We are super grateful for the opportunity to visit with Jay and her family during our stop in Valencia, Spain. Gayle and Jay started their teaching careers together in Bogotá, Colombia 20 some years ago and any time they get to reconnect it’s always a good time.
Jay and her friend are starting a business hosting Spanish cooking experiences at her home in the hills near a national park outside of Valencia. It’s a beautiful property with a big house, gardens and a pool. The first of these cooking experiences was to be Sunday, the day after we arrived. It was a special treat for us to get to meet many people and eat paella, a Valencian speciality.
We arrived on Saturday afternoon and learned that the pool had not been cleaned this week. Swimming was an option for the Sunday event and honestly, it was looking pretty rough and not suitable for guests. Jay was a little stressed about it. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll clean it tomorrow morning.”
True to my word, I went outside at about 8:30 to start the process. I am not a pro, but I have vacuumed a few pools over the years - so I was confident that I could figure it out. Then I opened the door to the pump room and saw the filter, pumps and pipes.
Whoa! This operation had 3 active pumps, multiple intake pipes, a control panel with switches and lights and an automated chlorination system. Every label was written in Spanish! This was much more advanced than anything I’d experienced.
Let the problem solving begin! It did take me a while just to figure out how to turn it on.
Next, I had to sort out the vacuum. In most pools, there is one skimmer that is used to hook up the vacuum. This pool had 4! There were 5 intakes from the pool that were controlled by taps and what a time I had trying to figure out what turning each tap did! After a few trials, I was able to set to taps to draw only from 3 of the 4 skimmers. While this was a positive move, when I hooked the vacuum to one of the three, physics took over and the filter simply drew from the other two only. Several more turns of taps (and 30 minutes later) and the vacuum was feeding on the bottom like a champ. I was very happy to start as the guests would be arriving at 11:00.
After a few minutes I could hear the pump chugging and the vacuum flow reduced significantly. I checked the basket in the filter and it was full of pine needles. After remediating that, the next challenge was to prime the jet pump and get the flow going again. This was not easy - I have always done this by pouring a bucket of water down the pipes. This strategy was not effective the first thee times. I noticed another tap that came from inside the house - boom. This was the primer!
Within moments I was back pushing the vacuum along the bottom. I was able to finish just after 11 and thankfully only one of the couples had arrived. Everyone else only saw sparkling clean blue water.
