Hey Dirk, I’m assuming you’re getting a bunch of leaves and pool bottom junk sucked directly to your cartridge filters versus caught in bag (at the pool). All that debris stays in the water until you clean the filter, breaking down and potentially impacting your chemicals.
We get a ton of leaves during fall so it feels like nearly every day the bag has to be cleared, I can’t imagine all this getting sucked to the filter and staying there until it’s cleaned (every three months).
Do you have any chemical imbalance issues?
1p1 beat me to it. You can use an inline trap to minimize what gets to the pad. But you're forgetting about the pump's basket. That's where most of my leaves end up. It's still something to clean, but it's a heck of a lot easier cleaning that basket than it is dragging out a pressure-side vac to clean its bag.
But you're absolutely right, a suction-side vac does put some added gunk in the filter. I figure that's what it's for! I clean my filter once a year, and I once went two years and the cartridges were not even fully covered, let alone full. I would say I have a much lower than average "gunk load." My pool is relatively clean. I do get leaves in the fall, but like I said they end up in pump basket. Actually, most of them end up in the skimmer basket, as my skimmer works well, so the majority of leaves never make it to the bottom of the pool.
I owe all this to the original landscaper who, by design or accident, planted very pool friendly plants around my pool. It's quite a forest, but most of it is evergreen and just doesn't shed all that much. If you're having trouble with certain plants making your pool cleaning tasks a pain, well, then get rid of the plants! Seriously. Replace plants until you don't have to work so hard. There are varieties out there that just work better with a pool.
Having experience with only one pool, I imagine other pools must vary in terms of how well a suction vac would work. And I expect they wouldn't work well at all if the pool's bottom was getting regularly trashed by something that was smaller than the grid of the pump's basket. So maybe some other type of vac would be better.
Lots of ways to skin this cat.
Oh, and no, I don't feel my chemistry is unduly affected by my suction vac and what gets into the filter. It must be affecting it some, because it is in there getting chewed by chlorine, but I have an SWG and it maintains my FC and I don't feel I'm running it excessively.
