Can find cause of all the dirt/sand in the pool

[nicole12]

Well tonight DH got into the pool with a garden hose and he sucked out as much of the debris as he could find. It's filter sand and some DE. It's as fine if not finer than kids play sand.

Check out this picture of it. I had the garden hose in the foot bucket to see if I could catch some of it. Not the greatest picture. The large straight item in the picture is a 1" blade of grass so you can see how fine this stuff is.

So for now our plan of action is to continue to use the garden hose to vacuum the debris out of the pool and see if it gets less and less. I have a new spider gasket on order so as soon as that comes in I'm going to replace it. Can't hurt. The old gasket did have some questionable spots to it. Looked cut up in some places.

Will frequent backwashing also get rid of some of this sand dust?





The reason why we used the garden hose is because our pool only has 7500 gallons and to vacuum to waste it would only take minutes to lose an inch. So it would have been quicker but we were trying to save water.

[matt4x4]

I would think the fine stuff is settling to the bottom of the filter, so backwashing will actually prolong it's stay inside the unit by pushing it up into teh mass of sand again only to have it work it's way back down.
Just keep doing what you're doing, it's probably from the new sand. It does sound like it's getting to be less though.

[poolrx]

Nicole,

Glad you found out what the problem is. At least you know it is just sand and not algae or something worse. I wish I could be more help but I am not really familar with sand filters. Matt sound pretty knowledgable and hopefully he can help you until you get it corrected.

Joe