FamilyGuy said:
Based on my experience, a chemical cleaning isn't necessary very often unless it's needed to eliminate the Grid set for high PSI/excessive Backwashing-required issues.
I went through this stuff last summer when I had what was for me, a tough problem that was causing the same symptoms with my D.E. Filter PSI. I had a "pink algae" problem in the pool, which isn't an algae, but an organic problem. It required me to change/clean the D.E. Grids numerous times last summer until I identified the root cause and used a chemical product to eliminate the organic issue in the water.
What was tough for me, were a couple of factors:
- During the time of the problem, the pool water looked great. The reason for that was due to the D.E. Filter capturing all of the organic issue in the water ("pink algae") so the water had no appearance of the problem.
- No local pool store tech or manager was able to identify the exact culprit in my pool. One regional Supervisor for "Leslie's
Pool Stores did identify the problem as an organic but was unable to steer me in the right direction as to a solution. This was after I had provided all of the information that I could, including observations of a pink-colored substance on the grids when I was cleaning them.
The problem that I had, was that I didn't have a chronic problem with the "pink algae", so the other visual indications weren't present in the pool, such as a pink slime on the gunite surfaces or cloudy water issues.
I found the root cause with a Google search in another forum. The poster described the exact symptoms that I was encountering in my pool. The only problem was the poster didn't mention the product he used to eliminate the organic issue in his pool.
After further searches online, I found what cured the problem which was a product called "Pink Treat", produced by United Chemicals. It worked but also converted my pool into a "bromine" pool which masks normal chlorine testing so I wasn't able to determine proper chlorine levels. Draining the pool got me back to normal operations.
Many thanks to "Scott Hamilton" at United Chemicals for helping me identify and fix my "summer of '12" pool problem.
I have since learned that there is another product, called "Yellow Out" that is advertised to treat pink algae. There's another product called "Yellow Treat" that, I believe, is the same composition. From what Leslie's has said, this product eliminates pink algae and doesn't use a bromine-based chemical in it's composition.
The way I looked at this, is the old saying that "it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good", since I learned a lot about D.E. Filters and the cleaning & assembly of the filter.
The only real surprise that I encountered last summer was that there aren't many pool techs/advisors, that have heard about pink algae so that slowed me down during the learning process.
Enjoy your pool
