Welcome to Pool Care Secrets - A Regular Weekend Warrior’s Guide to Keeping It Blue
We purchased our first home nearly a year ago, and with it came an in-ground swimming pool. I was excited to do a lot of swimming, because the weather here in Sarasota, Florida is gorgeous year-round. Little did I know that I’d spend more time caring for my pool than swimming in it.
It’s this constant struggle that led me to put together a compendium of the Web’s (and print’s) best (and worst - where noted) information on taking care of that big hole in your patio, the one that insists on being anything but clear, blue, and inviting.
PoolCareSecrets is somewhat of a misnomer, because there are NO SECRETS to having a sparkling blue swimming pool. At least, that’s what they keep telling me.
Filed at 6:48 pm under Chris' Pool Blog and Happy Pool and Filter Maintenance by Chris
Greetings again, fellow pool care warriors! It’s been a while since my last post, but like they say, “No news is good news!” Our pool’s looked perfect for over a month now. I was very curious about what the pool place would say when I delivered my water sample today, since I’d been slacking on regular liquid chlorine shocks and brushings and the other usual pool care maintenance.
I learned that my pool did contain some chlorine, but it was at 1.5 ppm, which is just below the recommended 2.0 - 4.0 ppm. The reason for this was that my stabilizer level was still rather high. They only prescribed a 1.5 gallon liquid chlorine shock, along with 18 pounds of Calcium to boost the hardness of the water.
I was glad to remember, while I was in the store, to mention to Ken, the friendly guy who helps me each time, that I’d been noticing a lot of gurgling sounds and tiny bubbles (in the wine) coming from one of my circulation jets. I suspected an air-leak, but didn’t consider that its location was at the top of my cartridge filter. Never having really noticed that the backside of my filter was wet most of the time, I told Ken about this and he said that it’s there that the air was creeping into my system.
I purchased a new O-Ring, made by Hayward, my filter’s manufacturer. They didn’t have any generic O-Rings for my filter, so I ended up shelling out $20 for a loop of rubber. I recommend seeking out the cheaper, generic alternative. Below are some pictures of the procedure I followed to change out the O-Ring seal on my cartridge filter. You can click each image to enlarge, and I’ll report back in a few days about whether or not this fixed the air-leak.
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The new O-Ring and the silicone-based lubricant
Close-up of the silicone-based lubricant.
Applying the lubricant to the O-Ring
Top of the filter with the new O-ring and bleeding the air from the system.
