Clearing a blockage in the skimmer line

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L.

How about a pic of your pump showing the input plumbing....

Do you just have one pipe coming into your pump? Or do you have several that you can select with a valve or two??

Have you checked your impeller? Have you opened and cleaned your filter?

Thanks,

Jim R.
 
lockmc said:
The pipe with the yellow tongue going into it is the line to the skimmer box and where the first picture is (about half a meter down).
Click to expand...
Lock,

Just so we're on the same page, the skimmer box is on the suction side of the pump so it's the line coming out at the bottom of the page and I can't see much of it in your picture. I can't see a yellow tongue in it. Can you back up a little and show me more of that line. The photo's you showed earlier look like this is a check valve flapper or that is stuck closed. Looks to me that it would be in the picture since that's only about 1.5'. There's no possibility you're looking at the discharge line that goes up vertically off the pump case is there? Looks like there's a check valve 1.5 ' into that line.

Chris
 
Hi guys.
Sorry for the late reply!
We have made progress!

So using a cheap snakey camera I bought off eBay, I was able to see that it looked to be blocked not far from the pump.... so we had to rip up concrete.
See attached images.

I spoke to a mate of mine who installs and maintains pool and he said that those 1 way valves are not required and should never have been under the concrete in the first place.
Not sure if that is the case, but I'm still having an issue.
We have connected the pipes back together without these 1 way valves (decided to remove the 1 way valve from both the solar and filter line), and the filter pump now doesn't pump unless it is primed.

So, if I turn the solar off for a day and was to turn it back on, then it works fine as there is water still in the lines I guess.
However, when I turn on the pump that was initially blocked, there's no water flowing unless I prime it manually.
Why would 1 stay primed but not the other?

Sounds like maybe those 1 way valves are needed after all? They were slightly above the water line.
We did put a shut off valve (not sure what the correct terminology is) on the line that had the blockage (you can see it in the first picture just at the corner of the concrete cut). To get it going, I would turn that off, fill the pump with water, and then turn the pump on. As I would turn the pump on, I would open the valve and it would start pumping, so perhaps I need to change that to a 1 way valve (it had one originally)- apparently that is quite easy as you just change the center of the valve.
 

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Those that you dug-up look to be check valves we don't recommend using. Maybe just what they had back in the day. Placing under the concrete was not the brightest idea. :hammer: We typically use check valves much like the one I have in my own equipment pad pool build (link in my sig).
These check valves can be inspected and maintained later on. Often times they are placed before the pump to prevent the suction line from draining backwards into the pool when the system is shut off.
 
Yep I think they are check valves. The pool is only about 10 years old. They are spring loaded and leaves been caught in the spring and then the back side of it had leaves all backed up and stuck, so we would never have cleared the blockage without cutting up the concrete.
Yes, so the two valves you've shown- the one on the left was replaced with a manual valve with a handle but was told that we can change it to that one (which has a flap in it)- would that solve my issue of it not staying primed?
The one on the right we also put a new one in (that is after the pump on the way to the filter) as the flap was busted.
 
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