u/Business_Bar_7241

genuine question for this sub. whats the last thing in your house thats still completely manual, and whats stopping you from fixing it.

mine is the lawn and its been mine for three years now. everything else got sorted. lights, locks, thermostat, blinds, even the dog feeder. the yard is still me and a push mower every saturday from april through october like its 1994.

the reason i never pulled the trigger is that my mental model of robot mowers is stuck somewhere around 2018. you trench a wire around the whole property, the mower eventually cuts the wire, you spend a sunday hunting the break with a multimeter, and god help you if you want to move a bed. that sounded worse than mowing.

i havent actually gone and checked whether thats still how they work, which is on me.

but im curious whether everybody has one of these. the one thing you keep meaning to automate and just havent, either because the tech genuinely isnt there or because you looked at it once five years ago and quietly filed it under not worth it.

whats yours?

i'm not an expert, just an above ground owner who spent way too long confused by the multiport valve on my sand filter. figured i'd write down what i wish someone had told me starting out, since new owners ask this constantly.

big rule first: always shut the pump off before you turn the handle. switching under pressure is how you wreck the seal inside. learned that the expensive way.

what each position actually does in plain english:

• filter: normal mode, lives here 95% of the time.
• backwash: reverses flow to flush gunk out of the sand. run it til the sight glass goes clear, usually a couple minutes.
• rinse: run this 30 seconds right after backwash, it settles the sand bed so you don't blast dirty water back into the pool.
• waste: sends water straight out, bypassing the filter. great for vacuuming algae or dropping the water level.
• recirculate: pump runs but skips the sand, handy when you're adding chemicals.
• closed: everything shut, only for service.

the one that gets people is skipping rinse after backwash. don't, or your first minute back on filter dumps dirty water in. the positions are the same on any 6 way valve regardless of brand, these aren't specific to mine.

fwiw i'm running an aquastrong sand filter setup, picked it mostly for the built in timer so the pump cycles on its own and i don't forget to run it. but the valve positions above apply to any multiport, doesn't matter what's on your pad.

anything i got wrong or would add?