Pool Basics: Understanding Pool Water Flow

hi this is rich with two light poles and today we're doing a little training video on just understanding how a pool operates so this is something I'm sure about so just basic understanding of how the water flows that's an important thing to understand you know for if you're new to pools new homeowner or one of my pool cleaners that I'm training then sometimes that you know they know they've been in pools before but don't exactly understand what all the parts of a pool are and how the water flows so especially when you look at the pool equipment then different plumbers plumbing builders do it a little differently so but this will give you the basic understanding of just when you when you walk up to the pool of equipment understand and follow the water flow and that's what I'm going to explain today so here then here's the normal pool we have an attached ball and then what you're going to have our skimmers and then main drains the skimmers are the rectangular openings on the side of the pool and that skim sort of the top part of the water it brings the leaves and debris that that fall on on the surface of the water it brings it in there and tries to help keep the pool cleaner by while it's still floating the surface tension of the water it brings it into there and then puts it in some baskets that are in the skimmer you can empty the baskets out throw the leaves out the main drain sort of circulate the bottom section of the water in the pool there's usually two these are the drain covers on the bottom of the pool usually two of them down there and then there's water also flowing through those to circulate sort of that bottom half of the water so usually how you're gonna have usually a one if if you have two skimmers on the pool it's common to have two skimmers on smaller pools they may only have one skimmer the skimmer one is going to be the one that's closest to the pool equipment skimmer two is the one that's farthest away from the pool equipment that's how it's usually marked and then you have the return fittings and so those are the little things called odd that look like little eyeball holes on the sides of the pool that are called a return fittings and we'll talk about that and just say so let's think about how the water is flowing pulling from the pool then you usually going to have a pipe coming into the pool pump from skimmer one you're gonna have another pipe coming all the way over from skimmer two and then you're gonna have a pipe coming from the main drains coming into the front of the pump so it would look something like this coming out of the ground usually that's the way it's plumbed now in old times sometimes they'd put the skimmer and the main drain together which does not good you can't control anything you can't get more suction when you're trying to vacuum it's more common to do it like this now so you have a main drain the pipe coming up and then a skimmer one and then skimmer two coming in and this is going to be in front of the pool pump this is kind of like if you were looking at it and these little round circles are control valves so that you could turn off skimmer two let's say if you were vacuuming then you could turn off skimmer 2 and give yourself more suction into skimmer 1 if you had the vacuum hose in there and then maybe even crank the main drain down slightly if you need a more suction while you're vacuuming with a vacuum hose this is coming in they're tied together and then there's a control valve here separating the small side suction from the pool side suction and and then it comes into the pool pump so this anything in front of the pump is called the suction side that's what we've got it right here so it's the suction side it comes in from the front of the pump and out the top of the pump any pump that you look at even a little booster pump it always comes in the front of the pump and then out at the top and this is the suction side so once it comes out of the top then where does it go it's going to go over here into your little dome shaped thing that's called the filter anytime you see a big dome shaped thing there next to the pool pump that it's tied to with and plumbing that's going to be your filter and it's usually marked as well unless the sticker fell off and what is the filter do well that's gonna pull some debris and contaminants and stuff you know out of the pool water helps the pool water stay clean and it also protects the heater and stuffs downstream you know the pool pump can let some debris come past it but then everything's get gets caught into the filter and it's cleaning that water and there's several different types of filter and we won't go into all that here but just basically the three types of filters is usually on commercial property to have a sand filter residential properties usually have you can see a sandwich every now and then but in this area we're going to have a cartridge filter which has four cartridges in there that filter the water or a de filter which is diatomaceous earth filter and that's the best filter for this it filters down to the lowest micron and it had a guess gives you the brightest cleanest water so it comes into the pool pump out the top comes to the filter it cleans it and then that clean water it sends to a heater if there is a heater on the system there's not always a heater on the system but if there is one it's going to come directly out of the filter and go into the heater and then you can see it come out of the heater and then now you're gonna go to it's either going to be a salt sell pool so a saltwater pool or you're gonna have some sort of a chlorine tower the salt sell is usually mounted horizontally like this and the piping if it's a chlorine tower that's where you have the three inch tablets that you put in this little tower with a little control dial on it and then it slowly absolves those tablets to give it some chlorine so the filter heater you're gonna have some sort of thing to give Santa to sanitize the water some sort of sanitizer that's gonna be your chlorine or the free chlorine from a salt cell that's released and then now it's ready to go back to the pool this is your suction side into the front of the pump and then after the heater in the sand the sanitizer that you grab now it's the return side of the plumbing ready to go right back to the pool and where does it go it comes back to these pool returns usually going to have five or six of them in the in the pool I should have drawn a couple more over here a little eyeball things right on the side of the walls and that's where it's shooting back into the pool usually through those the pool returns so that's the flow of the water it comes in to the pump from the skimmers and the mains rain then it goes through this section it goes through these different pieces of equipment and then here's the return side it's shooting it back over here to the pool one more thing to explain is sometimes that there's a dedicated line on the pool side that is going to send water continually to the spa and because we want the water to be fresh in the spa if we never sent any water there stagnate and not be good and so so there there's gonna when it comes back it's gonna mostly go to through the pool returns there might be one day to keep dedicated line that goes through the to the spa to give it fresh water the last thing to understand is what about if you change the valves and whenever you want to heat just the spa well instead of this whole big body of water then you want now you want to instead of 25,000 gallons or something now you want to heat this 800 gallons in the spa well how do you do that well you're gonna change this valve right here that's usually set to cut off the spa for the suction and there's another valve over here on the return side that cuts off the spa return usually it just depends on how they plumbed it and now you want to switch those valves when you think spa you want to cut everything off poolside so now I'm going to switch this valve turn it around and every the mains rain skimmer one skimmer - that's all cut off now I only want to pull water from the spa only and then I'll change a valve over here on the return side so that I only I don't send it back to the pool at all I'm gonna only draw water from the spa and send water back to the spa now I've sort of made this a small little pool if you will I'm only pulling water here I come filter it heat it that's you when you're usually using it and then I'm gonna directly return it back to the spa and that's in Spa mode this right here normal operations in pool most followed when you think spa mode everything pools cut off I'm only pulling from the spa and then returning to the spa so that's the basic operation of how a pool works and how spa works but for now you definitely need to understand how the water flows through the system that's the basic understanding that you have have to have as you're starting to deal with pools thanks

Channel: True Light Pools, LLC

Views: 48,274

Rating: 4.8646822 out of 5

Keywords: how to, how a pool operates, understanding pool water flow, pool water, pool water flow, pool maintenance for beginners, water flow in pool, swimming pool, swimming pool water, pool maintenance

Id: zODbHtQNSRQ

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 16 2018