New2Me said:
It's now been about 2 months since our pool has worked properly
Went back and re-read your post. Somebody did something two months ago, and won't fess up.
No, it was me!
My husband caught a bad case of pneumonia in October, and landed in the hospital for 10 days. I am the one who handles most of the pool upkeep, and needless to say, the pool was the very last thing on my list of priorities at that point.
We happen to have many beautiful oak trees in our backyard, and every fall, all those leaves end up in my pool. When my husband was ill, I started ignoring the leaves and everything else. Oh, and the Aquabot broke as well. Once things settled dwon again, we realized that we had a pump prime problem, due to leaves clogging up the plumbing. Our previous pool repair guy replaced some of the suction side plumbing, as we were having big problems with the check valve in front of the pump. After that, things just never worked properly, and around Thanksgiving, the pump failed. My husband installed a new impeller, and the pump worked again, but now we could not get it primed at all.
My husband tells me that once he replaced the impeller, the priming issue got worse - so I think our very next step is for him to take apart that pump and make sure everything is as it should be. Retracing our steps, if you will. Next, we are going to implement steps that some of you have mentiond, such as checking the lines separately for priming issues, and the idea that Dave had in one of the recent posts.
Looking back over the past year or two, and knowing what I do now - it seems like we've been developing a suction side issue for some time. For a very long time, when the pump has started up, we'd get increasing amounts of air in the lines that would be expelled out of the pool returns into the water. Then as time went on, it would take 5 - 30 seconds for the pool to prime. From reading past posts, this seems to indicate a leak somewhere, and is not normal behavior for a system.
As for the worms, who the heck knows?? :|