Is DE-4820 a drop-in replacement for DE-4800?

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L

lleo

0
May 3, 2014
3
next to my pool
Hi All,
I have been (mostly) a happy owner of an IG 18X40 vinyl pool, and the last two years of my 3 years ownership I have been maintaining it myself, thanks to the detailed and extensive information on this site.
The pool and equipment is original to the house, and some parts required replacing. I fixed leaks, replaced gaskets, replaced pump last year, etc.
This year I started getting DE leaching back into the pool on the returns from the DE-4800 filter. I figured that the grid elements need replacement due to their age, so I opened the filter.
Inside the filter was almost a solid DE block, despite me back-washing it regularly (never had higher pressure than ~15 psi)
So I cleaned the grid with the hose (I also figured out where the bristles of several brush-less brushes that came with the pool went...), but then I could not disassemble the filter further as it seems the standing pipe and just about any joint in the filter is glued together with blue PVC cement.
Thankfully did not order the replacement grid elements yet, but it seems it will be a lot of hacking to take this apart and fix it. Is it common to glue together a DE filter? Is there something I am missing how to take this apart?

Might just bite the bullet and get a complete replacement, which brings me to the subject: is a DE-4820 a drop-in replacement for a DE-4800?
I mean the height of piping and thread size for a VariFlo valve.
Thanks!
 
:wave: Welcome to TFP!!!

The internals should not be glued together. Sounds like your filter might have rivaled the one shown at the beginning of the DE Filter Cleaning Tutorial :D ... which BTW, should be done yearly as backwashing alone will not remove all the DE. And when you do backwash, you should only add about 80% of the full recharge. Here is more info: Use and Care of DE Filters

As to your specific question, I am not 100% sure, but I would think things should line up. Although you are going to have to do plumbing work anyway if you want to use the new unions for the bulkheads.
 
To update the thread on the progress: I found the required measurements in the DE-4820 manual and measured my filter to find that it lines up.
The filter should arrive this week and will switch over to the new.
I have side question related: could a broken filter result in algae growing? Since I noticed that my filter is leaching DE, I started getting green spots in the pool floor and walls. Vacuumed and brushed but they seem to come back a few days later. My water is balanced, by FC is 9-10 and even SLAMed last week. The pump is running about 12 hours a day at 1700 RPM producing about 30 GPM measured by a FloVis I installed. This does a full turn-over of the water every day.
The weather was colder and water temp is around 71-72 so we have not really used the pool.
So does an ineffective filtering cause algae growth?
 
lleo said:
To update the thread on the progress: I found the required measurements in the DE-4820 manual and measured my filter to find that it lines up.
The filter should arrive this week and will switch over to the new.
I have side question related: could a broken filter result in algae growing? Since I noticed that my filter is leaching DE, I started getting green spots in the pool floor and walls. Vacuumed and brushed but they seem to come back a few days later. My water is balanced, by FC is 9-10 and even SLAMed last week. The pump is running about 12 hours a day at 1700 RPM producing about 30 GPM measured by a FloVis I installed. This does a full turn-over of the water every day.
The weather was colder and water temp is around 71-72 so we have not really used the pool.
So does an ineffective filtering cause algae growth?
Click to expand...
Nope. I wish I had bookmarked the thread last year or the year before where someone set the filter on recirculate for some reason and forgot to turn it back. Huge fights ensued with the wife for letting the kids in while they were all dirty. Test results were perfect, no overnight loss, it just lost the sparkle. A week later, he discovered his mistake. It stayed algae free a whole week with no filtration.

Even though the plumbing may line up exactly, don't be surprised if the manufacturer switched the thread pitch on the unions. They do stuff like that out of meanness, I think. So keep the kids out of earshot when you go to install it or their vocabulary may grow in directions you don't want it to. "mrgreen:
 
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