06/19/2026
🚨 Pool Pump Not Moving Water? Check This First! 🚨
This customer called because her pump wasn’t pushing any water. Unfortunately, we were booked out for service calls, so I asked her to troubleshoot over the phone and realized it was more than something simple to do over the phone so I asked them to bring the pump in for us to inspect.
When I pulled the front housing off, I found the impeller completely packed with leaves, debris, and other junk! 😳
The culprit? They were vacuuming without the skimmer basket installed. Once the pump basket filled up and overflowed with debris, all that material was able to get sucked directly into the impeller, blocking water flow.
💡 Lesson of the day: Always make sure your skimmer basket and pump basket are in place before vacuuming. Those baskets are your pump’s first line of defense and can save you from costly repairs and downtime.
A few minutes of cleaning saved this pump from needing major work!
📸 Check out the before and after photos below. That’s a lot of debris for one little impeller!
