Showing posts with label swimming pool. Show all posts
Showing posts with label swimming pool. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Pool Deck Drain Cleaning, Mechanical and Biological

Now for something completely different, a cobbled-together "solution" for a clogged pool deck drain!

Hurricanes Helene and now Milton have had their way and then some with my area of Florida. As a result, various compostable debris off my roof has found its way down onto my pool (or bacta tank, if you're that hardcore) deck and through the plastic drain. Similar to this one except the drain lives at the corner of the concrete deck and concrete block wall.


Heavy rain led to water intrusion into my garage underneath the back porch due to a compromised door threshold with rotting wood thanks to one and done sketchy, sloppy workmanship by a contractor who shall remain nameless (not out of compassion, it's just been so long I've forgotten, lucky them). 

So, inspired by madness and various other factors, and rather than pay some handyperson to do the job for me, I put together a selection of goods to handle things brutishly.

First, a wood augur, this one.




Next, a 1/2 inch hex socket to hold the augur in place.




Then, a couple of TEKTON 1/2 Inch Drive socket extensions, 24 inches each.



Next, a socket adapter to enable my cordless drill to hook up with this maniacal assembly. 




And, finally, OG Duck Tape to literally seal the deal. 



The idea here is to connect these pieces into basically a long, heavy drill bit that will see the auger power through what gunk and dirt lives in the deck drain and extract it. 

Here's the end result, Ryobi drill for scale.



Months prior to devising this thing, I deployed a liquid biological dethatcher, basically a concoction of beneficial bacteria and microbes to go after accumulated organic matter and start to break it downl. This is similar to the notion of  creating compost, where bulky leaves and branches and grass clippings and whatnot are deconstructed into humus, ideal for gardening among other things.



To help my new microbial friends do their job, I also every few weeks in added some compost accelerator to speed up and promote the bacteria's growth.



Before this enterprise, the rotting threshold saw water intrusion leading to small puddles of water collecting in the area indoors just behind the back door leading to the pool deck.

After a few goes over a couple weeks with this super-lengthened augur, proper drainage has been restored, and despite the inches upon inches of rainfall, water has yet to accumulate. This is buying me some time so that repairs can commence to the threshold once the nice, agonizingly brief spell of cool fall weather sets in.

Following drilling into the muck and seeing the auger capture and help me extract foul-smelling, increasingly soil-like gunk, I took a regular garden hose to the drain and did a once over with it down the length of it. As I did so, very fine organic matter with roughly the same dark hue (and odor) as the dethatching agent would bubble up through the drain as I went, suggesting the bacteria had well established itself and been gobbling up the stuff in advance nicely.

Not exactly within the purview of information technology, but at the same time a nice side project to pursue to take unclogging clogs into my own hands.