Cloudy pool 'fixed' by three bottles of clarifier, actual problem was 30 bucks

Started by tampapoolguy · · 3 replies
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#1
Had a customer last week paying a pool store for clarifier every week for a month, water still hazy. First thing I did was pull the cartridge filter and it was caked solid, like concrete in the pleats. Hosed it out good, ran the pump, water was clear in about a day. No chemical trick fixes flow that's not happening.

Small win but it's the same story every season, seen it a hundred times. Somebody sells a bottle instead of asking when the filter was last cleaned. If your water's cloudy and you're dosing chlorine fine, pull the filter before you buy anything else. Cartridge, sand, DE, doesn't matter, check it first. Saved this guy maybe 60 bucks a month and he was about ready to just believe it was a losing battle.

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#2
This matches what I tell people every time cloudy water comes up, filtration and chlorine fix cloudy water, clarifier just glues particles together temporarily so they look gone, it never addresses why they were suspended in the first place. A caked cartridge is basically the pool trying to tell you it can't turn over the water properly and no bottle changes that.

I run gunite with liquid chlorine only, no cartridge to deal with, but my Dolphin Premier does the fine filtration work instead and I check those bags every couple weeks in pollen season because they load up fast and once they're packed the whole unit is basically just idling instead of actually pulling debris. Same principle as your customer's cartridge, if the thing meant to trap particles is maxed out, water stays hazy no matter what you dump in it.
#3
Same deal with my sand filter, pressure creeps up 8-10 psi over a few weeks in summer and I just don't backwash till it hits that range instead of on a schedule, saves water and the media actually does its job right up until it's maxed. Cheapest "test" for whether it's dirty is just watching the gauge, no bottle required.
#4
When we first bought down here the guy who did our pool inspection before closing told me the exact same thing about a caked filter, except in our case it was DE and the previous owners had apparently never had it serviced, water looked like skim milk. So this story tracks for me completely.

Tampapoolguy, quick question for you, when you pulled that cartridge how long had it actually been since it was cleaned. I ask because I'm curious if this was a once-a-year neglect situation or if the guy was cleaning it regularly and it still caked up fast, that matters for what you tell him going forward. My pool runs under a screen cage so I genuinely don't get much load on my filter, but I'd imagine an unscreened pool with any tree cover nearby is a different animal entirely and might need cleaning way more often than people assume. Good luck with it, sounds like you saved him a chunk of money either way.