Hey everybody, I'm Brian with Ford Knox Company and I'm going to show you how to clean your pool filters. That way you can do it the right way and save yourself a whole bunch of money. Now, if you have a pool, you already know that this needs to be done every 3 to 6 months. I like to do it about every 4 months. Where we live here in Las Vegas, and based off the kind of weather and the wind protection we have, we don't get that much dirt in the pool or dust now that the construction's kind of over. But it is a good thing that has to be done a couple times a year. And if you've paid for it before, you know that it can get pretty expensive. So, I'm going to walk you through all the steps so that you can do this yourself. You're just going to need a couple basic tools. A 7/8 socket, a 7/8 wrench, and then I would highly recommend getting yourself one of these little rubber mallets if you don't already have one. It comes in handy, especially when we're getting this thing put all back together. But just a couple basic tools and your garden hose. You don't need anything fancy. You don't need a power washer or any special tools. Just some of these basic hand tools here and your garden hose. So, one of the first things that we want to do is make sure that we shut the power off on this. That can be done at two different locations. One of the places is over here at the motor. You can turn the motor off just by pressing that onoff button. But I would also recommend going over to your control panel where you have your circuit breakers and actually shutting the power off to the whole system. That way, in case you have any automation settings or something that might turn the pool or the pump back on while you're working on it, you can prevent that from happening by just making sure that the main power is shut off at the panel. The next thing we're going to do is relieve the pressure out of that tank where the filters are. This can be done by the pressure relief valve here at the top. You just give it a quarter turn and it will start to shoot out some water or air. If the system's off, it should mostly just be air. And we want to make sure that all that air releases. So, open it up, step back, wait for it to go to zero and that there is no pressure. Then, we're going to move to the plug at the bottom of the tank. This is a 7/8 usually. Because it is all plastic pieces, you don't want to strip any of those plastic threads. And there is a little bit of a seal there, but I use my 7/8 wrench and I'll actually loosen this and let all the water out. We're going to do this while the whole thing is assembled. Let the air out, step back, wait till there is no pressure inside the tank. Then remove the plug at the bottom of the tank and let all that water come out. And because the valve is open on top, it's going to allow air to come through and prevent it from having a vacuum and let all that water come out the bottom. Once all the water has ran out, we can then take the tank apart and start getting to our filters. And if you've never done this before, I would just recommend that while your system's running, go to your pressure relief valve at the top, give it a little turn. Just be very quick with it and you'll see that it will shoot out water. Just become familiar with this because this is how we're going to actually put the system back together and get it back running and release the air out of it so that we don't build up any pressure in there. It's a very simple pressure relief valve. There's a little gauge on there that I'll show you later how to set so you know when it may be time to clean your filters again. But this is something that I found out that a lot of people did not know about and how easy it was just to release some air or water out of the tank. So, our system is off. We're going to start by opening up this valve on top, letting all the air come out. You can hear it. Once this is all done and I hear that air releasing, I'm then going to come down here to the bottom. We have this plug down here and on the end of it is a nut end. It is a 7/8 also. And that's where I'm going to use my wrench. We're going to open up that once all the air has released. And this is going to allow all the water to come out. As the air is coming out, you can start to hear that there's air coming into the system. You can hear it kind of bubbling through. I've heard of people trying to close off certain valves to prevent any water or air going back and it helps with your startup so it doesn't have to pull as much water through. I haven't really noticed a difference. So, I do not usually shut off any valves. I just shut the machine off, turn the power off, then I can go ahead and start through this process. So, now that we have the valve up top open, all the air is gone. We're going to take this off here. I'm going to use my wrench here. This is 7/8. Now, we can just let all that water run out. That's going to also make sure there is no pressure in this tank before we take it apart. And you can see right here in this cap all this dirt that's sitting in the bottom. This is what we're expecting to find in the bottom of that tank. So, everything was sitting down there. When we open it up, there should be a lot of this stuff in there. Now, with this still open, we're going to take off this bolt right here, and we're going to remove this metal band, which holds the top cap and the bottom together. We'll pull it off and I'll show you some of the pieces inside to pay attention to. That way we can make sure that it goes back together in the same order. And you'll see right here we have a washer and then the spring and then a washer and then this nut. When we put this back together, we're going to make sure this is in the same order. And when we tighten it down at the end, we're going to make sure these coils are touching. That's how you know how tight you need to go. We're going to have all these coils compressed all the way together. Once we get this loose, we can take the rest of it off by hand. As you can see, it is a lot of threads, but we're going to keep this together in this order. And then we can take this belt off. You're going to slide this out. This slides through here. This is how we put it back together. This is where you can use that rubber mallet. Tap it a little bit to get this band off. And we're going to take this metal band off and away from this tank. And this is that band assembly sitting off the tank. The threads that slide through. We have our spring with our washers above and below. Once we slide this through, we put the springs on. And then this goes down through the middle. You'll see that this washer goes on top so that the brass can go through it. The smaller washer, which allows the threads to go through, goes on the bottom. That's the order. Large hole, small hole, and it goes on right here at the end. So, we'll put this all back on at the end, and I'll show you how we make it tight. Let's go ahead and separate those two tanks and get to our filters. Now, this is where a lot of the fun begins. This is open. The system's off. The plug is out on the bottom. We're going to pull this straight up and off. And you'll see the filters inside. Set this off to the side. And here we have it. These are our four cartridge filters. This spring and this assembly on top holds them all in place. So, we'll pull this off the top. This can stay here. And we will rinse this off. You'll see this little cap right here. It has debris on it. We will remove this. It just pops right off. We'll rinse this off as well. So, everything we take off, we're going to rinse. Then, we can pull these straight out. Now, we have everything set over to the side that we're going to rinse off. We can pull these cartridges straight up. They're not stuck on anything. They just sit on another base that looks like that top piece that we took off at the bottom here. I'll show you. It looks exactly the same. Pull these straight up and out. These are what we are going to rinse off with our hose. So, let's take a quick look inside. You can see we have another one of those bases that looks very similar to the top right there. We're going to rinse all this out with a hose. Let it go out through the drain there at the bottom. See all the dirt sitting there? So, we'll rinse all this out. This can kind of sit as it is. Then, we'll clean our filters over there. You'll see we have a big rubber gasket right here. A big rubber O-ring. I like to take this out and actually wipe it down and clean it. Make sure there's nothing seated in here like this dirt. Clean it all up before we put it back together. Rinse everything out here. Then we can start reassembling everything once we rinse out our cartridges. So now we're at the point where we can rinse these filters out. And I think that this is the fun part. You can just put on a good podcast, turn on some music, whatever it is, get your hose out and start rinsing these cartridges off. This is where I've seen a lot of people kind of complain about when they pay for the service is that they don't actually clean the filters very well. They're trying to get in and get out because they're making money. You know, time is money for them. and whether or not they have a fancy tool that kind of does it for them. They're just trying to kind of rinse them off and get it back together and leave. So, this is where I like to spend time, make sure it's done right, make sure they're very clean. It can also make it so that you don't have to do it as frequently, but again, that also depends on where you live and how much dust you have in the air and the environment. But, I have seen some tools out there that are supposed to make it fast that you can buy on Amazon. I'll link a couple of those in the video, but I haven't tried them out myself, but I may do a video in the future kind of testing them out so we can see if we can really save some time, maybe even get a better clean with them. But I will link those there just in case you want to check them out. They do have pretty good reviews, but this is where I think we can have fun with it. Get the hose out, let the kids run around. Let's rinse these cartridges out. I'll show you what to look for so we know that they are cleaned thoroughly, and then we'll get this thing back together and then up and running. So, here are our filters. As you can see, when they are brand new, they are crisp and white, almost the same color as this. They have a lot of fine dust in there. You can see the buildup at the bottom. This obviously comes off very easily. We're going to run the hose through this and I'll get one really clean and I'll show you the comparison of how it looks. Let's get the garden hose and let's start spraying these things off. We're going to be using a basic garden hose handle. I have it on the jet setting and we're just going to start spraying it off. You can see in less than 30 seconds just kind of spraying it lightly. You can see the difference between the dirty side of the filter and where I started to spray. But I'm going to show you what can be deceiving because you'll see a lot of this dirt coming out of the bottom. What we're looking for here is on the inside. You'll see there's some caked up dirt. It'll get way down there in the grooves. And that's where I've seen some tools that actually go in and it kind of rinses deep. But what I like doing is using that jet setting. Kind of work the top, let it run down, work the middle, let it run down, work here, and then kind of wishwash across the bottom. You'll see it building up here. So you can spend less time up here, more time down here because of gravity just kind of working with you. Rotate it. Do it again. And then once I have it done 360, I'll go over the whole thing again real quick. You'll be surprised how this does still come out at the end. But overall, you're looking for a clean rinse so that as you're washing down, the water coming out of the bottom is not brown, it's white or clear, then you'll know that you're good. We can move on to the next one. Next one, next one. Now, if you haven't already and you do like the video and you find it helpful, please hit that like button for me. It does help me out a lot. Also, I have a website where I make my own t-shirts. I do it just for fun, but it is my own designs. I print them and make them myself. I make everything to order. So, I'll put a link for those also in the description. Check those out. It's just another way that you can support me and the channel. But I appreciate you watching and if you enjoy this video, just hit the like button for me. Even consider subscribing. I have a lot of DIY and how-to videos on my channel. Hope you enjoy the content. Let's get back to putting this thing together and I'll show you guys how to get this thing back up and running. Okay, without cheating, can you guess which one has already been rinsed off? This one right here took me about 5 minutes. I worked my way from top to bottom, spun it around. I would do as much as I could see, turn it around, then do one more once over. This was my bottom as I took them out. I can put them back in, put them the other way. They are reversible. Most of them are at least. But we're going to go ahead and do the other three. So, if it's about 5 minutes each, you can spend about 20, 30 minutes here, maybe less. Just kind of depends on how dirty they are, how frequently you clean them. I'll also put links for new filters in case you need them. There are a lot of them available out there, name brand or generics. I'll put links for some of those in the description as well. So, we've rinsed off all four of our filters. That actually took me less than 20 minutes. You can see over here how much dirt we have. This is pretty thick. This is all the stuff that came out almost an inch thick over here. But you can see this was in the filters. Everything that ran all the way out, but this is what was sitting in there just in these. We're going to rinse off our parts. Then we can start assembling everything back together. So now we have all of our filters clean. Last thing we're going to do is rinse everything out and rinse off a couple of these parts here. So I'll just take the hose, rinse out the inside of this whole thing really well. You can see it all still coming out the bottom. We can also rinse out this this little cap right here. This is just a little screen. And our plug right here that goes in the bottom of the tank. Still got a lot of debris in the bottom. So, now we got everything cleaned out, we can start reassembling everything and get this thing turned back on. So, one of the first things we're going to do is we're going to seat these cartridges back on the base here. Make sure that they sit on the circle here. It's going to fit right in this opening. So, make sure that they are seated correctly. Again, they're going to pop on just like that. Put all four filters in. And one way you can know that they're all seated is obviously you can kind of feel it sit down, but you'll also see that these will all be level. Right now, this isn't seated down all the way. And now you can feel it slide in and everything is nice and flush. We're going to put that cap back on. And then we're going to put that assembly back on. This just pushes down. Then we're going to center this. This helps hold the cartridges in place. Again, line up all these holes. That should sit just like that. We're going to clean off this rim. Make sure there's no debris or sand here. Make sure it's sitting all the way around. Then we can put our cap back on. Then we can go ahead and put the band around. And I'll show you how to tighten down the band. Now we're going to put the top back on. And you can see in the top of this lid right here, it's actually pretty smooth at the top. This spring just kind of helps put a little bit of pressure at the top. But how we set this down, it's just going to go straight over. You'll feel it kind of sit on the edge. You'll feel it kind of center itself. It should be flush around this edge here. You'll feel it kind of sit down. One thing to pay attention to is that this is open right now, but if we were to close it, you can actually read the gauge wherever you're standing. So, you might want to adjust this lid so that while it's closed, you can read it. And also that while it's open, this spout is shooting in a direction that you don't mind that water coming out. So sometimes people will kind of put this on and then while it's closed, the gauge is facing the wrong direction. Then you can't really read it while the machine's running. So I like to face it forward and that way when I open it up, I don't mind the water shooting out. But that way when it's closed, I can actually read the gauge while the pump is running. Adjust this as you would need it. Make sure it's seated down. Then the next step is we're going to put this band on here. But before we move on, make sure that this is open. This stays open while we put everything back together. And when we start the pump back up, this will remain open so that it relieves any air and pressure. Then we'll close it when we're ready. But for right now, this stays open. Let's go ahead and put this band on. And before we put the band on, something to look for also is that you have an even reveal all the way around. This will be seated almost all the way down. But if you don't have it seated evenly, you'll see that it'll be tight right here, and there'll be a big gap in the back. So look for an even spacing around. Then we'll put the metal band around and get everything assembled and start tightening it. This goes on just like we took it off. It'll sit like that. And this will be pretty snug. So you can loosen it a little bit. You are going to feed the threads through the opening just like that. So the threads are sticking out right here. Make sure that this also is facing in a direction that you want so you have easy access to put everything on and tighten it or loosen it. If you have to, you can do this by yourself, but it does help to have an extra set of hands. You want to feed this through. Make sure you get your threads through. Pull it tight. Making sure again that it's seated as best I can evenly around. We can go ahead and start putting our threads. Remember, washer with the small hole, spring, washer with the big hole, and then that brass nut. So, we're going to put on the washer with the small hole first. That goes right here over the threads. Then, we're going to put the spring, then the large washer as it goes over this nut here. We have enough to start it. A lot of this you can do by hand to start because we will have a ways to go. This is going to go all the way through. And as we tighten it down, we want the coils of this spring to tighten. We are going to use the rubber mallet to kind of tap around. That way, as it tightens, it starts to seat itself. But the first part is just getting this tightened all the way down by hand. So, this is tightened down by hand. Periodically, I'm going to go through and I'm going to tap around the band just so it seats itself as it's tightened down. We'll see this come in slightly, but not too much. What we'll really see is everything right here tighten. And again these coils will eventually touch. Now we're almost there. This will be squeaking a little bit. Don't worry. But you can see we have almost the coils touching right here. A little bit more. This will be ready to go. We'll put the plug back in on the bottom. Tighten that with the wrench. and we can get everything started. So, now we're all done here. These are touching. I made sure it's seated really well. Now, we can go and put that plug back in the bottom. So, this right here is our plug that we're going to put in the bottom. Make sure this O-ring is good. Make sure it's not broken and that it's seated all the way down. Then, check your threads. Make sure that the threads are clean. So, I might clean this out a little bit better. Then, we can go ahead and put this in and tighten it up. and remember this is a 7/8 wrench that I'm using here. And we do not want to overtighten this because remember these are plastic threads. So, very, very snug, but do not overtighten. So, now we're ready to turn everything back on. Remember, air valve is open. That's tightened down there. That plug, we got the band tightened down and seated really good. Coils are touching. We have the power back on. We can now go ahead and turn the pump back on. So, what we should see as this thing starts to pull water through the system, it'll start putting water back into the tank and it will shoot out the top. Let it shoot out water for a little bit. Once we have a good solid stream, that means that we have no air inside there. We can close it off. Now we can close it off. Everything's closed. We have no air inside the tank. Don't really see any leaks around here. No leaks anywhere else in the system. We're good to go. Everything's back up and running. And speaking of this gauge, I know that my filters are clean. I did not know, but you can actually adjust this bezel so that your PSI is reading where you want it. So now that everything's clean, I'm going to set it to where I know it's start. This means it's normally running the way it should. When they get clogged or everything gets really dirty, it's going to create more pressure inside the system. This will start to kind of move over time. And this lets you know that it's getting closer time to clean your filters. But this bezel right here is adjustable. So set it where your filters are clean and that way you know that's a good starting point. Something I learned a couple years into owning a pool, I always thought it was just kind of stuck there and it always kind of read a little bit off. But I knew that every 3 to 4 months I needed to clean them anyways. But that is something that I learned. Hopefully that helps you out. And that's pretty much it. I hope you guys found the video helpful. I also want to mention that we do have a pool cover on and it does help a lot with keeping the dust out. It also helps with less evaporation, but it really helps with keeping the pool temperature up. Right now in Vegas, it's about 60° and the pool is over 76°. So, we are almost 15 to 16° higher just because of the pool cover. I do have another video talking about the pool cover, but it's our second year using it and we love it, but it does help with keeping some of that dirt and debris out of the pool as well as evaporation and using as many chemicals. So, looking into getting a pool cover, I would highly recommend it. And I'll link that video here at the end in case you guys want to check it out. But other than that, I appreciate you watching. If you haven't already, hit like, hit subscribe. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments. I'm really good at getting back to those. Also, if you have any tips or tricks, leave them down there as well because a lot of people will come here and see that. Maybe they find that helpful and it might have been something I missed in the video. But, thank you again for watching and I'll see you on the next build.