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Swimming Pool Pump Motors: At the Heart of Your Pool’s Cleanliness

June 17th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed

What happens when your swimming pool pump motor dies? Well, I found out a little over three weeks ago. Truth be told, it was on death watch for weeks before that. A bad storm came through months ago, blew lots of tree branches and debris into the yard and pool and produced massive lightning that shorted the pump. As it was way past pool season, hubby and I didn’t really care much at the time. It worked, but made terrible screeching and rattling sounds - “the death rattle”, we’d joke, as we fished for limbs in the pool’s deep end.

Well, opening the pool this year has been h*ll. There’s new construction in back of the house, and dust and new debris constantly blows through the yard and, of course, into the pool. Wanna manually vacuum Georgia red clay out of your swimming pool? It ain’t fun. My cartridge filters are begging for mercy. The pool pump got slower and harder to start until it finally quit. We were gone for a weekend, and came back to a ominously cloudy pool. We’ve decided to replace it with the same model swimming pool pump. Of course, no one has that pump in stock, it has to be special ordered, and there’s a three week wait for service thanks to pool opening season being in full swing. No, not even the local Leslie’s Pool Supply had it (!). Seems it’s a pretty fancy model I inherited - a 2.5 HP Hayward Super II two-speed pump - that I understand isn’t usually stocked in the back room.

So I’ve been manually adding chlorine shock to my swimming pool these past weeks in a slowly failing effort to keep 30,000 gallons of clay laden H2O from turning green under 90+ degree heat. These woes, plus a bout of ill health, make for a lousy start to summer. As swimming pool pump motors and researching them are at the top of my mind, thought I’d post a bit about them.

The swimming pool pump motor can be considered as the beating heart of your pool’s filtration and sanitization system. As I can personally attest, any still body of water sitting outdoors in hot weather becomes a steaming soup of algae PDQ. The pump is necessary to move your pool’s water through the filters to sift out debris (like bugs and clay silt) and in my pool’s case through the salt system cell that converts the salt in my water to chlorine and through the gas heater for cooler fall evenings. My auto pool cleaner also runs off the pool pump motor (happy, happy joy…) so if the pump is out, my beautiful salt water swimming pool is effectively DOA.

Swimming Pool Pump Sizing
When it comes to choosing a pool pump, bigger is NOT necessarily better and horsepower is not always what it’s hyped up to be. When replacing a swimming pool pump motor a real constraint is the size of your filter system and the pipes. A pump that is too big and powerful can blow out your pipes and damage your filter and heater with the force of the water. It’s safe, and generally recommended, to match what you already have; which is what I’m doing.

If you’re replacing your filter system along with your pump, by all means look into a different size. There’s no way to know if the builder sized the pool pump properly from the beginning. Oversized swimming pool pumps can consume lots of electricity needlessly; too-small pumps won’t keep your water as sparkling as it should be. So it may pay to question if you need to change pump sizes.

First, you want a pump that can circulate all the water in the pool through the filters within 8 - 12 hours. This is called the “turnover time”. The more use your pool gets, the shorter the turnover time needs to be. For Read the rest of this entry »