Pool Swim Silicone
We have a leak in or swimming pool. Please help.?
We have an in-ground pool with a vinyl liner. It’s 3 tears old and is getting progressively worse. I dropped the water level below the skimmer last fall and put the cover on. I checked the level 2 months later and the water was down at the first step. (about 7″)There is also a light at this level. I assumed the leak was related to the step and/or light. I took them both about and resealed them with silicone and filled the pool. It’s still leaking.
I installed the pool myself and did not install a bottom drain so there is no cuts or obstructions below my winter level.
The pool is now all ready for swimming so I’d like to find and repair the leak with out draining the water.
Please help?
Unless you improperly installed the light niche and the conduit, you can pretty well rule the light out as a source of the leak. They’re pretty hard to screw up when installing but the most common problem being a bad connection from the niche to the conduit. This can be dye tested if you have any doubts. The actual wall seals on them work well and are fool proof unless you over tighten the screws on the face plate and strip them or crack the plate.
One thing I notice in your details. You mention dropping your water below the skimmer. I hope you went further than that. You need to drop it to just below the return opening or lowest inwall suction fitting if you installed an inwall vac connection. If you don’t go that low…you can’t properly winterize the return lines when you blow them out. Even if you installed your winterizing plugs properly with T tape, there will be water in that line and that could burst a pipe. If you didn’t install plugs in those inwall fittings…better plan on doing a pressure test since that will be a good candidate as the culprit if no plugs were installed. Return fittings are also at about pool light height on the wall. While you’re at it, also check the return face plates. They do crack over time, especially if they’ve had their screws tightened in too far. A simple fix and can be done while the pool is filled. You can lose 1/4 to 1/2 an inch with a badly cracked face plate in a night.
If you did indeed winterize it properly and had a look around the liner at the lowest water level point you’ve experienced (look carefully since debris tends to get caught in holes), then my bet is the stair stripping. Those ARE easy to screw up. You only get one shot at doing it right.
You’ll need to remove the beauty strip from on top of the stair stripping to expose the screws and first off look for the obvious, a section of liner torn out from under the stripping or a missing screw. Nothing? Turn off the pump to reduce currents eddying in the pool, grab a mask and an old bottle of phenol red ( your pH reagent). Makes a good cheap dye for leak tests. Moving slowly, squirt a little dye along the stair stripping over a distance of 10 inches or so and watch where it goes. If it just hangs there, no leak, move on to the next 10 inches. If you see it drawn in anywhere…there’s a leak. It’ll be handy to have a mirror to inspect the underside of the stair stripping too. It’s too hard to get your face on the bottom and see the underside and if the liner has torn away anywhere, that’s a common spot since there’s a good deal of stress on the liner there, especially so if that liner was a tight fit in the first place.
If it is the stairs, you really ought to get a pro in. He’ll be able to figure out if he can make a repair with all the water in the pool or if he’ll need to drain it to just below the bottom stair strip.
One thing I should mention that is very rare but I have come across it twice, is that it’s also possible that your light conduit set up a siphon. It depends on how you ran your conduit. It ought to have come up to be just barely been visible when you did your back fill and just under the concrete of the deck. It should also be level under your deck with no sudden drop where it exits the side of the original excavation. If your pool gets overfilled slightly, water rises up the conduit and out. If it’s placed wrong, that conduit then sets up a siphon that’ll drain the pool to where the conduit enters the light niche but no farther as it loses the siphon. Your pool water rises over winter as it is displaced by your winter cover water. If that pool was filled to the brim or nearly so with winter cover water…that could also be your issue. Only you would know how you installed that conduit.
Swimming Pool Sounds – Sumergible (Silicon Soul ‘darkroom’ dub)
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