Quote Originally Posted by Yeggim View Post
...You have to kill everything in the water with chlorine and then it has to be filtered out...

...While you're feeding the monster swamp the chlorine it needs, you have to filter it. DE filters are very good at this. As you kill the algae it will settle to the bottom and little by little the water will clear. As your pump circulates the water and filters out the suspended particles, you should be able to see deeper and deeper as time goes by.

Don't kill your motor and pump. If your filter fills up in a few hours, you cant run it unattended. Let that stuff settle. Don't rile it up. Once you can see the bottom, you can vacuum to waste if water replacement is not a problem.

You need to keep your water circulating as much as possible. If your filter is clogging up quick, back off on the amount of DE. Use a little less than the manual calls for.
Thanks for the encouragement I don't mean to be pedantic (and feel free to call me a pompous ass if I am - my boss does, regularly!), but when you say kill it "and then" filter it, do you mean once it's all dead, or filter as I go?

My filter currently clogs in minutes rather than hours, even after stripping it down, hosing the fingers clean, and adding minimal DE - I understood from Ben's earlier post here that live algae will clog a DE filter very quickly, so I've just been recirculating while I try to kill it all off; planning to start running it through the filter when most of it is dead. Water replacement is not a problem, so running the dead stuff to waste is an appealing alternative to back-washing every half an hour!