MAYDAY! Pool leaking under winter cover!!

[glockshooter]

hi folks! First post, and I'm afraid it might be a bad one. I bought a house this summer with a 16'x32' vinyl liner inground pool. The house disclosure said the liner was about 2 years old. I added water maybe twice through the summer. I attributed this to not having a solar cover, and heavy use by 2 kids, plus a semi-dry summer. I had the pool professionally closed in September. Cover is a basic cover, held with waterbags.

I started to notice some sag, so I spent some time pumping the cover off. I'm in northeast PA, so we're getting snow, rain, etc. Ice is still on the cover. I noticed last weekend after a heavy snow that it looked like my bags were getting pulled in, a better look in the morning confirmed it. After a few days of warm weather (at least warm enough to melt snow) I was pumping and replacing bags.

Over Christmas, one of my visitors was a former employee of a pool company, many years ago. They took a look at the cover and said "WOW! That's not good!". I made it out today to actually start looking under the cover to see what was going on.

I would say i'm down to about a 1-1/2' of water in the shallow end. I'm going to say it's normally a 4' shallow end? It was pumped down to below the skimmer by the pool company when closed. I'm thinking I lost 3' since the end of September.

I was able to inspect a few spots today, just by looking under the cover in spots, and I don't see anything glaring. What do I do? Obviously, i'm expecting to have an issue in the spring, I just want to make sure I can mitigate this as much as I can now.

Thank you in advance!

[PoolDoc]

Unless you want to uncover the pool and find the leak -- which probably will involve getting IN the pool -- I'm not sure there's much you can do except to continue to fill as needed. You cannot install a vinyl liner in cold weather, so that's not really an option. Even installing a patch would be tough. Local vinyl pool companies would have more experience trying to work with vinyl pools in cold weather than I do, so asking them might be helpful.

Welcome to the forum.

[CarlD]

Despite living in a similar climate (we have about 6-7" of snow that just fell) I'm not sure what you can do. It could be the liner, but it could also be a leaking plug if you have a bottom drain, or a cracked pipe underground. When your pool freezes (as it may already have) at least the ice can keep the liner from floating out. How much of an ice layer do you have?

I would still add water, which is a pain as you must open a hose bib, then drain it again (or get a foam cover for it).

[glockshooter]

Thank you guys. Working on it or investigating is going to be a week or two out. We're under 10" of snow, and it's currently -3F. I suspect there is a good ice layer on it now. Last time I was pumping the cover and looking under it was in the mid 30's.

As far as I know, I don't have a bottom drain. I'm assuming it would be plainly visible, right? The hopper of the deep end is smooth. I think at this point I'm below the suction and return lines as well, unless I totally misjudged the depth in the shallow end. I guess the best I could hope for now is an issue mid depth, at least the water will drain to there and not be totally empty.

Barring that, any ideas what else could have happened? I'm just shocked at how quickly I lost the water. I added 2x over the summer, but figured without a solar cover, a dry summer, and kids in and out constantly, that was par for the course. At this rate, it would have been empty by mid summer. Can a liner just catastrophically fail somehow? Anything that the closing company could have/have not done correctly?

Thank you for your help!

[PoolDoc]

I think, without inspecting the pool, all we can do is offer useless guesses. Until this cold spell moderates -- which may be in 2 *months* (due to global warming, of course ;) ) -- there's little you can do usefully.

[CarlD]

" Can a liner just catastrophically fail somehow?"

It sure can! I had my new pool filled 10 days when on Mother's Day, 2003, I woke to the sound of a "waterfall". The brandy-new liner had split on a factory seam and was seriously washing away my sand base. Luckily, I have engineered drainage under the pool so the water didn't flood my basement. It was replaced under warranty and it's lasted 11 seasons so far.

But this "Nor'easter" has made ANY pool repairs or even assessment virtually impossible. We have 6 or 7" and we hit -3 deg last night, so I'm in the same weather system as you.

[glockshooter]

I know the repairs will have to wait. It's just the suspense that is killing me. I almost had the ice off last weekend before it started setting up. Figured I could at least flip back half at a time and look around.

[glockshooter]

Well, after a 50 degree shift, and about 2 inches of rain, my cover had enough water on it to pull the water bags in on the shallow end. At least I can look around that end for a bit and the rain is going into the pool. I guess that's about as good as I can hope for at this point.

[PoolDoc]

Sorry, but I just don't know of any practical steps you can take till things warm up a lot. One caution: vinyl sheeting can be brittle in sub-freezing temps, so be careful how you touch it.

[CarlD]

Sorry, but I just don't know of any practical steps you can take till things warm up a lot. One caution: vinyl sheeting can be brittle in sub-freezing temps, so be careful how you touch it.

You just want to make sure you have enough water in it so the liner stays in place. If you have to use a hose bib to add water to the pool, remember to shut off the water to the bib and open it to drain it so it doesn't freeze. And watch out because the hose will be brittle, too.

But it's supposed to go down to single digits again tonight! (ouch!)

Saturday night we had -3. Sunday night it was in the high 20's. This morning, less than 36 hours later it reached 56 melting most of the snow, and a few hours later DROPPED 20 degrees, and now we're due for single digits--all in just 48 hours!

[PoolDoc]

Tell me about it -- it was 53 yesterday afternoon, and currently it's 12, on its way down to 5. And, this is N. Georgia, supposedly in the (fairly) deep South.

Actually, we had this sort of weather fairly regularly when I was a kid. I remember a winter when we registered -4 F. on the thermometer at our house. But the last time any weather like this occurred was in the winter of 80/81. I was still a plumber then, and I worked my a## off for 2 weeks, fixing busted pipes.

Speaking of . . . there are a LOT of houses out there, built in the last 25 years, that have never been tested by this sort of weather. They will be discovering pipes too close to the exterior wall, water lines that were installed too close to the surface and more. There are also a lot of people that will discover, this spring, that the winterizing methods that have worked fine in the past didn't work so well this winter.

The kiddie pool I service a local country club was never designed for this sort of winter -- it was build about 25 years ago -- but that's not been a problem till now. I had to fill it to flood level, and restart the pump, so I could keep it circulating through all this.

Of course, I'm enjoying some aspects of this. Some conservative media outlets have been flogging some video quotes from Obama claiming that Nov 2013 had excessively warm temps due to global warming; I wonder if he'll now claim that the cold weather was caused by global warming, as a Brit 'scientist' did last winter. And, I've had to giggle, every time I think of that ship full of 'eco-tourists' who went to Antarctic to document the loss of coastal ice, but got stuck in the "missing" ice instead, along with a Chinese rescue ice-breaker.

[glockshooter]

well, it looks like the water level has stabilized. It's still way low, but if it stays around this level, it's going to be about a foot of water in the shallow. Beats having a hole in the dead bottom of the pool, right?

[CarlD]

It certainly does! It looks like you have found approximately where your leak is, and since it's allowing you to keep 1' of water in the pool, you may well survive the winter with your pool intact and able to repair the liner. Good luck!