Good morning, I am having a problem with my Cal Spas spa; it is from the early 90's. It uses 3 pumps, 2 for jets (right and left side) and one for heater / ozone.
I have a 15 year back round working with commercial pools and spas, so I am not new to this by any means.
I live in northern Minnesota and my tub is outdoors, I drain it in October and refill it in March every year. When I drain it I use a shop vac and leaf blower to remove the water from the lines, the process takes me 2 to 3 hours.
I just refilled my tub yesterday. After repairing the wiring the rabbits had chewed, it came to life and the heater pump fired right up. When I tried the jet pumps they did nothing. I checked to make sure that they were primed and they were (water was in both pump housings).
I proceeded to check all gate valves and they are open. The pumps are working; they will move water out the pressure relief line located in the skimmer. I started to think the lines may be frozen, as I have no discharge on either pump, at this point the water in the tub is @ 38 Degrees and heating, so I assume it will unthaw as it warms, but to speed it up I places a 40,000 btu torpedo heater outside of the cabinet and directed it inside the skirt for about 5 hours. Still no circulation. I decided to try to force water into the discharge line, using a garden hose placed into the line via a jet selector valve on the surface of the tub, this appears to have no effect. I then shut everything down and closed all of the valves, disconnected the discharge lines from each of the pumps, opened the valves and nothing came out. I then snaked a garden hose as deep into the line as I could and ran it for 5 min, this did no good.
As I sat and though about just trying to start it on fire, I decided to let some water out of the tub, when I got to the exterior drain valve I found I had left it open from when I had winterized the tub, and nothing was coming out of it.
This morning the water is 104 it has been 20 + hours since I started this and still the discharge and drain lines will not allow water through them. Could they be frozen, maybe I left some water behind last fall, but after all the heat I would think they would have unthawed.
I don’t know how the plumbing runs, but I do believe the 2 discharge lines are complete separate. Could a family of mice crawled in the drain line and made their way into both discharge lines and plugged them?
I am at a loss. I have thought about taking a sewer snake to the lines, but not knowing how the lines run I don't want to damage anything. Maybe I could use some compressed air, but