CAN YOU TOP THIS?

Welcome to the latest edition of our popular “Can You Top This?” column, featuring the newest entry in the Service Industry News “Horror File. ”

This issue’s entry comes to us from Matthew Dunn, of Independently Dunn, in Redmond, Washington.

“We went to this service call for lack of suction and no prime,” writes Matthew.

“Everything looked ok on the suction side until I cut the pipe and my pvc cutter folded the pipe in half. We discovered the pool was plumbed with class 200 PVC. Code requires schedule 40 PVC from the pool to the pump room. This pool has a 3.95hp variable-speed pump. It was much too powerful for this pool and it was sucking air, not water. We spent 3 days breaking apart the concrete to pull out the ‘creative skimmer installation’ and replace the PVC.”

Wow! Matthew, this looks like it was quite a challenge; our guess is that you had to really drill down to get to the bottom of the problem.

Other publications like to print lots of pretty pictures of beautiful pools, spas and well engineered installations.

At Service Industry News, we would rather go behind the scenes and take a closer look at the type of stuff our readers encounter everyday — cracked tiles, tree roots, spaghetti plumbing, rats in the heater, cars in the pool and more!

When you are out in the field and you see something that doesn’t look right, send us an email along with a picture and a brief description: Attention Horror File, serviceindustrynewscd@yahoo.com.