Hello all,
Since I bought my current house, my wife and I have been muddling along in terms of our vacuum setup - the pool and skimmer are old and we didn't have most of the parts. We did have the basket, but of course it was brittle and broke during our first year. Since then, we've been trying to piecemeal a system together that works and have had moderate success - moderate as in we've been able to vacuum, just not well.
All the fine folks on this website just walked me through doing a slam and getting rid of all the nastiness at the bottom of my pool, it has since remained mostly clean but when I do vacuum, I want to do it right.
Last week, I sat down and did a deep internet dive and (finally) managed to find what I think is the right basket and vacuum plate. I believe the skimmer to be a Season Master, which requires a 7.25" basket, which is hard to come by. It also has the little tabs on the side for the vacuum plate to slide over. See pictures.
Anyway, I got both the new basket and new vacuum plate and just used them and ran into several issues:
1) The vacuum plate I was using had a 90" degree angle so that I could slide the hose through the skimmer door and right onto it, keeping everything underwater. The new vacuum plate comes straight up and there just isn't enough space to try and bend the hose so I had to run the hose over the railing to the vacuum plate (see picture). I got a slug of air in the pump, though it kept going and had way better suction than normal. Is this okay, or am I going to cause myself issues?
2) When I put the vacuum plate onto the skimmer basket, the suction was incredible - so much so that everything tilted so the basket and plate were not level and water was getting sucked in around the edge instead of through the hose (see picture). Again, it worked better than normal so if this is the way it is then so be it but if there is a way to do this and not have that happen, I'd rather do that.
3) Finally, see the basket picture. Each side of the basket where there is a tab, the plastic is thinner so that it almost creates these little flaps. I have no idea the purpose of them, but that is where the old basket broke and I'd like to avoid that happening again.
Since I bought my current house, my wife and I have been muddling along in terms of our vacuum setup - the pool and skimmer are old and we didn't have most of the parts. We did have the basket, but of course it was brittle and broke during our first year. Since then, we've been trying to piecemeal a system together that works and have had moderate success - moderate as in we've been able to vacuum, just not well.
All the fine folks on this website just walked me through doing a slam and getting rid of all the nastiness at the bottom of my pool, it has since remained mostly clean but when I do vacuum, I want to do it right.
Last week, I sat down and did a deep internet dive and (finally) managed to find what I think is the right basket and vacuum plate. I believe the skimmer to be a Season Master, which requires a 7.25" basket, which is hard to come by. It also has the little tabs on the side for the vacuum plate to slide over. See pictures.
Anyway, I got both the new basket and new vacuum plate and just used them and ran into several issues:
1) The vacuum plate I was using had a 90" degree angle so that I could slide the hose through the skimmer door and right onto it, keeping everything underwater. The new vacuum plate comes straight up and there just isn't enough space to try and bend the hose so I had to run the hose over the railing to the vacuum plate (see picture). I got a slug of air in the pump, though it kept going and had way better suction than normal. Is this okay, or am I going to cause myself issues?
2) When I put the vacuum plate onto the skimmer basket, the suction was incredible - so much so that everything tilted so the basket and plate were not level and water was getting sucked in around the edge instead of through the hose (see picture). Again, it worked better than normal so if this is the way it is then so be it but if there is a way to do this and not have that happen, I'd rather do that.
3) Finally, see the basket picture. Each side of the basket where there is a tab, the plastic is thinner so that it almost creates these little flaps. I have no idea the purpose of them, but that is where the old basket broke and I'd like to avoid that happening again.
