"The problem people had in the past is they'd put a pump on there and it would only operate at one point," says Rob Stiles, product manager for IntelliFlo. "Whatever point it intersected that system curve is where that pump would run. What the IntelliFlo does is give the user the ability to completely negotiate that system curve based on what he's working with. The pump basically has 3,050 curves, and it constantly switches between those. Every 16 milliseconds that pump looks at what it's doing and figures out if it's doing the right thing. And if its not, it renegotiates itself."
     Although the IntelliFlo's components are considered a trade secret, Stiles explained a little of how the pump works. "We've come up with this slick way of measuring resistance of the impeller to figure out what the hydraulic situation is for the pump. There's no sensor at all. With speed and power, we can figure out what flow and pressure are. It's part of our patent. It does it all through digital input." Stiles says the IntelliFlo motor was designed specifically for the pump, and is similar to an electric car motor.
     The Ikeric unit yields many of the same results, but is much less technologically complex and does not do the monitoring and calculations that the IntelliFlo's computer component is able to do.
     "What made me think of this was conveyor belts," says Hornsby. "For years, people have been able to turn a knob and slow a conveyor belt down. So I got to thinking, 'There's a motor running that, how are they doing that?' Well, I went and found out." What Hornsby found out was that he could take a Sta-Rite pump and assemble it with a commercial variable frequency drive controller. "All this stuff has been around — this is old technology that I just put to use in the swimming pool industry." The Ikeric motors come with factory pre-sets of low, high and boost. Each of those presets actually has about 600 speeds, and that can be adjusted in the field to fit a given project.