MAYDAY! Pool leaking under winter cover!!

[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?