Pleatco PCC130 Replacement Cartridge

I purchased these once before and they worked pretty good. They lasted for like 3-4 years, cleaning them every 6-9 months. Since I had a good experience the first time, I thought I would purchase again. We had the second set for about a year now. Over the last year our electricity bill has been very higher than normal and we couldn't figure out why. Since the filters were fairly new and we have efficient pool equipment (i.e. variable speed pumps), we didn't really suspect it to be either. I started noticing our pool pump behaving abnormally, such as not priming or saying there was some kind of blockage. I even cleaned the filters, but still had problems. Thinking it was the pump because the filters were fairly new and recently clean, I started trying to diagnose the pump, but everything was looking fine. Finally, I decided to pull the cartridge filters out and run the pump without them, just to compare. Immediately, I noticed the pump was working like it should, using less than half of what it was using before (went from 1200 watts to 370 watts). I'm not sure what they changed on the latest set that would cause this problem. This might be dumb, but I ordered another set, thinking I'll have the same luck as my first set. For now, system is running without cartridge filters. I hope the new ones work better.