Vacuuming to "waste"? How is that done?

[Jon Burk]

Greetings pool mavens.

After years of dodging the bullet, my wife finally talked me into buying a house with a pool. It was a short sale, and the pool was pretty green.

Two weeks in, I've got the pH where it needs to be (7.4), and I'm shocking the heck out of it. It's not green anymore, just brown from dirt. Lots and lots of dirt.

When it settles, there is a coating of sand and dirt covering almost the entire bottom of the pool. I try to vacuum it up, but I don't get to far before the filter PSI shoots up. So I have to clean the filters :x , wait for it to settle back down, and go again.

I've seen articles that mention "vacuuming to waste", where instead of sending the vacuumed water and crud through the filter, it just gets runoff. That seems like what I need.

So, how exactly would I do this? The only obvious drain mechanism I can see is the plug on the bottom of the filter unit. Other than that, I don't see where I would bypass the filter. Or do I need to rent some sort of external unit?

 

[JohnT]

Welcome to TFP.

Unfortunately,vacuuming to waste isn't usually an option with cartridge filters.

 

[whoozer]

That's not what I was told. I've spent the whole day trying to rig it up for my cartridge filter.......seriously it won't work?

 

[JohnT]

That's not what I was told. I've spent the whole day trying to rig it up for my cartridge filter.......seriously it won't work?

You can do it with some creative plumbing. It just isn't a normal feature of your filter. Essentially you want to pump from the pool, but go to a waste line instead of to the filter. You can do it with a 3-way valve or a pair of valves.

 

[whoozer]

How about plugging one of 2 returns and taking out cartridge then having a line on the 2nd jet go to waste?

 

[257WbyMag]

Some cartridge filter setups are plumbed to send water to "waste". Mine is and by turning a valve, I can route water to a 2" line that has been plumbed with a T into the sewer clean-out. But this is not a waste setting in the sense that a sand or DE filter might have because there is no multiport valve. Instead the water that is sent to the waste line is done so after the filter and not before. So in a cartridge filter setup, there is no way to bypass the filter and this is what you would want to do if vacuuming to waste.

It would be nice if you had a buddy who would loan you their robot for a day.

 

[taekwondodo]

Almost all cartridge filters have a 1 1/2" "plug" at the bottom of the canister. Remove this plug and hook up a hose to it, run the hose to where you want to drain, drain, then remove the hose and put the plug back in.

 

[jule]

Hello,
We have a Harmsco Betterfilter cartridge filter with a 1 hp Hayward motor servicing an inground pool with vinyl liner and steel walls. The picture shows the piping that allows me to pump to waste. I do not have cartridges in the tank when I do that. The water is filtered only through the basket in the motor/pump (black section) housing which does get emptied and rinsed if/when it accumulates debris. White pipe coming up through cement near the house is the line from the skimmer, white pipe in front leading into cement is return to the pool. I run a hose from the gray pipe section to vacuum to waste. The orange valve is the flow control for the waste line. The red valve is the flow control to the filter tank which is OFF when I'm vacuuming to waste. So the water is not sent through the tank and I'm not needing to clean filters during this process. Lots of work and time saved! This filter system was in place when we bought our house in 1982. Several years ago my husband set up the gray piping to save me hours of work in opening the pool. The canister holds 14 paper cartridges, which have to be ordered every year. This year they were $70.00.

 

[whoozer]

Yeah I am debating replumbing mine now so mine can go to waste before the filter as well. I have tried using the bottom plug from the filter but it didn't work the diameter was too small on mine and the water would not go out fast enough causing the pump to suck air. I am going to try and get a valve setup between the pump and filter today to make a waste line as otherwise I just continue to pump dead organics back into the pool. I also thought about affixing to my jets and plugging one jet but decided that I would rather not have any junk going through all of the piping again, easier to just have it go straight from the pump out.

 

[jule]

whoozer,
If you can set it up to vacuum to waste you won't regret it. I struggled for YEARS getting ours clean by vacuuming through the filters on start up. We don't have leaves but rather some pine needles and a lot of pine pollen in the spring. We don't cover the pool in the winter, (huge mistake I know and this year I may order one) so we do end up with a small worm pile in the center bottom over the winter. Until the end of 2007, I worked 12 hour shifts with various days off, so if I didn't get to the pool early enough in the spring, it got green as well. Not fun to do the vacuum, filter clean, vacuum routine after a 14 hour day/night with kids and other duties to attend to. Hubby takes care of pump install and storage, and winterizing the pipes, but water maintenance has always been left up to me. I won't even consider vacuuming through the filters on start up now, even if it means draining it down and adding fresh. I'm switching from Baquacil to chlorine this year, waiting to get a water sample on Monday after filling the pool. It's green right now and I won't vacuum until I know where it's at chemically and if I need to do anything before using the chlorine shock.

We live in the country and run about a 90 -100 feet of house out to the other side of our driveway that's lined with grass, weeds and scrub trees. Nothing has ever died there from the waste water. Our drinking water is better than any of our relatives who have city water.

Good luck with yours!