Things My Water Filter Taught Me

By Emily Niebuhr:

After an interesting day at work last week, I went home and changed my filters, I learned a few valuable lessons. I was pretty frazzled at the end of the day and knew I needed to change my filters so I thought “What the heck? This will be easy”. Soon I learned that I was not immune to making mistakes.

Lesson 1 – Always follow directions (Even if you’ve done the task many times before)

I have talked to so many of you about how to change your filters that I can probably change them with my eyes closed, and I’ve been the ones to service my filters each time so I’m confident in my filter changing ability. Well, I drained one of the sumps, used the wrench to remove the sump and took the filter out. I moved onto the second sump. While draining the second sump I got bored and thought to myself, “I know this is going to be heavy, I’ll just be careful when I remove the sump”…BAD PLAN!

Lesson #1 - Make sure you drain the housing as much as you can before you take the sump off. Just as I spun the sump free, it slipped in my hands and I dropped it, and when I dropped it I spilled water all over my pump house, which sent me scrambling for materials to sop up the spilled water. Luckily I semi caught it so that it didn’t land on the bottom drain and break that off!

Lesson #2 – Always plan ahead
Yes changing filters is a simple task but, it does require a little bit of planning. After cleaning up the water in my pump house I moved onto the next step of changing filters, I needed to clean the sumps out with some bleach water and a soft sponge. Well if you guessed that I hadn’t filled a bucket with water prior to turning my water off and removing my filter sumps then you guessed right! And because I don’t have a bypass installed (a longer story) there is no way for me to get water unless I put the sumps back on.

Before you remove your sumps to replace your filters draw a bucket of water for your bleach solution so that you’re ready when the time comes.

Lesson #2A – If you plan on installing new o-rings take them out of the package and unwind them so that they aren’t stuck in a figure 8.

I decided that I was going to change my O-rings this filter change too, well I had just grabbed some off the shelf at work thinking that I could outsmart them. After 15 minutes of trying to get them to unwrap themselves I gave up and put the original ones back on. (There wasn’t anything wrong with the originals, I just thought after being taken off 4 or 5 times they would like a break). If you know you’re going to change your filters AND O-rings get the O-rings out of their package a day ahead of time.

Lesson #3 – Don’t take yourself too seriously
It’s not the end of the world if you spill water all over your pump house, or if you have to put filter sumps back on. You’ll get it figured out and changing your filters next time will go as smooth as ever!