Help! Vacuum losing suction in spurts. What's wrong?

lacigrl · Postby **lacigrl** » Thu 24 Feb, 2011 22:23

Just bought a house w/ a pool, our first. We paid for a pool guy to come in and show us how to work the equipment and what did what and how to maintain water w/ chemicals. So I've been trying to vacuum the pool for the last few days, and it STILL just seems to be pushing the dirt around. I've tried both a vacuum head with a brush and one on rollers. The odd thing is, SOMETIMES it will have strong suction for a few seconds or so at a time, then nothing for probably 2 minutes, then sudden suction again. I held the vacuum head near the wall, and could see this in effect. It almost appears as if it is pushing water OUT, which makes no sense, as I've got it connected to the skimmer basket with a vacuum plate. To test the theory that it's pushing water out, I dropped some DE into the skimmer area and watched its path. It appears that it pulls a little in (like a few particles), then nothing. No suction. Then it slowly draws in a tiny bit more. Definitely not enough to vacuum.

What the heck is going on?!? I've tried everything. It's weird, because sometimes it will develop strong suction for a good string of time, and you can SEE the whirlwind suction being pulled into the skimmer hole. Then it'll just stop, and I don't see suction again for a while, if at all.

I have a DE filter and have tried backwashing and adding more DE. No idea when the filters were last cleaned, since it's an REO house. The pressure seems to jump from high 20-ish to 30 going suddenly down to like 5 and back again, but mostly in the low end. I can see that the pump is mostly running about 1/3 full of water, and isn't pulling in a lot.

Any suggestions? I think there's something wrong, but I don't know where...

Postby **Larry** » Fri 25 Feb, 2011 11:11

The pressure seems to jump from high 20-ish to 30 going suddenly down to like 5 and back again, but mostly in the low end. I can see that the pump is mostly running about 1/3 full of water, and isn't pulling in a lot.

The pump is sucking air and losing prime so it is not able to pump effectively.

Do you only have air in the pump during vacuuming, or is it always like that? The air could be entering the system through the vacuum hose/ line so we need to determine if the pump primes normally during daily filtration runs.