New Pool Filter

The pool's been getting grimmer and grimmer all winter long. I knew the sand needed replacing in the filter, but then the filter was starting to rust through, so I figured I'd wait until winter was over and then change it. The pool guy kept reminding me and I finally did it. I found the filter I wanted online pretty cheap and he matched the price which was nice (except for sales tax) and he delivered it, but I had to install it.

It's powered by diatomaceous earth and I found out I needed to get 6lbs of that before I could install it. So that put me back a day. There was a need to hurry you see since we had a pool play date planned with a classmate of my daughter on Sunday. I finally got it installed on Friday night, and mixed up the DE and coated the filter and had it running all night long. Here's a picture of the new filter. The pool works at a much lower pressure than it used to with the sand filter, this will put less strain on the motor so that makes me happy.

In the morning the pool was blue! It was amazing. I did some quick vacuuming up of some green algae on the bottom and it's been spotless ever since. I'm delighted!

There's a few more pictures of the old pool pump area (with a broken skimmer pump, old crappy sand filter) and the new area and a shot of inside the old sand filter over in the Photo Gallery.

It was also a bumper weekend for wildlife too. When I went to check on the pool and the filter around bedtime it was already dark and I saw a big alligator lizard under a plant. Then I saw a huge king snake that must have been over 18 inches long. Just slinking along across our driveway. Also last week I found a huge black widow spider in the garage, just hanging out on one of the cabinet doors. The spiders have been going crazy recently with the super hot weather, and heading into the house, we've chucked out lots this week. We catch and release ALL spiders around here, even the black widows. We also finally got a pretty o.k. picture of a blue tailed skink, he was hanging out by the back door in the sun.

This afternoon I patched a few holes in the driveway and while I was doing it there was another 2ft long king snake on the hill by the driveway, he even rattled his tail at me! When I got wifey to come look at him she noticed there were TWO of them on the same hill and they weren't the same one we'd seen the other night!

The pool is warm enough

The weather's been lovely for 2 days, the water has been circulating around the solar panels for a week and today the pool is officially warm enough to swim in. It was great!

Not much else been happening around the house. I've been working on clearing out the brush down on the terrace behind the pool, it's slow going when you can only chip wood with the wood chipper when my daughter is awake. There's also a huge old rotten log that's about 3 ft in diameter I'm slowly working my way through to get out of the way. I'm trying to get the whole area ready for her to explore around and perhaps make some swings in the big trees and perhaps a tree house and also my big goals for a huge deck at BOTH ends of the pool, but that mostly depends on if we're going to remodel the house or not.

Soon it's going to be time to install a new pool filter which is going to be a big adventure.

I guess it doesn't look like we'll get much more measurable rain so I'll document how much rain we got so far this year: 32 inches. not bad, but nothing compared to the 60 inches we got a few years ago.

Pool Work

It's been a long time since I blogged here, sorry. Not much has been going on with the house since the spawn arrived since she's been keeping us rather busy. Mostly it's been reactionary stuff when things break and I can't even remember anything breaking seriously enough to warrant much attention (we've been lucky!). About a month ago, the pool pump just kept stopping and tripping the circuit breaker, after a quick afternoon of diagnosis I worked out it was a short in the conduit that leads down from our main panel down to the pool pump (about 50 ft). It could have been worse, I might not have been able to find the problem, but at least I did, but sadly it's a long piece of wire underground. I quickly botched something together using the very thick old wire that used to power our well pump (replaced with the new pump (in 2003 I think)) and promised myself I would talk to the pool guy about it and also talk to an electrician about getting it fixed. Then I got busy at work and the pool guy called and asked why I was trying to kill him and I finally got to calling an electrician to come fix it.

You see I have grand plans for that end of the pool. When we moved in there were two really old rusty intermatic boxes with old mechanical timers in there, the one for the pump worked, the other one for the pool light never did work. When the timer finally gave up the ghost I found a really slick digital one on line for only twice the price of the mechanical one. I got it, I love it. The best thing is that it keeps time for 8 hours during a power outage which is kinda critical where we live. It bothered me it was installed in this crappy old rusty box, but I just couldn't find a new box on line and it was more work than I wanted to replace it anyway. At some point my plan is to have a nice big deck at that end of the pool too, just like at the other end, but it will be more private and have a bench that covers up the pool pump and filter.

Anyway so when talking to one electrician he came up with the genius idea of moving the timers to the side of the house and only running conduit down to the pool pump and everything will be simpler and only 15 ft of conduit to bury. Lovely! I got back to thinking of those crappy old boxes and moving them to the side of the house and searched in earnest and found a beautiful double timer box for not much more than a single box and it came with two timers, which I could keep as spares in case my digital one ever broke, or I wanted to time more high voltage motors to come on. Why am I blogging about this? because it worries me the kind of pride and joy this new timer box brings me and how excited I am to see it finally installed on the side of the house and to tidy up some of the pool wiring. I'll post before and after pictures once it's done.

After the electrical is done, I need to replace the pool filter too. The Pool guy is heavily pushing a DE filter which he says will be awesome and I've found it cheaper online, I'm seriously considering trying to install it myself and cleaning up more stuff around there while I'm at it (like taking out the old busted pool sweep motor).