How to Tune Your Pool Skimmer

[Music] hello everyone and welcome back this is Josh small the voice here with another video for swimming pool science today we are cruising the streets of Arcadia and neighborhood located in the heart of Phoenix just west of Scottsdale where the streets are lined with quaint houses that eventually get bulldozed in favor of McMansions to line the pockets of developers in today's video we're going to look at skimmers and how you can optimize yours to keep your pool looking its best I figured we'd start with a little history and go back to the beginning to the first conventional skimmer as we know it these copper skimmers were massive made by companies like landon Patek and swim right most of them underneath the basket housed a suction side de filters these massive relics from over half a century ago are constructed of copper back when plastics and polymers were considered exotic materials this antique is 36 inches deep and 12 inches wide and it actually falls on the smaller side of the scale for skimmers of this era sometime in the late 60s or early 70s swim quip came out with the benign skimmer this would quickly become the go-to standard for in-ground skimmers here I've laid out the typical plumbing setup for your basic swimming pool with the pump being tied to the back hole of the skimmer and the main drain being tied to the front hole of the skimmer the main drain plays an important role as it's the place where the majority of your water should be drawn from the skimmer merely plays the part of a junction box between the main drain and the pump so how do we tie the main drain and the pump together if there are two separate pipes well that's this guy's job and if you're like most people it's sitting in your yard or maybe you threw it away a while back the skimmer diverter valve sometimes referred to as a UFO or flying saucer is a key part of the skimmer being able to do its job so let's clear the clutter away and take a look at this thing when we flip it over you'll notice there's a hole in the bottom with a slide valve attached to it this is what allows us to control how much water is pulled from the main drain verses from the skimmer you can open and close the slide valve as much or as little as you need typically you want it open about a pencil width make sure the o-ring on the inside is attached and I'll show you why here in just a little bit there's a float about the size of a chlorine tablet built into the skimmer diverter valve and that plays an important role if the skimmer is ever starving for water that float drops down seals on the o-ring and allows the pool to draw from the main drain exclusively in order for that to take place a tight seal must be maintained there's an o-ring at the bottom of the skimmer that's coincidentally the same size as the filter lid or ring of a Pentair tr6 tea filter you can see how bad this one is it's falling apart failing and needs to be replaced the great thing about the b9 skimmer is that it's still in use today and the parts are very common now that the diverter valve is in place I'll go ahead and close the weird door and starve the skimmer for water and you'll be able to hear it lock down into place as the water level drops that pop we just heard that's the float locking down to seal things up tight and now we're pulling exclusively from the main drain notice how we're not seeing any water movement whatsoever in the skimmer of course if this is an entrapment issue all we've got to do is just lift up on the diverter valve and start the process over again and we're back to pulling at our normal settings the other important component I often see missing from a skimmer is this guy right here the weird door it plays a very important part in speeding the water up at the very very surface in order to trap and pull in debris as you can see this piece of debris going right by the skimmer that's missing it's weird or this is because without the weir the skimmer will draw water from top to bottom all the way through instead of just from the very top check out what happens with the same piece of debris with the weird or installed goes right in the skimmer and then look at that look at the difference in water velocity at the surface let's take a closer look not only does the weir speed up the water at the surface but it also creates a depression where the debris gets trapped let's take a look at another important function that the weird door serves when the pump turns off the weird door floats up and traps the debris inside the skimmer so that it can't float back out again without the weird door and with no current to hold the debris into the skimmer the debris just floats back out now that we have a better understanding of the important components above and beyond the basket let's look at what you do if you've got a plug in a suction side cleaner but you don't have a dedicated suction line this device here is called the vac mate it allows you to plug in a suction side cleaner into the skimmer while still having the ski function it's got a basket attached to it to catch the debris and the basket unscrews and screws back on easily check out how easy this thing goes into your skimmer it just drops right in and replaces the basket the vac mate also comes with a retention device to hold it down in place once it's in place you can then plug in your hose for your cleaner and then use the dial on top of the skimmer side to adjust how much power your cleaner has versus how much you're drawing from the skimmer there are some new innovations coming to the skimmer recently we're seeing a lot of these quick skin skimmers being installed and they have a venturi effect that has a return that shoots through the bottom of the skimmer underneath the basket out into the pool drawing additional water through the skimmer to pull more debris and if you want to vacuum your pool no big deal you just remove that coupler piece and you have access to vacuum when we get a call about a leaky pool one of the first places we check is the joint between the plastic mouth of the skimmer and the tile grout a lot of times these will open up or they'll be a shift in the deck and it's an easy fix which can be sealed with some epoxy or some tile grout in some cases you may find hairline cracks on the inside of your skimmer keep an eye on these and if they get bigger they can also be sealed with epoxy the skimmer is often overlooked but it's a very important component to your swimming pool circulation system make sure your diverter valves are set your o-rings are good and check that weird or sometimes they get stuck and when the leaves are falling make sure you're emptying those baskets often when those get full the pump stars for water and it can cause undue stress on your equipment and you'll break baskets left and right I hope you found this video informative if you did click the like button don't forget to share and we'd love it if you subscribed and hey if you want to leave some constructive feedback in the comments we'd really appreciate the input thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Swimming Pool Science

Views: 545,454

Rating: 4.9076738 out of 5

Keywords: Pool skimmer, Pool repair, how to pool, how to, pool skimmer repair, swimming pool science, Josh maule the voice, Hayward, swimquip B9, Pentair, Vac Mate, phoenix pool service, Arcadia pool service, Biltmore pool service, pool maintenance, swimming pool how to

Id: m-HyAn8giUA

Length: 8min 0sec (480 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 06 2018