A Texas pool owner walked away unscathed after what he called a “total rookie move” involving his pool filter.
On January 14, after freezing temperatures arrived in the North Texas area, Terry Roden of Plano watched his filter explode into the sky.
Roden said that the night before, his freeze stat didn’t kick his equipment on, so the 12-degree temperatures froze the equipment solid. The following morning, he picked up an industrial heater and set it up near the pump. Once it thawed, he fired it up.
The explosion was magnificent. “It spooled up, and then the top of my filter pod broke loose and looked like Elon Musk launched a rocket from my house,” Roden posted on X. The top of the filter landed in a neighbor’s yard.
He realized too late that the frozen water in the filter had caused it to crack, and when the pump was turned on, the pressure caused the filter to blow.
“Such a boneheaded move,” he wrote.