First, Dead? What do yo mean by dead? No power? Not producing? Eaten by bear?

I am a little confused by what you are asking.
If you run your pump for 8 hours a day, it will only run for 8 hours a day. You control the % of time it is on via the controls. 100% down to 20 for a stand alone.
"bypass all the salt and chemical testing" It doesnt stop and check the salt, it is always doing it. Plus the plates reverse polarity every couple of hours to "self clean" them. They would need to be cleaned very often if you took that function away.

I have had many IC-40 running for a long time and have not had anyone call me to say it died. I would expect min 3 to 5 years from this if not abused. Again have many out there longer then that.

I tell all of my customers that the money they are saving by not using chlorine tabs ect will eventually go back into a new cell.

The unit is sealed. To open it up and attempt to modify is begging for major trouble. The unit is designed for an approximate life of 10,000 hours. It sounds like you are there.

That $550 isn't that much. 3" Tabs are about $2.50 to $3 a pound, depending on the size bucket. Tacking on the added costs of alk and pH increaser, periodic water dumping or reverse osmosis treatments to get rid of excess CYA that builds up when using them, and your time spent further burdens the actual cost and lost convenience of using tabs instead.

Perhaps we can increase length by modifying some of your targeted chem levels.

1) What size was the cell?
2) What size is pool?
3) What are you normal chem level targets?
4) Where are you located?
5) What is your water temp?

Scott

Do you guys know what goes bad at 10,000 hours or does Pentair just program these units to stop producing at 10,000 hours? To me it just seems like two charged plates and I can't imagine what could go wrong other than needing a good cleaning.

Typically, the plates' coating erodes creating a short. It's a pretty hostile environment inside the cell, chemically speaking. The life span is typical when compared to other brand cells.

Scott

I wonder if anyone on this site has done their own DIY chlorinator.

Here is a link that might be useful: DIY Chlorinator

Another alternative is a liquid feeder like the Liquidor.

Pentair is supposed to be releasing to production the IntelliChem with both an acid and/or liquid chlorine feeder very soon along with several other new products, but as is normal for any company, things sometimes run late for various reasons.

Scott