What is this? Related to in-floor cleaner?

[kchacker]

First time pool owner, bought the house 1.5 years ago...still learning something new about it every day.

I've struggled to figure out how the in-floor cleaners work but am slowly digging up videos, pics and threads while tying it all together. My purpose is to a) better understand this thing b) see if I can get it to do a better job of cleaning c) see if I can get it to stop blowing stuff all over when I vacuum!

I have an A&A top feed actuator, I'm guessing it is a six zone (I've never popped it open) with 21 pop-ups in the pool, six in the spa. The spa pop-ups don't make any sense to me, but I'll get to that later. I do not have any wall returns, everything returned to the pool comes through the floor or spa spillover. The spa does have wall returns as one would expect but I have that figured out. I have two pumps, but only one that runs most everything. The second pump runs the separate fountain only.

There is a valve that sits in front of my in-floor actuator, which I will attach a couple of pics of. The pics make it look like the actuator and the stuff in the red box are attached but they're not...at least not above ground. I don't know what it is. Can someone help me figure it out?

 

[jblizzle]

Likely selects between the floor returns and the spa returns. Both appear open in the picture. You have to close off the floor system to heat and run the spa.

Looking again, nevermind what I said. Why not just turn the valve and see what happens?

 

[kchacker]

Likely selects between the floor returns and the spa returns. Both appear open in the picture. You have to close off the floor system to heat and run the spa.

Looking again, nevermind what I said. Why not just turn the valve and see what happens?

Yeah, the floor returns and the in-wall spa returns are on the automated valve at the top right of the wide view.

I've turned the valve before but I needed a refresher so I just went out and ran it for 10 minutes each on all three directions.

With the valve closed facing the check valve (white arrow pointing left), the floor returns in the spa never pop - it just skips them.
With the valve centered, all floor pop-ups engage in succession.
With the valve closed opposite the check valve (white arrow pointing right), all floor pop-ups engage...but the spa seems to spill over more water in this setting than it does in the centered position. That could just be my mind playing tricks on me, but it sure looks that way.

This is where my lack of knowledge of plumbing (about my pool and in general) has me stumped. Once the water enters the actuator valve, isn't that really the last decision to be made where the water ends up? Six tubes coming out of it, and the water runs through each one in succession? How could that valve prevent water from coming through the in-floor pop-ups in the spa?

 

[jblizzle]

One of the floor zones must be split between the pool and spa and the valve decides how much is sent to the spa pop ups (check valve side).

 

[kchacker]

One of the floor zones must be split between the pool and spa and the valve decides how much is sent to the spa pop ups (check valve side).

After further investigation, I think you're right. I think the one of the zones is split between the pool and the spa. If I turn off the check valve side (which apparently feeds the spa), the pop-ups in the deep end seem to run twice as long compared to having the valve closed the opposite way. When it is split between the two, the pop-ups in the pool stay popped for the duration of spa cycle as well.

I ran it for most of the morning with the spa pop-ups disabled, and it cleaned the pool much better than it had before when I had it split. Our pool is abnormally dirty right now after two storms this week and there is quite a bit of leaves and dirt in it. The debris that usually remained in the deep end (where the pop-ups were running twice as long) moved to the other end of the pool and the dirt seems to have disappeared.

I'm going to run it like this for a few more days, and manually flip it to get some fresh water running through the spa. It does appear that I can isolate the spa water from the pool water using this valve and I didn't think that was an option. May come in handy during the winter when I want to keep the spa warm for a few days in a row without dumping it back into the pool.