the pool light's waterproofness without the electronics initially, especially if the cable connection required additional sealing as in our case.

Hopefully this tutorial was useful, and best of luck to anyone else upgrading their Pentair pool lights :)