Hi,
I live in Suffolk, UK. We’ve just moved to a house with a swimming
pool. The previous owners did not leave the instructions for the
filter system and oil fired pool heater so I would certainly
appreciate as much help with this as you guys can give me.
For starters, I wonder if you could tell me what all these functions
mean on my filter system, I think I know what some of them do:
- Filter - Normal operation, filter the water, pump back into the
pool
- Waste - Dump water out of the pool into the waste (in my case it’s
pumped into a ditch next to the house 
)
- Closed - Erm, switched off?
- Backwash - Is this to clean the filter? When do you need to do
this? Where does the dirty water go? Same place as for ‘waste’?
- Recirc - ??
- Rinse - ??
And there is no timer switch that I’ve seen, yet another puzzle…
I was thinking of putting some car radiators inline with the pump so
that I get some heat when ambient temperature is higher than the
water temperature but I should probably get basic operation down
first.
Thanks
Nick.
Hi, new to the list
March 21st, 2003 · 3 Comments
Tags: pumps
3 responses so far ↓
1 Neva Marjory // Mar 28, 2003 at 7:56 pm
Hello Nick. Welcome to the Club!
On your multiport valve you will normally use “Filter” to filter the
water from the pool and return it to the pool, “Backwash” to reverse
the flow through the filter (typically for 2 minutes every week or
two) and dump the resulting water with the filtered out materials
from the top of the sand bed, “Rinse” for 10 seconds after
backwashing to resettle the sand bed by passing clean water through
the sand in the normal direction, but also to the waste
drain, “waste” to pass water directly from the pool to waste (perhaps
after prolonged heavy rain if the level has gotten too high)
and “recirc” to pass water from the pump back to the pool bypassing
the filter.
Make sure you stop the pump before changing the position of the
handle.
Better keep quiet about where the waste water goes, it’s considered
to be contaminated and the Environment Agency might have something to
say if they knew it was going into a ditch.
Not all systems include a timer, depends on a number of design and
use factors.
I could give you some tips on procedure to minimise the amount of
water you lose vacuuming and backwashing the pool, chemical use, etc
if you contact me direct. I’m in Cambridgeshire, so if you travel,
you’re welcome to arrange to visit for a chat and demo.
Steve.
2 Neva Marjory // Mar 31, 2003 at 6:22 am
The radiator idea won’t work!
The amount of heat needed to warm water is substantial, and the gain
from the difference between air temperature and water temperature you
would acheive by passing the water through car radiators would be
insignificant.
The pool flow rate is much greater than radiators are designed for so
you would need a large bank of them all in “parallel” to cope with
the flow. In practise this would lead to some radiators being under
greater pressure than others without pressure and flow balancing
valves.
The chlorine might well corrode the metals in the radiators, or, more
likely, all the couplings. In any event you would certainly introduce
contaminants into the water.
You would also need a “differential controller” and motorised valve
(see my answer about solar heating) to bypass the system
automatically whenever there was no solar gain or the radiators would
radiate!
Steve.
3 kevin_100 // Apr 1, 2003 at 1:10 pm
Steve,
Thanks for the info about the valve positions. I just need to find out at
what pressure my filter needs backwashing and if/when you replace the sand.
It’s called a ‘permenant media’ water filter - does this imply you don’t
have to top it up with sand? It certainly looks like you can’t easily get
inside it.
I started the filters for the first time yesterday. The water is very green
and you can’t see the bottom. Do I just need dump a large dose of chlorine
in? The previous owners had left to Algicide so I gave it a dose of that.
Cheers
Nick.
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