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.