Help Needed with Cartridge Filter! (total ameteur here)

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Dek117

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Jun 22, 2013
3
Long Island, NY
Hi there,

We are pool owners by default- it happened to come with our house when we bought it from the bank. We aren't quite sure what we're doing!

We bought a new filter 2 years ago and had a new liner put in this year. After the new liner went in and the pool was filled with water we did not open it right away, we put the cover on and let it sit for a few weeks. After the trees finished flowering we opened the pool. It was just about black! We put the filter together and turned it on and within a day it was crystal clear albeit in need of a good vacuum. Since that time we had a new baby, so a few weeks went by without vacuuming. Then when we got ready to vacuum we noticed that the pressure was going up on the filter, it would go down when we backwash but goes right back up shortly after. The return water coming out of the eyeballs is strong right after backwashing but weakens very shortly after. The skimmers have very little suction, we are not able to vacuum on filter mode, only on backwash mode and it's wasting water as well as overflowing our backwash well.

Today we removed the cartridges and rinsed them- they were visibly dirty and looked visibly cleaner when we were done. When we turned the filter back on after cleaning them it was great! Pressure stayed low on the gauge for hours! The output water was nice and strong for hours! (both were previously shooting up immediately after backwashing) Then when we looked about 8 hours later the pressure was up on the gauge and the output was low, so we backwashed. Pressure went back down and all looked good- for about 10 minutes then shot right back up.

I have no idea what's wrong here! I'm sorry for my lack of knowledge on filters and the vocabulary, any help you can give would be greatly appreciated- and I thank you in advance for your patience!
 
Welcome to tfp, Dek117 :wave:

What brand and model filter do you have?

What does your water look like?

It sounds like you might be fighting some algae in the pool and the filter is just doing it's job. I am a bit confused by your mention of backwashing a cartridge filter, since that is not done as far as I know. If you can post the filter info I asked above, I am guessing that you might have a DE filter?
 
Thanks for the quick respsonses-- I guess I should have given a little more of a back story:

We bought a DE filter 2 years ago. We spent 2 summers backwashing and putting DE in just like the manual said. We had one (apparently crooked) pool guy come and open and close our pool those two years. Then last summer we used someone else to close our pool and came home to a WHITE patio....that guy told us that we had a cartridge filter that was FILLED with DE. Apparently we thought we had a DE filter (owners manual, receipt etc all said DE) but that's not what we were given. We had been putting DE in and backwashing all summer long and the previous pool guy never opened up the filter so we didn’t know until this new guy came. So that's the story with why we backwash-- we didn’t know you weren’t supposed to with a cartridge filter. We are doing that out of habit...we'll stop now...

As for the filter itself it's not a Hayward- but when we bought it we were told that it was exactly like the Hayward, but it's a generic model. The company that we bought the filter from is a bunch of CROOKS!! (apparently they are aplenty on Long Island) and there is no way to get any help from them on the filter and since we spent quite a bit on it we're hoping not to have to go buy a new one-- we did have two summers of crystal clear pool when we were stupidly putting the DE in!!

The water is cloudy blue. It was green last night (we brushed down the sides since there was algae) and it turned green, then we shocked it and the filter has been on and it's now blue but a bit cloudy. It seems like the filter IS working, just at an extremely abbreviated level. I should also add that the cartridges were dirty when we took them out, but they were in tact. The pool guy that we used last year told us that they were not ruined from the DE that we were putting in. We are tempted to put DE back in the darn thing since it was working until we knew about the cartridges!

Thanks for your help and patience!
 
You can find helpful articles on pool filters in Pool School and how to clean them. :goodjob:

If your water is clouded and has algae, you will definately have to clean the carts more often than not until you can clear the pool.
 
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