Hard freeze and pools

[Tommyh]

Well, evidently i opened by strainer basket and bleeder valve to my ctg assy soon enough that we didnt break anything. We got lucky! The pool guy who stopped by today said hes been doing free estimates this week and that hes surprised at the amount of damage ges seen. Also said that the parts were going to be rationed so hoarders couldnt buy it all up.

[SabineHunter]

I saved my in laws pool. At first, he didn't believe me, cause the news was telling to run it 24/7. He is very happy now that I convinced him and his pool is fine. The neighbor across the street has major repairs on his pool. I just can't save everybody.

[LFD2037]

All seems good with mine except one thing. Normally, I can turn the waterfall on on this timer or with the wall switch. It’s not letting me turn it on via this timer flipped to on. Did it fry a board in this timer maybe?

[rladner]

No damage here . Trusted freeze protection but no power pretty much erases that.

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[SabineHunter]

^^^^^^^^ouch

[LFD2037]

No damage here . Trusted freeze protection but no power pretty much erases that. [ATTACH]1041380[/ATTACH][ATTACH]1041381[/ATTACH][ATTACH]1041382[/ATTACH]

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So did until until I lost power. Then I killed the breakers, drained both pumps & filter housing. All of that made it thru thank goodness! Sorry about your equipment.

[rladner]

So did until until I lost power. Then I killed the breakers, drained both pumps & filter housing. All of that made it thru thank goodness! Sorry about your equipment.

doing all that never crossed my mind at 3am Figured with rolling black outs it would be fine with 30 minute outages. By the time I figured out 30 minutes really meant 30 hours, well, it was too late.

[dfkoon]

Yes, ouch.

I should've shared the story of the 1st winter I had my pool. We had plans to be out of town for Thanksgiving. Leaves (at the time I had a bunch of trees around the pool) were still falling heavily so that you had to empty the skimmers several times a day. I put the pool service mode and left town. Sure enough, hard freeze. I came back to frozen pumps, frozen pipes, etc. Of course I panicked and took the kerosene heater from my shop to thaw out the equipment -- don't do that. Long story short, 1st year of pool and the pool guys are back out fixing it.

Every since then, if we have a hard freeze (and I don't use the hot tub anymore - pulled the heater out completely), I drain the equipment and the filter and the backwash line. This has kept any other issues. I did have a concern this year as I expected the pool to freeze over. However, there was no damage for that. I have a 9.5' deep pool and while it did freeze over, it did not freeze solid. Not sure if anyone had a solid freeze.

Moral of my story - I drain my equipment.

[Chad C]

Are system survive. The only thing that didn't make it was a swivel on the polaris hose. Feeling pretty lucky.

[CaptainDave]

We were lucky. Lost power Monday night to wake up and find the equipment completely frozen. I flipped the breaker to ensure the pump would not come on the chance of power being restored. The pump was a block of ice from Monday night until going into Friday. I fired it up Saturday afternoon without issue. We were lucky. Also, the plumbing and filter were all less than 3 months old as we renovated our pool. Perhaps the equipment being new helped a little. Father in law down the street lost their Polaris pump, but everything else was ok. Overall, they felt it could have been a lot worse.

[SharpEnd]

We were able to keep our equipment running and the pool from completely freezing over. We poured buckets of hot water into the skimmers several times daily, had wrapped the equipment pipes in trucking blankets covered by a tarp, with a drop light underneath. The power would come on for 20 min every 60-90 min so it worked well. But when everything defrosted on Friday we discovered a sudden leak, the manifold on one side of the heater (which wasn’t working for some reason) had frozen and had a crack. Water was gushing out.... the equipment is now drained and we are waiting for parts, which my pool guy said has no ETA due to demand.

[tigerscowboy]

As soon as we lost power at 7:40 Monday morning, I opened the filter valve and removed the motor lids to allow as much water to drain to ground level with gravity. I also have check valves everywhere on return lines. We were well below 15* on Tuesday.

Power did not return for us until Thursday. Everything fired back up without damages.

[Pineywoods]

The second our power went out on Monday morning, I ran out there, killed the breaker, relieved the pressure on my system, and drained every pump, filter, etc. It was either 4 or 6 degrees at my house on Tuesday morning depending on what thermometer I looked at, and thankfully we had zero issues firing my system back up without leaks.

I run a company that builds custom pools and we have seen quite a bit of damage on pools from customers, friends, and family. All of the damaged systems that we have seen are a result of failing to drain the system when the power first went out. The most common damage we are seeing is with heaters, followed by cracked pumps. The manifold on the heaters seems to be the weak point. Check valves have also been an issue. We use Pentair exclusively, but I'm sure Hayward is experiencing the same issues. If a person just has a broken heater and can't get a new heater or parts, I recommend bypassing it for temporary until inventory is restored. Unfortunately, getting replacement parts or equipment will be an issue for some time. I have whole equipment packages for new builds right now that are on delay because we can't get pumps, heaters, or certain valves. We provide Dolphin or Pentair robotic cleaners for all of our customers so I have recommended to them to run it for two cycles a day, along with liquid chlorine to help circulate their water and fight algae while their system can't run.

[Tommyh]

just opening and draining seems to be the sauce, so i dont think i will follow the let it run in the next big vortex like this one.

[Jet Black]

Everyone should drain, it's super simple and takes a massive load off of the electric grid too.