Hello everyone. Here is my story.
Pool has been open about a week.
Backwashed yesterday morning and added new DE through the skimmer. I let my Aquabot vacuum crawl around the floor of the pool for a couple hours and then pulled it out to clean the bag. The bag was full of what looked and felt like wet sand. In all there was probably about a handful of this stuff coating the bag. At first I thought it was just a lot of dirt (I have a mesh cover so I was thinking a lot of dirt got in over the winter and settled to the bottom. When you hold it in your hand it feels like wet sand.
Concerned that there was a hole in my filter, I opened it up and pulled out the grids. I could not find any tears. Here are a few pictures of the grids. These pictures were taken several hours after backwashing, adding DE, and letting the filter run. I'm not sure what a properly functioning filter is supposed to look like when covered in DE, but to me it does not look like there is enough DE on these grids. That would support the theory that it is getting back into the pool. View attachment 49516View attachment 49517
A couple of other things about this that may or may not be important:
There is definitely a small leak on the air relief assembly on top of the filter. I've ordered a new O-ring to fix that and am awaiting its arrival.
There is also a small air leak in the pump. I see extremely tiny little bubbles (have to look really close to even see them) through the window. Not sure yet what is causing this. It's nothing major and the pump runs fine, but I'm not sure if this could be contributing to the DE problem.
After I took this photo, I put the filter back together, backwashed, and re-filled the DE. I watched the return jets to see if there was any DE being spit out. I couldn't see anything although I'm not sure if you would be able to see DE coming out there.
Like I said, maybe this is just a lot of dirt, and the DE is not a problem, but i thought I would check with you all since I don't have too much experience. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Brian
Pool has been open about a week.
Backwashed yesterday morning and added new DE through the skimmer. I let my Aquabot vacuum crawl around the floor of the pool for a couple hours and then pulled it out to clean the bag. The bag was full of what looked and felt like wet sand. In all there was probably about a handful of this stuff coating the bag. At first I thought it was just a lot of dirt (I have a mesh cover so I was thinking a lot of dirt got in over the winter and settled to the bottom. When you hold it in your hand it feels like wet sand.
Concerned that there was a hole in my filter, I opened it up and pulled out the grids. I could not find any tears. Here are a few pictures of the grids. These pictures were taken several hours after backwashing, adding DE, and letting the filter run. I'm not sure what a properly functioning filter is supposed to look like when covered in DE, but to me it does not look like there is enough DE on these grids. That would support the theory that it is getting back into the pool. View attachment 49516View attachment 49517
A couple of other things about this that may or may not be important:
There is definitely a small leak on the air relief assembly on top of the filter. I've ordered a new O-ring to fix that and am awaiting its arrival.
There is also a small air leak in the pump. I see extremely tiny little bubbles (have to look really close to even see them) through the window. Not sure yet what is causing this. It's nothing major and the pump runs fine, but I'm not sure if this could be contributing to the DE problem.
After I took this photo, I put the filter back together, backwashed, and re-filled the DE. I watched the return jets to see if there was any DE being spit out. I couldn't see anything although I'm not sure if you would be able to see DE coming out there.
Like I said, maybe this is just a lot of dirt, and the DE is not a problem, but i thought I would check with you all since I don't have too much experience. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Brian