Thanks for all of the great information in this thread. I, too, am new to all of this. I bought a house with a vinyl liner salt water pool. So...what's a sand filter? How do I know if I have one? My pressure is reading at 25, is that an issue?
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Thanks for all of the great information in this thread. I, too, am new to all of this. I bought a house with a vinyl liner salt water pool. So...what's a sand filter? How do I know if I have one? My pressure is reading at 25, is that an issue?
A sand filter will look like a big dome with a drain plug toward the bottom on one side and usually a knob or screw-in fitting on the top. See the third pic in this thread http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthr...gasket-install for a typical sand filter. There will be a round piece coming from it with a handle attached that can be moved to different settings, and if you take the top off, you'll see the filter full of sand. The other options are cartidge filters, that have removable cartridges that have to be cleaned, and DE filters, which look a lot like sand filters but someone else will have to describe the inside to you because I've never used one.
Whether your pressure reading at 25 is okay or not depends on what pressure the filter runs at when it's clean and whether the pressure gauge is actually working. When you turn the pump off, does the gauge go back to zero? You really need to figure out what type of filter you have and clean it (clean cart if it's a cartridge, backwash if it's a sand or DE filter) and note where the gauge shows after it's cleaned and the pump is turned on. Then you need to clean the filter again each time the pressure rises 8-10 psi over the "clean" reading.
Edit: I moved your post to its own thread so you'll get more views and helpful information--if you have a question, it's generally best to start a new thread than to tack onto the end of a different poster's thread, especially if it's very long like the other thread is.
Janet
Thanks, so much Janet. It's like the more that I read, the more the matrix becomes legible. I'm pretty sure that I don't have a sand filter. I have a filter with 4 paper-looking coils in there - that's got to be the filter cartridge. The company that opened my pool said that I'll have to take each one of the cartridges out and hose them off after a little while. The gauge reads zero when the pump is off. When we opened the pool, the gauge read 20 and now it's at 25. Sounds like I'll need to clean those coils soon. Any advice on cleaning them?
Here is an old thread talking about cleaning a cartridge filter.
(By the way, I'm going to change the name of your thread to Cartridge filter question so the people who have that type of filter are more likely to look at your post and offer advice.)
http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/archive...php/t-606.html