Pressure increases drastically after two hours.

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S

SCpoolOwner

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May 2, 2008
43
My pump/filter pressure is jumping from 8-10 psi when I start up the pump/filter to 20-25 psi in about two to three hours. If I turn off the pump and turn it back on, the pressure drops back down to 8-10 psi. I thought maybe it needed to be backwashed but I did this just a few hours ago and it's already doing the same thing again.

Any ideas?
 
JasonLion said:
What does your water look like? Something like what you describe is common if the pool is full of algae (or other debris).
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Jason, thanks for your reply!

The water is dirty but not from algae. Over last weekend and today, I pressured washed the pool fence and it threw a lot of dirt into the pool. Today was especially bad!

Also, the starting PSI is now 12 and jumps to 20-25 psi in about 30 minutes. It sounds like the filter is getting dirty really fast and that I'll need to backwash more tomorrow.
 
JohnT said:
How long are you backwashing? 3-4 minutes is not excessive.
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This is my second pool season with a sand filter, so I'm still very green with the backwashing. I've never actually timed my backwash, so maybe I'm not backwashing long enough. I'll usually backwash until the the water in the sight glass is much clearer but not super clean. Then I run the rinse until the water is clean looking.
 
That sounds OK. I think you just have a lot of junk in your water and your filter is doing exactly as it should....it's filtering it out.

I would backwash each time the psi raises by 25%.

Do you have any chlorine in your pool?
 
duraleigh said:
That sounds OK. I think you just have a lot of junk in your water and your filter is doing exactly as it should....it's filtering it out.

I would backwash each time the psi raises by 25%.

Do you have any chlorine in your pool?
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I have chlorine in the pool.

There is just a lot of sediment that was in the bottom of the pool and the water went from clear to completely nasty and super cloudy after pressure washing the pool fence. The water is still super filthy but should clear up in a day or two.

I went ahead and vacuumed out the major areas of sand/dirt in the bottom of the pool directly to waste. After I vacuumed out the rest of the pool, I timed myself on the backwash. I would have normally stopped at 1 minute going by the sight glass. Then I went ahead and backwashed for a total of 3 minutes. After 1.5 hours of running the pump, the PSI has not changed. I feel pretty confident that I wasn't backwashing long enough.
 
Things are slowly getting better. After 5 hours, the PSI slowly increased to about 12 psi, with 8.5 psi being the baseline. I backwashed it for about 2 minutes and the water in the sight glass was nowhere near as dirty as it was when I backwashed earlier today. I started the filter back up and we'll see how long it takes for the filter PSI to go back up.
 

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