Winterize a Pool - Blow Out Lines, part 2

Jonathan Broga: Hi! I am Jonathan Broga with Potomac Pool Service, Design and Construction. Today I am showing you how to winterize the swimming pool. Right now we are going to blow out the lines. Now that the main drain has blown air, we want to lock that as well. This valve is an either/or valve, I don't want to lock the Main Drain and unlock the floor. So I am going to move back to this valve, by closing this valve I have now locked the main drain. The floor is locked, the main drain is locked. Air is now traveling to our valve returns. We have two sets of valve returns here, two that are in the love seat, two that are in the shallow end on the wall. We can blow those out one at a time. Now that I have blown out the deep-end love seat, I am going to blow out the shallow-end valve returns. Those pipes are currently underwater, so I am going to plug them while they are actively blowing air to sufficiently seal those pipes. We are going to airlock the main drain one more time and airlock the spa main drain. This particular pool has a suction side main drain and a return side main drain. The reason you would return water to the main drain is a) safety, it presents no suction entrapment hazard in your deep end but it returns warm surface water from the skimmers down to the deep end of your pool. In this case they are tied in underground, it's important to understand that this pipe needs to be blown out just like that one did.

To do so, we are opening this suction side valve which allows the air to come up from our skimmer, shoot across here; it wont go through the filter system because we have plugged the filter system, and down our main drain. We will get air out of the main drain just like we did on the return side. Once we have air coming out our main drain, we want to air lock the spa main drain in the same manner. To do so, simply route the air to the spa main drain while locking the deep end main drain. Now our spa main drain should be blowing. In case you are not familiar with them, high quality winterization plugs are critical to seal in a pipe. Make sure your plugs are not dry rodded or stripped. The last line that is still full of water is the polaris line. Your pool may or may not have a cleaner with its own dedicated line, most that do however do not have a valve that specifically controls that's line. So now that we have plugged everything else, this line will blow on its own. So that's how we blow out the lines of a swimming pool, at least this particular specific swimming pool. Again, understand that every pool is built differently and the requirements of how specifically to blow out the lines of that pool maybe different from this one. The concepts are the same however, use the air blower to one at a time, blow out each individual line and plug it while it's under pressure. Next, we are going to move on to drain in and blowing out the filter system, the above ground components of the pool.