What Not To Do To Your DE Filter

[tenax]

holy crap..no insult intended, but methinks i'm very happy i have a sand filter

[Katy-Texas]

Thanks all. Yep, agree with Waterbear! I now resolve to tear down and clean every 3 months !

Another question, the cloth on the fins was rough, almost crunchy, felt a little like rough grit sand paper when sliding the fins down beside each other. Manual said that may get "Liming" on fins where get some scale buildup (initially filled pool with hard tap water, just this week gettig a water softener installed). So I think that is the problem. Manual said if "Liming" to bath fins in mild HCl soln. They are tall so I was thinking of doing this next tear down in a clean tall plastic garbage can.

Agree?

[imfignewton]

You can buy a solution to soak your elements in. It will be acidic and have something in it to break down oils on the elements. A large plastic garbage can from Sams Club works great for soaking DE elements.

[huskyrider]

Actually I didn't think it looked that bad, I've seen them much worse after several years of service without being broken down and cleaned. They simply backwashed over and over again. These folks explained that we used to go for months between backwashing and now it's gone to a matter of days and we always made sure to add our DE after backwashing, LOL!!!
I have to somewhat disagree with waterbear. IMO a DE filter should be broken down and cleaned after every third or fourth backwash.

See Ya,
Kelly

[waterbear]

Actually I didn't think it looked that bad, I've seen them much worse after several years of service without being broken down and cleaned. They simply backwashed over and over again. These folks explained that we used to go for months between backwashing and now it's gone to a matter of days and we always made sure to add our DE after backwashing, LOL!!!
I have to somewhat disagree with waterbear. IMO a DE filter should be broken down and cleaned after every third or fourth backwash.

See Ya,
Kelly

Huskyrider, let me ask you this....what happens when you run a DE filter without DE in it? the grids foul, right? Why is running unfiltered water
BACKWARDS through the grids not going to foul them just as easy?