The last 2 nights I have back washed and put new DE in my filter to find it raising from 16 to 30 in matter of hours. My pool is currently being shocked and is a slight green. I did have a DE leak this last week that I have fixed. Could it be that the pump is picking up the extra DE in the pool and causing it to raise the pressure/overloading the filter? Should I backwash and not add my recommended amount and see if it still goes up that fast. I have seemed to get most of the old DE out of the pool but not sure about the deep end because of the water clarity. Or could the filter just be grabbing that much stuff out of the water and has to be back washed that often. When back washing it is a dark dark brown when coming out. Thanks again in advance.
Question on DE backwashing. TOO often??
- Thread starter Fugitive37
- Start date
The brown DE in the sight glass tells you the filter is doing it's thing correctly. When you are done with your de-swamping, I suggest you hose off the grids. Backwashing doesn't remove all the dirty DE, just most of it. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a significant cake buildup of old DE when the de-swamping is done.
Scott
Scott
Your subject says "Too often":Fugitive37 said:
I don't claim to know much and can't speak to shocking, but generally speaking anytime the pressure gets around 30psi, we just clean the DE filter & add new DE:
Sometimes we just open the DE filter and take out each filter and hose it down.
Sometimes we just open the DE filter and hose it down, leaving the filters intact.
Depends on bad it is and how long since the last cleaning. Pretty much after bad wind storms and rainstorms it's a given we have to clean the filters.
When I first opened the pool the filter had not been ran in over a year and DE was left in it and would not backwash. I opened it and did a good cleaning. I cycled it again last night and the pressure went up 15 or so by morning. I just did a backwash and opened the filter and sprayed all the left over out the drain plug. There was a bunch still left in there. I'm guessing it just isn't all coming out from the high yield of stuff from the water.
Are you hosing off the filter fingers that are attached to the top of the filter (not sure what they're called but look like fingers/tentacles etc.) of all the old D.E.? I know you said your cleaning out the filter but i had to clean out my filter and fingers and replace the d.e. three times before i got a consistent psi level of about ten. I noticed vacuuming makes the psi rise a lot as well. I have the same pump but a smaller hayward d.e filter.