Cartridge Filters

The Cartridge Filter:

Construction:

Cartridge filters are made of polyester, and are shaped as a cylinder with pleats. The pleats enable the cartridge filter to have a large filtering capacity much larger than would be guessed at just by looking at its external housing. Newer models have several cartridges within the housing. These newer, multiple cartridge models have very large square footages, sometimes over five hundred square feet! Cartridge vacuum filters, oil filters, air filters, pool filters, are very similar in design.

Cleaning:

The cartridge filter itself, can be accessed usually by loosening a clamp or band clamp somewhere on the cartridge filters housing, the quickie cleaning process is just to wash the filter cartridge off with the water from a garden hose. Here you want to take your time and be sure to clean between the pleats or folds of the cartridge. Clean the base of the filter and then turn the filter upside down and wash off the top inside of the filter. You will also need to wash off the hollow interior of the filter, this is the most difficult part of the cartridge filter cleaning process. It is hard to get the dirt off the center interior portion of the cartridge. There is no way to get a good straight aim with the water hose, an extreme angle is all you get here. A proper and thorough cleaning always takes longer than a sand or diatomaceous earth filter and much longer than what one manufacturer advertised: "Cleaning is a snap!" That is B.S.

The proper way to clean a cartridge filter is to soak it in a product that is specially formulated for this task. A good soaking will help remove oils and other dirt from the cartridge's pleats that a simple rinse off will miss. After it has been soaked, then it is time to wash off the remaining dirt. It is best to have two cartridges, one that is being used and another one that has been soaked and completely rinsed and cleaned and ready to go.

Note here that a cartridge filter is only good for a certain number of cleaning cycles, when the filter structure begins to get too floppy, or when the time period between clean outs gets too short, it is probably time for a trip to your local pool store to pick up a new one.


Filtering Quality:

Cartridge filters are a poor way to filter pool water, any pool with this type of filter is always more troublesome than a pool with a sand or D.E. filter. Most manufacturers specifications suggest that cartridge filters can remove particles as small as approximately thirty microns. The higher quality more expensive cartridge filter can go down somewhat lower than this. I have never been too impressed by this type. A lot of stuff is going to fly right on through this filter.


Cost:

It is cheaper to install a cartridge filter during a renovation, or in a new pool. But after a few years, the high cost of replacing old worn out cartridges negates whatever savings you might have initially enjoyed. This combined with the fact that regular cartridge filters cannot filter out the finer dirt particles in the pool means that you are going to spend a lot of additional time and money fussing with the pool. Equipment will wear out sooner, more frequent green algae blooms will cause additional chemical expenses and the pool will always be dirtier, all this leads me here to reject cartridge filters as a viable alternative when considering filtering options.

When I was called out on a repair call and I saw that the customer had a cartridge filter, I would immediately ask the customer to replace it with a sand or D.E. filter. The cartridge type of swimming pool filter is only appropriate within an absolutely cash strapped situation. Even then, it would be best just to wait and save some money up for a better choice. They may perhaps be useful in spa situation, but even here the spa water had better be changed frequently, and a sharp eye kept on disinfectant levels and associated sanitation parameters. Spas will be covered in a later post as an aside to the main theme of this blog.

I feel justified in bluntly stating here that cartridge filters are a very poor choice when considering filtering options. There are some very high tech cartridges out in the marketplace, but these are generally very costly and still present a formidable cleaning process.

The next post will cover sand filters.