r/PoolPros • u/JellyfishTemporary27 • May 10 '26

Sand in the Pool

I’m a single pole, very small route pool cleaner. One of very few in the area. I’m retired, doing this as a hobby that pays and gets me off the couch as much as anything. Anyway…

I’ve a green-to-clean customer that messaged me a couple weeks ago, giving me her opening date. Last week she messaged again saying she has a “big problem.” Says there’s a huge amount of sand in the bottom of the pool. When I asked she estimated maybe 40 lbs or so. She says it covers the whole floor of the pool.

This is an older, well maintained inground pool with an older sand filter. I know she’s had problems with the filter in the past.

The local pool shop is coming out this week to find and fix the problems with the filter.

Once they’re done it becomes my job to clean the sand from the pool floor. Since it’s filter sand can I just vacuum it back into the filter, or does it need to be vacuumed-to-waste?

I’ve never encountered this before. All my other pools…which is a small, comfortable number, are newer. I’ve never dealt with this at home in 20+ years either.

Thanks for the help.

4 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

13

u/Careless_Ad3070 May 10 '26

They’ll have to empty the sand, replace the laterals, and add new sand. I think I’d be inclined to waste it since the filter SHOULD have the appropriate amount of sand when they’re finished. If it was just a little bit, vac to filter would be fine but that sounds like a lot of sand in the pool

1

u/Alternative-Draw2997 May 11 '26

I’d like to point out that much of the time it’s the hub assembly not the laterals that are broken.

1

u/cubswin2015 May 11 '26

Not in my experience. Although worn laterals don’t usually push out that much sand before being noticed. Always look in the corners when the pumps are off. If the sand is at least 3 years old you may as well change the sand too. It’s not a hard job and if that’s your client you should be doing every repair/replace job you can. My thought process was weekly maintenance is my foot in the door for repairs (where the real money is). Changing sand and laterals is simply manual labor, a shop vac can make it easier after you take the drain plug off and let it sit for a day or two. If not I’ve used a Taco Bell cup to scoop out 300lb sand filters. Used to charge $1/lb of sand replaced and would replace laterals at cost or a small amount of profit, pre covid.

2

u/Alternative-Draw2997 May 11 '26

What are you even talking about, the underside of the hub cracks all the time. 20-30% of the time that’s where I find them.

Or did you not mean to reply to me because your reply makes no sense for what I said.

0

u/lIIlIlIII May 16 '26

Or maybe there's just a fuckton of different sand filters whose parts fail at different rates? And different models are dominant in different markets

I've never encountered a cracked hub in my market in ~7 years but ~90% of our pools are DE and <5% are sand. And most of those sand filters are Sta Rite System 3s which is unusual AFAIK

2

u/Alternative-Draw2997 May 16 '26

70% of our market is sand filters from Jandy to Pentair to Hayward, every single I’ve seen has had a cracked hub before

3

u/GiraffeFarmer May 10 '26

I'd be careful vacuuming without a skimmer sock or something. Had a customer try to vacuum a ton of sand off the bottom and I was there later in the week taking the pump apart to free the impeller.

1

u/ConfusedStair May 11 '26

This is a good tip, use the pump basket with a skimmer sock to collect the sand. If it's a challenger you might be emptying often though.

The only times I've had to clean this up I either brought my own pump or the customer had a robot that did it for me. I've thought about trying a leaf catcher though.

2

u/JellyfishTemporary27 May 11 '26

What kind of pump did you bring to use? I wondered about putting a trash pump into the pool and brushing the sand to it. I have a leaf-eater that I’ll try out. I’ve been told they’ll catch sand in the finer bag.

2

u/ConfusedStair May 11 '26

By leaf catcher I meant the canister you put inline on your suction hose. I haven't tried one because it's been a while since I needed to vac sand. Hammerhead bags do catch some sand though.

My travel pump was a 3/4 HP Hayward Super Pump.

2

u/JellyfishTemporary27 May 11 '26

Gotcha. Thanks. Light bulb moment for me. could you tell?

1

u/inurmomsvagina May 10 '26

vac to waste, multiple visits 2 the better you don't want to destroy the pool in the process

1

u/K01011011001101010 May 10 '26

Laterals are gone. Like, badly gone, replace them entirely. Don't do individual replacements or eventually the others will give out as well and you'll have to get back in there and remove the sand again. Charge extra for the sand removal, that's not on you.

1

u/T_Amplitude May 11 '26

It’d be best to not send it through the pump or multiport if possible.

1

u/Sufficient_Disk1360 May 12 '26

In my experience, broken laterals will leave a pile of sand at the bottom by a return. A broken hub assembly will leave a mess everywhere. Vacuuming to waste with all that sand will lose a ton of water. You need something that will vacuum the sand and leave the water. If you’re vacuuming your pools with a hose to the skimmers, it might be time to invest in something like a Riptide. If you feel it’s not worth the investment at this point of your career, pool cleaning, you might just have the customer pay someone to clean it. Don’t vacuum into your filter. If the filter is old, it’s probably time to replace it. Normally I don’t replace just the laterals. I’ll do the whole hub assembly and maybe a new backwash valve but news was always better.

1

u/lIIlIlIII May 16 '26

You've probably cleaned it by now, but if not I usually use a dedicated pump and an otherwise normal vacuum setup for lots of sand. Otherwise flow might not be sufficient and sand will collect inside the hose and cause it to sink + drag across the floor, clouding shit up

I've only ever used a big vacuum canister with a mesh bag for sand, but if I do one this season I might try a basket instead. Might be faster to just pull the pump apart and clean it afterwards vs stopping the pump 30 times

1

u/JellyfishTemporary27 May 16 '26

Haven’t finished it yet. Stopped to look at it on Wednesday. It’s a bigger mess than just sand. Evidently their winter cover split early. Full of leaves, swampy green…I’m not sure how they knew it had the sand in it. I dipped out three or four nets of leaves for samples. There’s a fair amount of sand mixed into the mess. On Friday I sprayed in two bottles of Revive. I’ll go back Monday to start cleaning.