No questions here necessarily but I did want to share my experience of my initial cleaning of my pentair 420 cartridge filter over the weekend. just a bit of background. shortly after the pool was completed, the PB needed to come out and repair the scuppers that flowed into the pool. that required sawing the coping on both therefore getting considerable dust from the concrete into the pool which of course led to the PB's maintenance guy having to come over and vacuum the pool twice. at that time i asked the PB to have the maintenance guy clean the filter. he said that it would be fine since it was a large filter. so at that time, i noted the pressure on the filter and jotted it down. this was back in late february/early march. since then, we have had 3 pool parties with considerale bathers but that was it. typically it's just the wife and i. nothing that i would consider a large bather load by any means. also, a chocolate lab that loves to swim whenever we let her. the problem there is with the dog hair that enters the pool. GROSS.
so i had notice that the water over the past couple of weeks hadn't looked as "polished" as it had previously. my chemicals that i test for using the TF100 are all in line and always have been. i went through the process of shutting everything off and removed the top of the filter tank. i was SHOCKED at how the cartridge filters looked.
all 4 of them had dog hair, dirt, sand, muck (for the lack of a better word) and grass clippings stuck to mainly just one side of them. i could actually scrape this mixture off with my hands. in a word, DISGUSTING. so after getting them hosed off and then soaking them for an hour in diswashing detergent (cascade) and then hosing them off again, they were all back to as white and clean as i could get them. i reinstalled everything and got everything to working again with no leaks and turned the pump back on. the couple of things that i noticed immediately was the pressure dropped about 5 psi and the water flow into the pool and over the spa overflow was considerably better than before. i was actually amazed at that. :-D. i'm sure that since this was the first time and it had been 6 months since the filter had been installed, that was part of the issue or at least hope so. 
so from the FWIW department. i read numerous post on here that some cartridge filtered pool owners didn't notice any increase at all in filter pressure before cleaning their cartidges. everyone with larger cartridge filters might want to take notice of that. so moving forward, i will schedule two cleaning of the filters during swim season just to be on the safe side and chalk this up to a great lesson learned.
BTW, the water looks better today than it did before the cleaning.
so i had notice that the water over the past couple of weeks hadn't looked as "polished" as it had previously. my chemicals that i test for using the TF100 are all in line and always have been. i went through the process of shutting everything off and removed the top of the filter tank. i was SHOCKED at how the cartridge filters looked.
all 4 of them had dog hair, dirt, sand, muck (for the lack of a better word) and grass clippings stuck to mainly just one side of them. i could actually scrape this mixture off with my hands. in a word, DISGUSTING. so after getting them hosed off and then soaking them for an hour in diswashing detergent (cascade) and then hosing them off again, they were all back to as white and clean as i could get them. i reinstalled everything and got everything to working again with no leaks and turned the pump back on. the couple of things that i noticed immediately was the pressure dropped about 5 psi and the water flow into the pool and over the spa overflow was considerably better than before. i was actually amazed at that. :-D. i'm sure that since this was the first time and it had been 6 months since the filter had been installed, that was part of the issue or at least hope so. so from the FWIW department. i read numerous post on here that some cartridge filtered pool owners didn't notice any increase at all in filter pressure before cleaning their cartidges. everyone with larger cartridge filters might want to take notice of that. so moving forward, i will schedule two cleaning of the filters during swim season just to be on the safe side and chalk this up to a great lesson learned.
BTW, the water looks better today than it did before the cleaning.
