Does vinyl bleaching hurt the integrity of the liner?

[tokmom]

Yes my pool was perfect before now, lol.
I know you don't have a crystal ball, but are we looking at years or days of possible failure? I won't hold it against you I promise. just trying to pick your brain.

[PoolDoc]

My guess would be, it won't impact the life of your liner. Like I said, I've seen liners with bleached out spots that were several years old. You asked if it damaged your liner; it did. But damaged doesn't mean unusable.

I cut my thumb about 15 years ago, and severed one of the nerves, 'damaging' my sense of feel on one side of the thumb. But, I continued to use the thumb, and it works quite well for most thumb-purposes. (At this point, most of the feeling has returned.)

Your liner is damaged, but not unusable.

[waste]

Hey tokmom, as the resident 'liner expert' I fully agree with Ben's assessment (and also BigDave's).

To go a little further, the real sign that your liner was 'severely damaged' by the trichlor bits is if you see 'puckering' (a bleached out area with radial lines coming out of the middle). Even when they first appear, it's not necessarily a sign of imminent failure, just a reminder to start saving up for a replacement liner.

I honestly think that you'll get the standard 8 - 10 years out of your new liner

If you have any questions, please feel free to pick our brains.

[PoolDoc]

Thanks, Ted.

[CarlD]

My take is that, as was said, if you don't see puckering, you are mainly dealing with cosmetic issues. I actually had my liner fail 10 days after it was installed in my new (then) pool! But that was a seam failure. As for ugly? Well, the guys who installed the replacement didn't know how to do a sand bottom properly and I've had footprints in the bottom of my pool that REALLY show up at night when the lights are on for 10 years now. Part of me wants the liner to fail so I can do a complete overhaul on the pool, but part wants to get another 5 years or so out of the liner.

But it's like that first ding on your new car...it's never the same!

(as a useless aside, mine came as I watched an elderly lady turn into my still new car. She then tried to offer me forty bucks for what turned out be about $500. When I asked for her proof of insurance she handed me her Medicare card. Then when the police sergeant came to make the report, it turned out she was his lieutenant's mother-in-law! I was worried until he said he was going to razz the LT like crazy about this...The car was fixed and it's still a great car.)

[canucksdownsouth]

I have to be honest...if those few spots weakened that fast and caused trouble due to the pucks sitting and bleaching or eating through, I'd be calling the liner manufacturer. Surely these liners are not so weak that they can't handle those sort of everyday mishaps. Especially the thicker liners. Perhaps you just caused a cosmetic 'blurp', is all.