Pool Pad Reconfiguration

I began with an impressive array of accumulated parts: pumps, timers, plumbing, connectors, valves, electrical conduit, wire, etc. and on one fateful Saturday morning, I went out to the pool pad to begin scoping out the work I needed to do. I started tenatively, still not sure just how much reconfiguring I wanted to do. My friend happened to stop by when I just had done a little diconnection work, so I went and discussed with him my plans and the choices I had to make. He was much more ambitious than I was feeling and basically said that I should go all out and do the whole nine yards of digging everything up and moving things.

While this was easy for for my friend to say, he also stuck around for a long while helping me dig up the entire area, which was a massive chore due to the small space, all the obstacles and many rocks and roots. Add to this the fact that the old valves were not in great condition, and we were very quickly ankle, and sometimes knee deep in mud. Digging all this up was not something I would have been able to accomplish myself, since I had a degenerative hip problem and it was a major effort in all sorts of awkward positions. The picture at right is what it looked like at the end of the first day. It was clear that my two-day weekend project was going to be going overtime. While I appreciated the help in excavating the area, I would be on my own for the remainder of the project.

Beginnning on Sunday, Day 2, I had nothing but the old intake and outake stems and electric wires poking up from the ground. The outake lines (one for main return and one for the Polaris pool cleaner) were actually in a decent location on the perimeter, but I would have to cut the pipe below the valves to be able to have enough pipe to work with in the new arrangement. So I had to figure out a way to prevent the water from coming back down the outtakes. The intake line was to be relocated, so that too had to get cut and replumbed before the valve, so there too I would need to figure out away to prevent water from coming back from the skimmer. Neither of these was going to be easy, short of draining the pool, which I wanted to avoid.

Before dealing with the water, I wanted to first clean up the danging electric wires, so put in new electric conduit once I decided where I wanted them to come up. I was constrained by the length of the existing wires, since I did not want to have to add running new wires to this rest of this project's tasks.

In what would be the first of more than 10 trips to the home improvment and pool stires in the coming few days, I went in search of rubber stoppers, caps and all sorts of things to help me stop the water flow. After a bunch of failures, I was finally able to block up the outake lines enough to be able to cut the old valves off and put a new one on. One down, one to go.

I went through many attempts and failures to block up the skimmer to prevent water coming down the intake line: nothing was working, and much mud was being created as I tested various schemes. I wound up with no choice but to drain the pool below the skimmer level. Had I done that from the get-go, I would have saved myself a lot of time, money and aggravation.

I was finally able to cut the intake line and extend the underground pipe so it processed to the further perimter of the pool pad area. The tricky part was knowing at exactly what height the intake line needed to go horizontal, since it had to exactly match the height of the pump. Problem is that the pump is not installed and the ground was dug up, so how could I have any idea ho high the pump would be? Tricky business. Also, it better be going parallel to the ground, or else I'd have to put my pool pump on an incline to line it up. I tried my best, but still wound up with needing a whole lot of trial and error of grading the ground in various ways to get the level and angle of the pump to line up once I had the PVC in place.

Having been in mud for the last couple days, I was anxious to add concrete stepping stones throughout the pool pad area so that I would have as little mud as possible to deal with now and in the future. The new "flooring" for the pool pad was an idea developed in progress and resulted in at least two trips to the home improvement store.

I finally had the intake and outake lines moved, new valves in place and the electric conduit moved with electrical boxes on the electric lines. Besides filling in the holes and grading the area, everything else is now "new" work, which should be a lot smoother sailing.

Because I had never wired a two speed pool pump and timer before, and because I have never undertaken doing this much PVC plumbing work, I went very carefully, which means slowly. Also, because I had invested so much time, effort and money, I refused to cut corners on a lot of the minor details, which usually meant going out to the store to get the "right" part. One instance of this (there were many) were the colors of the electric wires. I had plenty of wire, but not of the right colors that would help make it easier to work on in the future.

I also wound up doing many things twice. I would do it, have some doubts about decisions I made, then do some Internet research to see what others had to say. Invariably I'd find that I should have done something slightly differently, so I would.

I've more experience with electrical work than PVC, so I got that out of the way first. I had still not actually decided how the equipment would be arranged, so I could not start the plumbing before that. The picture at right shows the completed electrical work and the initial laying out of the pumps and other equipment. You'll see an outlet in the PVC electrical box. That's a no-no as was evident by the fact that the screw holes on the outlet did not match the box. I found this out the hard way and wound up removing it rather than installing the required metal box in the area. I had also plannedon putting a electric subpanel there to more easily allow turning the breakers on and off, but I chickened out since I was not sure how to wire it and did not want to delay more hours figuring it out.

I finally had the two pumps and the Nature2 vessel arranged so the plumbing would not be too convoluted and each piece of equipment could be easily accessed and worked on. Now to run the PVC plumbing. It's a little tricky to line it up, but with careful measuring and cutting, I was doing a great job. My only lingering doubt was the few threaded joints I had. I'd read conflicting reports about whether to use putty or teflon tape on PVC and eventually decided to use the teflon tape.

I got the the very last two PVC gluing points: the intake and outtake on my brand new Nature2 vessel. These are unions, so that the union glues into the main system, and then the vessel screws it the unions on both ends. A union consists of two pieces: a non-threaded part that you permantly glue to your plumbing, and the collar that goes around it that seals and screws onto the vessel which must be put in place before you glue it. Wanting to be very careful about not getting glue on the threaded part of the unions I put them aside while I was gluing everything. In a dreadful moment of excitement at arriving at the end, I forgot to put them back on and glued up the piece. I came as close to crying as you can without actually crying.

Of all the plumbing pieces I could have screwed up on, I could have fixed any of them by buying areplacement part: except for these. These parts that were now glued in were special to the Nature2 vessel. They were non-standard in size, and were not available anywhere, which I found out as I frantically visited all the home improvement and pool stores. I did get some advice on using an "inside" collar after cutting the pipe, but this looked mighty shady and I worried it would leak. The outside of PVC is smooth and has close tolerances to ensure a good fit. The inside diameter is rough and has loose tolerances. However, it was the only hope I had and I gave it overnight for the glue to dry to give the best possible chance of working. I took the extra precaution of adding some special putty that hardens and is waterproof as insurance against this patch work.

My beautiful plumbing job was now ruined with these ugly patches. Worse of all, I had my doubts they would actually hold water under pressure.

I wanted to wait overnight for the patch job to dry before putting exposing it to water and putting it under presure. I also needed to install and program the timer. After 3 very full days of work, this day was shaping up to be easy.

The timer I bought was a very nice device: well thought out and well made. It is smart enough to know about two-speed pumps so that it never energized the two wires at the same time. It is smart enough to know that the booster pump should not be turned on until 30 seconds after the main pump. It is smart enough to know top turn the main pump onto high speed if you request using the booster pump. It is smart enough to know if the temperature is below freezing to turn the pump on to circulate the water to prevent the pipes form freezing.

Electric done. Timer installed. Plumbing maybe done? Time to open the valves. Uh oh. With no pressure I had a leak, and it actually was not a leak but an elbow I forgot to glue. There were a lot of glue joints and a lot of dry fitting to ensure I had the right lengths and angles. I seemed to have forgotten about this particular dry fit. With everything else glued, it was a bit tricky to take it apart, apply glue andput it together, but I managed it with some help from my wife (needed four hands).

Ok, so let's try again. Open the valves, any leaks? Nope. Ok, next up is to turn the circuit breakers back on and energize the pump motors and see how it handles pressure. No disasters, but 3 of the 4 threaded connection leaked. Generally, on PVC, teflon tape tends to distort the plastic and thus is not recommended (now I know). The putty is better. The leaks were not substantial though, so I decided to let them drip for a few days and I'd repair them on the following weekend when I had more time. I already had to use personal time at work to get this done.