Quote Originally Posted by mas985 View Post
First the whole concept of turnover for residential pools is flawed (see pump run time study in my sig). There is no minimum turnover required for a residential pool so minimum flow rates are really only important for things such as heaters and SWGs and SPAs so you really don't need to bother trying to figure it out unless you have one of these features.

No need to. A pool can get by with as little as 2 hours of run time (see study).
I couldn't agree more Mark,
The chlorine kills what it can in under a minute, what isn't killed by chlorine has to be filtered out. How quickly should this be filtered out? should it be a hour or 8 hours? If the filtration isn't good enough then the whole lot is just recirculated so you spend on electricity achieving very little.

The only thing I couldn't see in your pump run time study is a turbidity measure of how clear the water was. It seemed to me it was just an observation?
I filter my water 24/7 using my energy efficient system, this achieves a better result than a short pump run time for several reasons.
1. The dirt and debris actually go into the skimmers because the system is running so a lot less makes it to the bottom which is what happens when a system is off.
2. This slower rate filtration improves the filtration process by a factor of 4 so catching much finer particles ie it actually removes the fine stuff and improves the turbidity. Conventionally this was 5NTU now 0.5-1 NTU.
3. The power consumed by a conventional system in 2 hours of running is sufficient to run my pool for 24 hours.

Why did turnover rates ever become popular as they tend to be the focus rather than the really clean clear water achieved by proper filtration which begins when you half the hourly flow rate figure written by the manufacturers on their filter information.