I’ll never see any advantage of cartridge over sand. A sand filter takes 5 minutes to clean with no mess and effort and just 50 cents worth of water, compared to 30 minutes with a cartridge filter and probably using almost the same amount of water to hose the filter off. 50 cents worth of water to clean a filter, rather than 30 mins of disassembly labor, any day of the week.I'm a cart guy, biased as snot, but fair is still fair. It's the Chevy / Ford/ Mopar debate when all we need is to get to the grocery store. All 3 will get you there fine, and our bickering about the rest of it is purely personal preference.
All 3 filters pick up your yard debris as a constant, no matter which way you go. That crud gets trapped and filters even finer crud, so IMO, your yard decides how fine you can filter. The only question is how quickly it's 'slightly dirty' and filtering to the yards parameters when the filter is cleaned.
My taking the carts out are the equivalent of you doing a deep clean (or same with DE). It should be done once a season for all. Carts don't have the little cleans in between the big ones.50 cents worth of water to clean a filter, rather than 30 mins of disassembly labor, any day of the week.
DE does seem to be a pain. Don’t know why anyone would want that bother.My taking the carts out are the equivalent of you doing a deep clean (or same with DE). It should be done once a season for all. Carts don't have the little cleans in between the big ones.
I clean mine after the spring just because and also at the end of the season just because. Going by PSI / flow, I could probably go 2 years before it needed it. If using hairnets, maybe 4 years. Lol.
But the key is that yours isn't a chore to you. It's a terrific choice if you like it.
It's not bad at all. I usually don't backwash all year and it takes 40 minutes when I'm winterizing to pull the grids and clean the entire filter like new to get ready for spring. Now if you want to talk about open vacuum DE systems....yeah that's a pain.DE does seem to be a pain. Don’t know why anyone would want that bother.