I hate my pool

          Ok, I hate my pool. I never swim in it. Its just a an ongoing project that costs me money. As i write that, i realize that describes about half the shit in my garage but this item adds considerable value to my house and the dogs and wife and child all like it, so I guess I wont fill it with concrete. 
           Anyway, when we moved in the Hayward pump that ran the filter was god only knows how old and made horrific noises. It boosted our electric bill by about about $200/month every summer and it was a constant pain in my ass. The only reason we kept it around is because new pool pumps are very expensive, its not a decision that is made lightly. 
           About 3 months ago the Ole Hayward took a pretty serious shit. What had been an inconveniently loud noise became a pretty serious scream. Like, this was loud, i piled old pallets around it so it wouldnt piss the neighbors off too bad. Luckily it was the cold season so it only had to run an hour or two per day. Regardless, once the shit hit the fan, things went south pretty quick ........

Not super ideal. So I rebuilt the pump. The rebuild kit cost 20 bucks, took about 4 hours to complete, and extended the pumps lifetime by about one week. And once it took a shit this time it REALLY took a shit. Smoke, and full god damn stop. Warm weather (algae growing season) was quickly approaching so it was either live with a swamp or get this pump rockin. I briefly considered turning the whole thing into a tilapia farm, but Christi was not enthusiastic about that. Which is absurd. 

So the extant PVC piping and valves were pretty ate up. So it quickly went from a simple pump exchange, to a replacement of pretty much everything that came out of the ground. I didnt get to straighten things out quite as much as I wanted due to the limitations of the existing pipe. Several repair joints were already installed and I didnt want to dig down any more than I already had to for this operation. Also, I quickly realized that the new pump wasnt going to fit in the old pumps footprint, it was considerably taller and had to be moved out from the filter afew inches. So i had to pour some concrete, so that was fun. 

 Anyway, The new pump is amazing. The whole project probably cost 1k, the pump was not cheap (though, as with all things, it was cheaper on Amazon Prime than anywhere and came free to the door). It is quiet, like I can barely hear it running most of the time. And it has a variable speed transmission thingy so it should save us a tremendous amount of cash and pay for itself within a year or two. I think the fresh gravel around the filter and freshly painted pipes really make the whole thing look alot better. The project also took care of alot of leaking issues, so that is nice for a number of reasons.