Dead Alge Vacuming/ Cleanup

[kd0g720]

Last year we struggled with dead alge. We have a cartridge filter which sucks for things like this. But anyways, it wasn’t much, so we just bough socks to put over the skimmer. This worked fine last year, but this year our tarp ripped over winter. We have a lot of maple trees around our pool so we always open our pool late. So we went to open our pool last week, and it was at this point we saw all the leafs had fell into the pool and alge was everywhere!!! We killed all of it, and the water is clear if the pump is off and the alge isn’t being stirred up. But I kid you not... on the entire bottom of the pool is an inch deep pile of alge!!!!!! The slimmer socks we used in the past fill up nearly instantly with the vacuum, we’ve tried panty hoes/ leggings over the cartridge, and that works for about 5 minutes, before it’s coated with alge and just blows the alge out the jet-nozzle. Does anyone know a good solution to effectively remove the dead alge?

 

[Richard320]

Last year we struggled with dead alge. We have a cartridge filter which sucks for things like this. But anyways, it wasn’t much, so we just bough socks to put over the skimmer. This worked fine last year, but this year our tarp ripped over winter. We have a lot of maple trees around our pool so we always open our pool late. So we went to open our pool last week, and it was at this point we saw all the leafs had fell into the pool and alge was everywhere!!! We killed all of it, and the water is clear if the pump is off and the alge isn’t being stirred up. But I kid you not... on the entire bottom of the pool is an inch deep pile of alge!!!!!! The slimmer socks we used in the past fill up nearly instantly with the vacuum, we’ve tried panty hoes/ leggings over the cartridge, and that works for about 5 minutes, before it’s coated with alge and just blows the alge out the jet-nozzle. Does anyone know a good solution to effectively remove the dead alge?

With a cartridge filter, it ain't gonna be easy. And it'll be a mess.

You can remove the cartridge and then take the drain plug out and install a length of pipe and a backwash hose. Then connect the vacuum and start vacuuming. It'll pull all the sludge up and discharge it out the backwash hose. That's vacuuming to waste, which you've no doubt read about with envy. You'll lose a bunch of water in the process, too, so you probably ought to start filling a couple hours before you start, so the water is as high as you can get it.

 

[RobertScalchi]

If you wish to vaccum to waste then do it if you do not live in an area where there are no water restrictions, water is cheap, and or rain is ample.

I installed a "vacuum to waste" valve in place of my drain plug on my cartridge filter system. It technically doesn't directly bypass the cartridge filter, but at least allows you to attach a hose and vac to waste to your area of discretion.

What you may want to consider as filtration redundancy is placing the skimmer sock or hairnet on your skimmer basket, with your cartridge filter, and a Duda Diesel 5 micron or 1 micron bag with an elbow in place of your return jet. This will catch all the fine stuff that the hair net skimmer sock or cartridge filter doesn't pick up.
When you have a significant amount of algae the skimmer socks are are going to load up quickly that's just the nature of it until you keep rinsing them and it becomes less and less within each interval.

If you decide to go with the bag on the returns jet and the skimmer sock combo, you probably could just eliminate the cartridge all together as a matter of convenience, rather than drain the cartridge tank and removing the cartridge each time, you would just have to clean the skimmer sock and the 5 or 1 micron bag.

 

[kd0g720]

Well if we have to backwash it luckily we hard lined all our pipes to our pump and have valves to easily backwash the filter.

Thank you guys so much for the help! I think we’ll try to get as much out with backwashing, and then and then try to use the filtration process mentioned above Thanks!!!

 

[domct203]

How do you know the algae is dead?