Bottom Feeder Cartridge: Dirt Gone in Minutes!

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Hey, welcome to the pool game podcast show. If this episode I'm going to follow up

on a product that I featured here in January, and that is the bottom feeder and shrimp

cartridge filter adapter, and this is something that has revolutionized the vacuum system

market in particular if you own the bottom feeder or shrimp cleaner, and I'll go over some

details of it, and of course, how it is after about three months of usage here. Are you a pool

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veteran in the industry, whether you're starting out or scaling up, I've got the tools to help you

succeed. There are more as we pull learning.com. So whatever new product comes out, there's always

skepticism about the reality of it if it actually works, and is it really effective? And of course,

with anything, if there was a predecessor to it that kind of didn't work as well as it should have,

then something new is always assumed to be just as bad as the predecessor product. So the bottom

feeder did have a cartridge assembly prior to this one that came out several years ago, and I

actually reviewed it. There were a few issues with this particular cartridge adapter, the original one.

It was a larger cartridge filter. I believe it was 80 square feet. I remember correctly. And it kind

of just, you kind of just push it on to the throat or top of the bottom feeder, and you just stay

there and place basically with a strap that you would put on it. And the top of it also had

like a piece of metal or aluminum, I should say, that would keep the dirt from going back out.

So it wasn't extremely effective, and so it sourd a lot of people that tried it. I thought it was

effective enough if you needed to use it to get dirt off the bottom, but it wasn't an everyday

tool to get dirt out of a pool. And so it wasn't that popular, and it kind of just kind of

disappeared on the market, and it promoted. I didn't really promote it because it wasn't that

effective. But this new one actually is highly effective, and the feedback from people using it

has been incredibly positive. You know, the fact that you can actually have a vacuum system now

with the cartridge on top, they can actually pick up dirt down to 10 or 20 microns, which is kind of

the holy grail of the vacuum system, because we know that the bags, even the small microns,

bags like the Riptide 60 micron, they actually have a 25 micron as well, that fills up with air

pretty quickly. They have a low micron hammerhead bag, and then of course if you're a powerback

user like myself in the old days, you had that yellow 60 micron bag that powerback had.

Have a funny story. I was cleaning a water feature with it. It was a brand new build,

and they had put like a little pond water feature, and so I had my my power back, and I had this

brand new yellow 60 micron bag to get some of that silt and dirt out of there. So I'm just using it,

and you know, going back and forth in there, and then I feel like something snagged it, or

I hit the bottom feeder on something, or the power back, I should say, this is parts of the

bottom feeder, and it actually tore the bag, you know, the whole length of the bag was torn

about 10 inches up, making it totally useless, brand new bag wasted, because it is a much fragile

fragile fragile, and much easier material to tear, because it's a little microns, and so when it

starts filling up with the air, and the dirt coats it, if you rub it against anything sharp, it'll

definitely tear open like nothing, and it didn't last very long either, because the smaller micron

bags tend to wear out faster, because of the material, being much finer, then say it, you know,

100 micron bag or 200 micron bag, and so the bottom feeder does have a 57 micron bag as well,

which is pretty good for most situations, but any dirt that's going to be, you know,

smaller than 57 microns will go right through the bag, which is a lot of the dirt, basically,

finer dirt will pass right through these vacuum system bags, so having the ability to have a

cartridge on top that will filter dirt out of the pool, is something that everyone's been wanting

for their vacuum system, because why would you ever want to manually vacuum a pool again,

if you have a vacuum system, it's so convenient to drop it in there, and then use that to get all

the debris out, and dirt down to a certain micron, but now if you can get dirt as well as

leaf debris out of the pool, which is one vacuum system, I think this is what makes it so amazing,

because with the fact that you can use the bag as well, and then switch it to a cartridge,

and I'll go over that in a second how fast it is to do this, but just the fact that you can use

the bag when you need to, and then have the cartridge available that is actually very effective,

when you need it, makes this a very versatile, and it makes it a all-in-one type device

for most pool pros in your, depending on your area, in your situation, if you're in an area where you

have a lot of dirt in the pools, as well as some leaf debris, this would be perfect for you,

now if you're in an area where you just get tons of leaf debris, and you're not really concerned

about the dirt, of course you could just go with the bottom of the heater with the bag,

or you can go with a larger vacuum system like the hammer at a rip tide, no problem there because

there are certain situations where the full size vacuum system isn't necessity in those areas,

but I would argue that about 90% of the areas that have pool servers can't get away with just

having the bottom feeder or the new shrimp cleaner as the primary vacuum system, and there's

really no need for the full size vacuum system with the cart, and especially with this cartridge now,

and I'm going to just touch on how easy it is to go between bag and cartridge,

there's a patent pending on this thing, because it is pretty unique in the industry,

the halo that's on the bottom feeder or shrimp is the little black part that the bags go onto,

they call it the halo, so the bags kind of, if you're using the back bag that comes with it,

you just kind of clip it on there, using another bag like the clear pool products bag,

the bungee cord goes over it, and that's what holds the bag on, but with the new threaded halo,

the actual cartridge assembly has a threaded part on the bottom, so the threaded halo is the

male part that runs on it, the cartridge assembly has a female threaded part on the bottom,

and you simply thread in the cartridge in about 10 seconds, you can go between the cartridge

assembly and a bag making this a very versatile cleaner, there's no need to take off

a clumsy adapter, unclip it, and then put the bag on, you just simply unscrew the cartridge,

and then put the bag on top, or take the bag off and screw on the cartridge,

and that's that easy to go from one to the other seamlessly, currently the cartridge adapter

is only available on the bottom feeder and shrimp cleaner, and surprisingly, it works really great

on the shrimp, now the shrimp is kind of like the bottom feeder, and it has the sides cut off,

and this little smaller has a five inch throat versus the six inch throat of the bottom feeder,

so it's much smaller and compact, it even has a smaller battery, so it is a much smaller compact

vacuum, and with the cartridge on top it actually works really well, in fact I think it works just

as good as the bottom feeder, if not better because of the smaller throat, it really pulls that

dirt in really, you know, in an accelerated fashion, and the nice thing about this cartridge is

that it's actually a 50 square foot cartridge that's not too bulky and too cumbersome, and actually

it's really well balanced on the back of the bottom feeder and shrimp, now there is a battery hack

that you can do, and I show that in the video where I filmed the extension kit, which I'll cover a

little bit as well here, and that is to take the battery off of the portability kit that comes

with it, it's a small little piece of pool pool, just take the battery, turn it upside down, take

a clamp that they would get, the bottom feeder will give you, and then clamp the battery about 18

inches above where the cartridge sits, and that way when you're in an area where the battery may

hit the cartridge, it's not going to hit it because you move the battery up 18 inches on the back of it,

hard to describe here on the podcast, but basically you're just turning the battery upside down

and moving it up 18 inches so that's not going to hit the cartridge, to me it's not a big deal,

writing it with the battery on the back of it, it's not super inconvenient, and there's

only certain points where you may hit it with the battery on the back, this cartridge again is a

50 square foot cartridge, and so you're going to have the ability, in my testing, to pick up about

one or two pounds of dirt, which is a significant amount of dirt, now it's not an infinite capacity,

so a lot of people are going to use this, and they're going to clean a pool that has, you know,

five or six pounds of dirt, or dead algae or DE in there, and just note that just like a cartridge

filter that can get overloaded, this can also get overloaded, and so you want to just be logical about

it, and one or two pounds of dirt is actually a lot of dirt by the way, it can also pick up leaf

debris, I would say a handful of leaf debris is the capacity, this is not made to pick up, you know,

a pool that's full of leaves, you want to use the bag for that, but if you have a handful of leaves,

you know, a handful is a pretty good amount of leaves, this will be fine, it's not going to cause any

problems with it, just be aware that when you take out of the pool the leaves are going to just fall

right, back down the throat onto the ground, so just put it somewhere where you know it's going to,

you can clean up the leaf debris quickly and easily, now the clean the filter is very simple,

you're just again unscrew it from the threaded fitting, turn it upside down and you can use a

high power nozzle to hose the inside of it off, you don't even have to take the lid off to clean it,

you can take the lid off to get it a thorough cleaning, but after every use you should get the hose

and stick it in there, and the hose off as much dirt as possible, so it's ready for the next pool.

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I did mention that I show this battery hack in this, the extension video,

now there are some pool pros that were saying that there was a lot of pools with you know three or

four pounds of dirt, they had to maybe take the cleaner out, clean off the cartridge, put it back

again to get the rest of the pool, some pool pros actually carry spare cartridges, and I can give

you which cartridges it is too, so that if you do have one, you can find a replacement cartridge,

it does work on other cartridges besides the unicell cartridges that comes with it that I should

back up and say that it comes shipped with a unicell 50 square foot cartridge filter,

if that's the unicell C9 405 50 square foot filter, there's also off brand ones you can buy

on Amazon, a pleaco actually makes one, the PAP 54 that's the unicell C905 or the Philber FCO684,

and this is also one, there's also a bunch of other ones you can use this on,

if you wanted to have two cartridges and you can switch them out with the heavy debris pools,

but the extension kit actually will expand the cartridge and make it a 100 square foot cartridge

filter, it has a 500 mm rod and then you just double stack the cartridges on top each other,

it's surprisingly it's not super unbalanced because of the way that it screws on to the

threaded halo, the cartridge actually stays on there firmly and it doesn't really move around a lot,

so even with a 100 square foot cartridge filter with the extension kit, the cleaner is really

very mobile on the pool and it doesn't really cause mobility issues at all in my testing,

so you can easily expand the cartridge again from my 50 square foot capacity to 100 square foot

capacity, now the way it's designed and I've had questions about this also, you know, the dirt

actually goes inside the cartridge and not outside the cartridge because of course if we went

outside the cartridge, you go right back into the pool and it's actually reversing from a cartridge

filter, a normal cartridge filter, the clean water goes down the center core and out the cartridges,

the pleats on the cartridge should say and all the dirt stays on the outside of the cartridge

contained cartridge filter, that's how it works but since there is no actual filter top on top of

this thing, the dirt actually goes inside the cartridge, the top keeps the dirt from coming out

of it and so all the dirt is contained inside of the cartridge itself and it's a self-contained

unit where the clean water passes through, ironically I feel like you don't see a lot of power drop

when you're using the cartridge assembly or the cartridge filter on top of it because the fact that

the bags, when the bags start to get filled up with smaller particles and some dirt,

let's say you're using a 75 micron bag or a 90 micron bag, basically that dirt will actually

coat the bag and prevent some of the water from going back through the bag, causing the cleaner

or the vacuum system to lose some power and then some extreme cases, if you don't empty the bag out

you'll actually see the vacuum system floating up and water coming out the bottom of it

because the water can't penetrate the bag at that point because there's so much stuff

coating it and it starts filling up with air as well but since you're using a 50 square

foot cartridge filter on top, the actual flow is pretty amazing so the clean water can flow

through the pleats really easily, the dirt leaves get trapped inside the core of the cartridge

and you don't really see any drop off again in power as you're picking up the dirt so by the time

you finish vacuuming up one pound of dirt from the bottom of the pool, there's like zero drop off

in power and there's no water coming out the bottom of the cleaner because of the extra flow

that the cartridge creates allowing the clean water to pass through again, trapping all the dirt

down to 10 to 20 microns inside the cartridge itself so if you go to the bottom feeder site

just go to the bottomfeeder.com, click on the shop button and there's a couple of ways actually

by the cartridge assembly you can buy it as a complete unit with the bottom feeder and shrimp

so you can see that in the shop area the shrimp and bottom feeder with the cartridge assembly

with the cleaner if you don't have a bottom feeder you can buy it all that together as one

complete unit or you can buy the cartridge assembly if you already have a bottom feeder or

shrimp you can buy the cartridge assembly separately you also have the extension kit for sale there

and you also have an extra cartridge for sale on their site now so you can buy the unicel cartridge

directly from the bottom feeder you can buy the bottom feeder assembly kit with the bottom

feeder shrimp or buy it separately if you have a bottom feeder or shrimp already and I would say

that again for most people this would be the only vacuum system you're going to need going forward

because not only will it pick up leaf debris but now you can vacuum out dirt down to 10 to 20 microns

which means that essentially you'll never get a need to use your manual vacuum and hose again

in a pool you don't even need to carry it on your truck a lot of people that get this

cartridge filter assembly leave their pool hose and vacuum head at home well the vacuum head might

come in handy if you have suction side cleaners and you want to use the cleaner hose as the vacuum

of pool but as far as carrying the cleaner hose or the pool hose with you you don't need the 50

foot pool hose any longer you have this cartridge adapter that will get the dirt out of the pool

get the dirt out of the spa and it doesn't really matter if you use the bottom feeder or shrimp

I think both cleaners with the cartridge on top work really effectively now if you're using

the bottom feeder one last note you want to keep that thrust ring in the throat so that you're

creating a little bit tighter area for the propeller and the area where the dirt gets sucked up

it'll create more suction that way but the shrimp there's no need for that because it has a five

inch throat and the propeller is actually right there at the edge of the opening and again it works

really effectively for both cleaners and if you're looking for a tool to get dirt out of a pool

and make your life easier and you're in the market for a vacuum system I definitely would

look into getting the shrimp or bottom feeder with the cartridge filter assembly on top of it

and it's something that's going to save you time energy and ultimately pay for itself with the

time saving out there on your route looking for other podcasts you can find those on my website

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thanks for listening to this podcast every next year week god bless

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