If you grab the pump and touch the housing you get zapped.
Lets say you have a loose hot wire in the pump, and it is touching the metal housing. The ground plug is used to protect the user from a case becoming energized. Notice that the ground plug never came into play here. If it detect a large enough difference, it assumes the difference is going somewhere else, such as through your body. A GFCI in basic terms senses the amount of electricity going out on the hot side and coming back in on the neutral. GFCIs are required in certain locations by code (outdoors, near water, etc). I certainly do not want to damage the pump, hose, or connector from ice, but I also want to minimize the hassle of taking the pump on and off.The type of plug (three prong or otherwise) does not dictate if it needs to be plugged into a GFCI or not. Since the pump has a float sensor to trigger when to turn on, can I leave it out and hooked in all the time, or should I unhook it and only put it out when it rains? The reason I ask this is because I left it out last week and the water remaining in the hose froze. Does the positioning of the hose matter when setting up the pump? Some places online said you shouldn't have the hose go 'uphill' (but that's virtually impossible since the pump is going to be in a sagging cover), that it has to lie completely flat (to prevent my problem i guess). So the problem is fixed, but 2 questions arose from this experience:ฤก. Again, this maybe makes sense, but I would think the pressure from the pump would be able to get past this on the first try. They said that by starting it up repeatedly, it would push the air through a little each time until it clears it out. water on both sides of it, so think air bubble), usually due to the hose bending/looping or not lying completely flat on the ground, it may not work. Somewhere I read online (didn't make total sense to me, but since it fixed it, who am I to argue) mentioned that if you get air stuck in the hose (trapped air, i.e. I managed to get it to work just by unplugging it and replugging it in repeatedly. After realizing that I had to wait for my post to be posted, I continued to work with it since it was only raining harder and filling up faster. I opened it and it was clean inside and the float moves around with no problem. The pump itself works 'fine', as using it without a hose had it pumping out with no problem. Thanks for any help you can provide to a new home/pool owner. It works fine without the hose, so why is it having problems when I reconnect the hose?
I couldn't find any specifications saying it wouldn't work with my setup, and it already worked fine the first day I used it. Do I need to somehow position the hose so that it does not have to go that far, or position it where it does not go uphill (unfortunately not possible at my house)? So the only possible thing I can think of is (and considering the first time it worked fine, I don't know why it'd be a problem now), does the elevation of the hose have anything to do with it? By this I mean will it not turn on if it has to pump uphill? My pool is surrounded by a deck, and since the cover is sagging a good 8", it has to first send the water up about 12" high, across about 8 feet of deck, then back downhill to our drainage ditch on the side of the house. I reconnected the hose to it and put it back in the water, and it refuses to turn on. I put the pump in the water without the hose and it immediately kicked on and started pumping water out through the hose hookup, so I know the pump works, the float is fine, the holes are clean (not clogged), and the electricity works. Today it's raining harder and there is a large pool of water on the pump. I got the ice out of the hose and it's no longer frozen. I pulled the pump out of the puddle on the cover and unplugged it. I tried to fix it and noticed that because of the cold (I'm in Maryland), there was apparently water still in the hose that had frozen, which I thought was maybe why it was not working, i.e. This last week I noticed that it was no longer draining water off. The first time it rained I connected my pool cover pump up to a hose and plugged it in and it pumped the water right off with no problem. I'm a new pool owner (in ground, solid cover) and just closed for the winter. I've used this forum for other information so hopefully someone can help me with my problem. I searched all over the internet for help and looked up the manual to the pump but nothing helped.