This morning, I went to do my regular backwash. The worst mistake of my life. The pool has been working fine all season, except at the beggining where I also couldnt prime it and the company who built my pool came to prime it for me with a secondary pump that hooked up to the skimmer. After i did my backwash, when i went to put the sand filter head on rinse, water started gushing out of the clamp of the filter head like crazy. I have to include that despite water gushing out everytime I turned the pump on, the pump was still priming at that point. In the end, I unscrewed the pipe connections to the head of the filter, opened the filter and cleaned around the main gasket there, and took it to the closest pool supplies store to try to get a replacement ( my filter remained full of water when it was open ) i could not find a replacement, but i got some gasket lubricant. Went back homed, lubed up the gasket. Put it back in place real well ( gasket still looked pretty new anyways no cracks and still springy ). Now the nightmare began. No more water gushing, but no pump priming. When I try to fill up the pump through the pool drain intake ( inground vynil pool), the water just flows backwards into the pool and i end up filling my pool and finding myself with a pipe thats just as empty, even tried to let it fill up for 30 minutes. No change. When i try to only open the skimmer valve instead, and fill that up, well the water goes nowhere. It just stays in the pump basket and fills it up instantly, if i turn off the hose, the water drains out of the pump basket kinda slowly. If i close the pump now, bubble will appear from the suction side, and when i turn it on, it just instantly empties the pump basket down to around 3 inches of water, with absolutely not a drop of water coming in ffom suction side. Ive tried to let it run, this pump is usually sensitive to running dry and turns of, but it just keeps going with those 3 inches of water going no where. Ive tried everything i can think off so far. Bought a rubber strap wrench to tighten all connections, tried insense trick to look for leaks on all connections, tried dumping loads of water with a bucket to try to full up the pipes, everytime i open the pump and try again you can hear the soujd of empty pipes from the intake ( suction ) side. Please someone come up with something for me.