Your filter’s job is to catch everything you don’t want: dead bugs, sunscreen slime, your neighbor’s shed hair. Eventually, it gets clogged, and water can’t flow. That’s when you backwash—you literally flip the flow backward to blast all that gunk out of the filter and into the ground (or a hose heading to your least favorite bush).
Fun fact: A backwashed filter expels water at up to 15 gallons per minute. That’s enough pressure to fire a garden hose into a small child’s face and still water your petunias in the same afternoon. You are now a water-pressure god.
