Do you HAVE to use a bottom and foam?

I know it is probably "recommended", but this $500 pool has turned into thousands of dollars already and I'm trying to cut corners where I can. If we are using 3" of masons sand, do we really NEED a bottom like Happy Bottom or Utimate bottom or styrofoam? Also, we are just using sand for coving, but do I NEED the wall foam that goes between the liner and the wall of the pool? The pool we have is aluminum so I understand I don't worry about rust, right? If I can get away with not using it, I'd like to do that. But if it's a necessity, then of course I will bite the bullet and spend the extra $300. Thanks!

You can use just the sand. The quality is what matters as you will find reading here one person used masons sand and had alot of pebbles that had to be pulled. The foam or soft bottoms are for added comfort and rarely include any protection. Hope this helps....

Excellent points Tpope. I use only sand on 95% of my installs with no problems. Sand is very different in other states than what we get here. It needs to be a fine masons type sand. Here it is called washed motar sand.

You don't want your cove to wash out so be sure to have dirt and then lanscaping covering you bottom rails all the way around the pool.

Best of luck, Dennis

Just a word of caution. I am new to pools but I know several people in our town ( at least 5) who have above ground pools and the sand has filtered down through the cracks below their pool and now there are valleys or channels below their liner where the sand left and ran down the cracks when the ground got dry and cracked during the hot summer months.

This might be only a problem in our soil. Black land. Cotton country. Our town was know for the sign in front of the rail road station that said "Welcome to Greenville, Home of the Blackest Land and the Whitest People" It's long been taken down, but their are still post cards floating around on ebay and if you google you will find all sorts of references to Greenville and the sign.

But back to what I was saying is so many people had their pools put in professionally and now they trip in their own pool because of the valleys in their liner. If your ground cracks at all, I would try and put down some heavy landscape fabric and 6 mil plastic before you lay your sand so the sand will stay where you put it. I might even put both down. I personally used a 2" Styrofoam bottom with the gorilla pad on top of it and love it. I also put the foam pad cove and the thick wall foam which I like a lot too. The wall foam does not come all the way to the top because I have 54" walls and you can really feel the difference between the hard walls and the soft walls. I didn't think that small of thickness of foam would make so much difference to the touch, but it does. Anyway, my 2-cents on laying something down before you lay your sand. I'm sure it will give a little but not run out if your ground cracks from the heat and here in Texas, we have already been warned about triple digits for this summer. Glad I got my pool up. We love it.

Aranon.