First of all, I did read the Pool School article and the thread it linked to about cleaning the cartridge.
1. It mentions soaking the cartridge. What do you soak it IN? Like, what container. My cartridge is 200 sq ft, so it is kind of big. I am trying to think of something I can soak it in, besides the bathtub. Do you have any suggestions?
2. We replaced the cartridge at the end of June. After a couple of weeks of trying to get rid of algae, I finally remembered that I have to clean the cartridge. So, on Saturday, I rinsed it out. Everything seemed fine. A lot of cloudy water flowed out during cleaning. I rinsed the inside of the canister as well and drained it. Refilled it, and everything worked fine. The pressure was normal. (Around 10 psi). On Sunday (yesterday), I tried running the vacuum. That's a whole other post, but it is an old Pool Cleaner. We have a Hayward leaf canister that I put in line with the vacuum. There is silt? (some leaf matter, and residue from when they put the new concrete around the pool), so I put a pair of panty hose in the leaf canister, over the blue bag that is in there. It did seem to catch a lot of stuff, but I am thinking it didn't catch it all. The vacuum did not appear to do much. There is still stuff at the bottom of the pool. A lot got stirred up during vacuuming and brushing, so I rinsed the panty hose and put them on my skimmer basket to, hopefully, filter some of the smaller particles before they go through the pump. When I checked it at midnight, the pressure was 30. I couldn't do anything with it before bed, so I turned it off. This morning, I rinsed the cartridge and canister, then turned it back on. I also brushed the pool, which may not have been that smart. Within an hour, the pressure was back up to 30.
Tl,dr: My pressure is usually around 10, after rinsing the cartridge this morning, it went up to 30 within an hour. I am planning to clean the cartridge more thoroughly, but is there anything else I should be doing? Could there be something stuck somewhere else?
3. This cartridge is almost a month old and it already looks a lot like the one we replaced. The top is swollen, so you can't take it off the post that goes up the middle of the canister. The post comes apart, so we take the cartridge out with the top part of the canister post still inside. This makes it difficult to rinse inside the top part of the cartridge, but if we lay it on it's side, we can spray up in there. The last thing I do is put it all back in the canister, open the drain at the bottom, then hose the cartridge in the canister until the water running out of the drain is clear. Also, the rubber around the bottom of the canister is cracked in several places. It was like that the first time we pulled it out of the canister. Is any of that normal?
1. It mentions soaking the cartridge. What do you soak it IN? Like, what container. My cartridge is 200 sq ft, so it is kind of big. I am trying to think of something I can soak it in, besides the bathtub. Do you have any suggestions?
2. We replaced the cartridge at the end of June. After a couple of weeks of trying to get rid of algae, I finally remembered that I have to clean the cartridge. So, on Saturday, I rinsed it out. Everything seemed fine. A lot of cloudy water flowed out during cleaning. I rinsed the inside of the canister as well and drained it. Refilled it, and everything worked fine. The pressure was normal. (Around 10 psi). On Sunday (yesterday), I tried running the vacuum. That's a whole other post, but it is an old Pool Cleaner. We have a Hayward leaf canister that I put in line with the vacuum. There is silt? (some leaf matter, and residue from when they put the new concrete around the pool), so I put a pair of panty hose in the leaf canister, over the blue bag that is in there. It did seem to catch a lot of stuff, but I am thinking it didn't catch it all. The vacuum did not appear to do much. There is still stuff at the bottom of the pool. A lot got stirred up during vacuuming and brushing, so I rinsed the panty hose and put them on my skimmer basket to, hopefully, filter some of the smaller particles before they go through the pump. When I checked it at midnight, the pressure was 30. I couldn't do anything with it before bed, so I turned it off. This morning, I rinsed the cartridge and canister, then turned it back on. I also brushed the pool, which may not have been that smart. Within an hour, the pressure was back up to 30.
Tl,dr: My pressure is usually around 10, after rinsing the cartridge this morning, it went up to 30 within an hour. I am planning to clean the cartridge more thoroughly, but is there anything else I should be doing? Could there be something stuck somewhere else?
3. This cartridge is almost a month old and it already looks a lot like the one we replaced. The top is swollen, so you can't take it off the post that goes up the middle of the canister. The post comes apart, so we take the cartridge out with the top part of the canister post still inside. This makes it difficult to rinse inside the top part of the cartridge, but if we lay it on it's side, we can spray up in there. The last thing I do is put it all back in the canister, open the drain at the bottom, then hose the cartridge in the canister until the water running out of the drain is clear. Also, the rubber around the bottom of the canister is cracked in several places. It was like that the first time we pulled it out of the canister. Is any of that normal?
