When you are trying to decide between whether to buy a sand swimming pool filter or a cartridge type you have to determine the amount of debris falling into your pool daily.
A year ago I had my old swimming pool sand filter start to leak for no other reason than age and sitting in the sun for twenty years. I had no complaints with the sand filter.
I went to the local swimming pool supply company and they convinced me that a Hayward Cartridge filter would be superior to the sand filter and would make the water clearer because of the finer filter elements ability to take out smaller size water contaminants. After buying and installing the new cartridge filter there were no problems and the swimming pool water did seem clearer. One week later we had a wind storm and a lot of tree debris got blown into the pool. The debris that was small enough to get by the skimmer got trapped by the filter cartridge and within hours almost completely clogged the cartridge.
This happened on a regular basis because my pool is surrounded by large trees so I ended up cleaning the filter cartridge every other day. So if you have a swimming pool surrounded by trees and anything else that may add large debris to the pool water, a cartridge filter may not be right for you, unless you want to clean it every other day.
I dealt with cleaning the filter cartridge for one year then replaced the Hayward cartridge filter with a Pentair TR-60 sand filter. The TR-60 is the same filter I originally had but it was made by Triton, I guess they were bought out by Pentair. The Pentair sand filter has been working great now for the past six months, and I only have to backwash it once every two weeks, a big improvement over the constant washing of the cartridge from the Hayward.
When deciding what type of filter you need for your swimming pool, whether a pool sand filter, or a pool cartridge filter you have to determine the amount of debris larger than large dust particles that fall into your pool water. If you have trees over your pool with pine needles, and the various blooms from trees can fall into your swimming pool then you would be better off looking at installing a sand filter.
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