Why does my swimming pool filter stop working? It pumps fine at first then slows down, almost to a stop? Whats wrong?

Help! Our pool filter worked for a while then slowly stopped. The amount of water being pumped got slower and slower until the pump was working flat out but no water was coming out! Solved.

Here is the background : We bought a house with a nice big swimming pool in the back yard. When we moved in we found the previous owners had let it go green. Understandable, but inconvenient. We also noticed that at night the back yard was filled with the noise of croaking frogs...sounded beautiful but little did we realize then exactly where this noise was coming from.

Our pool in the beginning - bit green isn't

We also found all of the pool cleaning equipment was worn out. So we replaced it.

We knew the filter and pump worked. We knew this because we had tested it when we moved in. It has two settings, one where the water pumped back into the pool is run under the water, and another which causes the water to sprinkle back in via a set of telltales that look like little fountains and sound lovely. So we thought we would simply filter all of the green stuff out and we would have a nice blue pool that was safe to swim in.

Green pool water looking in the filter access point

Hmmm how wrong we were. I should point out that at this stage I knew very little about the chemicals needed or salt water pool chemistry.

We gave the pool a good scrub and a stir. and turned the pump on. And it seemed to work. The pool cleared slowly, bit by bit. Then, after awhile I could almost make out the bottom of the pool. It was at that point I saw the tadpoles and clumps of frog eggs.

And slowly but surely the tell tales stopped working. The water flow slowed to a dribble. The pump was still working but nothing was happening. It was blocked.

This was going to be a bigger challenge than I realized.

What had caused this? Several things.

The algae and bugs had blocked the filter. As well as several frogs. So I cleared out the bugs and the frogs, and turned the pump on again. Noise but the water was not flowing, the jets were still blocked.

Not knowing what to do and not wanting to blow the swimming pool pump motor up or cause it to burn out, I switched it off. At least I had got rid of the bugs and the frogs. Right?

Within two days there were more frogs in the pool and more back swimmers....and tadpoles in my swimming pool?

That's right

So off we went in search of advice. The internet is great but when it comes to pools you just cannot beat a trained professional who knows all about salt water pool filters and pumps. So we went to the local pool shop. They explained how to work the pump switch, which would clean the pool filter system and get the jets working again. Here is a picture of it below. We cover the operation of this switch in detail, in another post.

They also told me that unless we sorted out the algae and bugs with the right chemicals, we would not be able to get our green swimming pool to crystal clear and clean.

And that was that. Next step ; putting the right chemicals into the pool to kill the algae and the bugs!





Tags :  Swimming pool filter, filter stops working, blocked filter, blocked pool pump, broken pool filter, broken pool pump

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