Help! I'm sick of vacuuming.

After initial opening and cleaning, my water was cloudy/clear for a while and I kept vacuuming every few days because I had brown spots all over the bottom. After clarifier and more vacumming the water is now crystal clear but I still get the brown globs all over the bottom the day after. I am now wondering if my Hayward sand filter is broken. Pressure is normal, around 17, and it never seems to need backwashing. Do you think silt and fine particles are just going straight through? I only run it 12 hrs a day and the dirt shows up after it has been running for a few hours. I have lived here 3 years and never had this problem before. Advice?

You could try vacuuming to waste if you are able to, so the dirt does not pass through the filter. Another option is some people on this board and others add DE to their sand filter to increase filtration with their sand filter. Only add enough DE to raise your filter pressure 1 psi add in small amounts and wait inbetween adding more.

Could be the particles arent all getting caught by the filter during vacuum, and they are settling down overnight. Then you wake up to "more" algae, which is just stuff that was stirred up or pushed thru the filter and settled down again.

Best bet is to vacuum to waste. Ive altered my opening procedure to take this into account.......I shock the heck outta the water and let it all circulate for 48 hours. Then I do a vacuum to waste to get everything off the bottom. Instead of vacuuming first, which just seems to stir stuff up and have it re-settle.

-Chris

I always vacuum to waste. I have done it 6 times in the past month and always the next morning when the filter comes on I get more stuff on the bottom. Now that the water is clear I figured it would stop but I figured wrong. Would broken laterals cause this?

We had similar problem that I thought was algae but after shocking and maintaining at high levels still had this stuff. (Water was too cold to get in to check if it was slimy or gritty so I assumed the worst.) It was gritty when I could finally stand to get in to feel it.
Next thing that was suggested in the forum post was the spider gasket on the sand filter was bad...sure enough it was. We had performed no maintenance on the filter in the 9 years we have had pool. We ended up replacing sand since we had everything torn apart anyway and wanted to check the laterals too.
Debris is much much less. We still have some because I have a dog that runs across the top step to drink and wash her feet and belly while she is at it. AND it has been bone dry with dust, dust and more dust!!!

Dumb Question, but how do you "vacuum to waste"?? I see the handle where it says "waste", but am I supposed to open the valve on the bottom of the filter so it exits the filter??

when you set your filter to waste it exits out the same hose as your backwash.

We're having a similar issue here in Eastern PA. Lots of brown stuff on the bottom, especially in the little dips and creases. In our situation it is most likely not algea but pollen and tree dust. There are some wild cherry trees near the pool and the prevailing winds deposit the wilted tree flowers all over the pool surface. This stuff eventually sinks to the bottom where it loks brown.

At first I thought my filter was blowing sand back into the pool but once the water was warm enough to get in I was able to collect some of this debris and take a look at it. Decomposing tree flowers.

I found out that the more the dogs and I swim, the more we stir up the water and the less of this stuff is in the pool. So hey, borrow a couple of big dogs and let them dive after Frisbees :)

Thanks for all the replies. After one more vacuuming I put my Polaris back in and it keeps things stirred up enough that I haven't seen too much brown stuff. It's still too cold to check out the feel of the bottom. I don't think my old Hayward filter has been serviced in a long time so I may tear it down and change the sand and check out the laterals. This is my third summer in this house and I have never seen this before. I love this forum though. It is a real blessing to all of us relative newbies.