Some Weird Things Out on My Pool Route Over the Years

I’ve been out in the field since 1988 servicing pools. Over those years I have seen a lot of odd things happen out there. Some are just perplexing. Others are downright deadly.

Ever clean a D.E. filter and then arrive the next week to a major algae outbreak? Wait a minute. I thought cleaning the filter would prevent that. I asked chemistry expert Bob Lowry about this phenomenon a while back and he said that the Diatomaceous Earth itself was the issue. Huh? It seems that one component of D.E. is dead algae. So D.E. contains algae. That would explain why after cleaning a D.E. filter you may experience an algae outbreak.

What I have been doing after cleaning a D.E. filter and recharging it is to bring the chlorine level up to a higher level to prevent this. But sometimes even then algae will form in a newly cleaned D.E. filter. Switching to Perlite will of course prevent this and I don’t see this too often with other filter types.

I will cover the dangerous things that I have experienced so that you can avoid getting injured and possibly killed out there. The most dangerous thing you will run into is when the pool return line is compromised and pressure builds up to dangerous levels in the filter.

There are a few different ways I have experienced this out on my route. The first time this ever happened to me was due to the customer turning off the pool return by deadheading the line. This usually can’t happen unless there are two failures. One is a poorly designed pool where the return line can be shut off, in my case the water feature and pool return were controlled by one Jandy valve. This can also happen with a pool that has a spa and pool return with one valve controlling both but is less common because a mistake can be seen right away. The second fail point is that the safety tab on the back of the Jandy valve must be broken allowing for the valve to be overturned and deadheading the plumbing.

In my case, the customer’s son went to turn off the water feature. He turned the valve with some violence and snapped off the safety tab on the back and continued to turn the valve until the “off” portion faced the actual pool return. Thus deadheading the plumbing. Fortunately, I was there the day after the party before the pool turned on. Right, when I turned the pool on I saw the pressure gauge jump to 40 PSI and quickly turned off the system.

The skyrocketing PSI on the pressure gauge is your only warning in most cases. It goes up from 0 to 30-40 in a matter of 1 second. Like the old WW2 submarine movies where the gauges go crazy when a depth charge hits the sub and water starts flooding a chamber. It’s pretty scary and you only have mere seconds to respond. After that, the filter will likely explode. This can severely injure or kill you.

Two other occasions were when a heater part broke off and got jammed in the check valve on the return line. Another time debris clogged up the return line at the salt cell after a routine filter cleaning. Anytime the return line gets compromised a potentially deadly situation arises. If you can’t safely turn off the timer quickly enough, get far away from the filter and try to find the main circuit breaker, and turn off the pump from there. Never try to turn off the timer if more than 10 seconds have gone by. At that point, the filter could explode at any moment.

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