- Feb 6, 2015
- 7,888
- Pool Size
- 12300
- Surface
- Plaster
- Chlorine
- Salt Water Generator
- SWG Type
- CircuPool RJ-45 Plus
What did you do to your pool today?
- Thread starter Patrick_B
- Start date
- Nov 12, 2017
- 12,687
- Pool Size
- 12300
- Surface
- Plaster
- Chlorine
- Salt Water Generator
- SWG Type
- Pentair Intellichlor IC-40
OK, I mispoke earlier, THIS is the post that concludes the Filter Plug Down the Drain saga.
As I mentioned, the Pentair plug does not come with an o-ring. That arrived today, so I wanted to swap that in asap. Which meant emptying the filter again. But ah-ha! I had a new plan, born from the previous fiasco. I took some scraps of ABS I had laying around, and added a few elbows from Lowes, and fabricated this today:
And it fits into the drain hole in my pad (the one that sucked down my previous filter plug), like so:
Now, when I unscrew the drain plug, this ABS gizmo swings into place, under the filter plug's hole, and catches the water, diverting it right down the drain hole! Because the gizmo gets placed in the hole first, before I unscrew the drain plug, there's no way for the plug to get to the hole! I even sewed in a stainless steel screen to keep the plug from getting into the gizmo, which is something I could probably manage to do somehow:
The other thing I did differently was to leave the filter's purge valve closed! Last time I had it wide open, and that created the flood of water leaving the filter body that snatched up the plug. With the purge valve closed, the water glug-glugs out in a much more controlled flow, and one that doesn't overwhelm the gizmo.
It all worked really well, and probably only a few cups of water and a quarter cup of crud escaped onto the pad. The majority of both went right down the drain. Before, all that river rock would get flooded and filled with gunk. You can kind'a see in this pic how little water and gunk escaped.
So with any luck, I'll be able to use this gizmo for 20 or 30 years, once a year. So worth the time I spent on it today. And maybe it'll keep me from ever losing that plug again!!
And then I went for a nice swim!!
As I mentioned, the Pentair plug does not come with an o-ring. That arrived today, so I wanted to swap that in asap. Which meant emptying the filter again. But ah-ha! I had a new plan, born from the previous fiasco. I took some scraps of ABS I had laying around, and added a few elbows from Lowes, and fabricated this today:
And it fits into the drain hole in my pad (the one that sucked down my previous filter plug), like so:
Now, when I unscrew the drain plug, this ABS gizmo swings into place, under the filter plug's hole, and catches the water, diverting it right down the drain hole! Because the gizmo gets placed in the hole first, before I unscrew the drain plug, there's no way for the plug to get to the hole! I even sewed in a stainless steel screen to keep the plug from getting into the gizmo, which is something I could probably manage to do somehow:
The other thing I did differently was to leave the filter's purge valve closed! Last time I had it wide open, and that created the flood of water leaving the filter body that snatched up the plug. With the purge valve closed, the water glug-glugs out in a much more controlled flow, and one that doesn't overwhelm the gizmo.
It all worked really well, and probably only a few cups of water and a quarter cup of crud escaped onto the pad. The majority of both went right down the drain. Before, all that river rock would get flooded and filled with gunk. You can kind'a see in this pic how little water and gunk escaped.
So with any luck, I'll be able to use this gizmo for 20 or 30 years, once a year. So worth the time I spent on it today. And maybe it'll keep me from ever losing that plug again!!
And then I went for a nice swim!!