How Much Can a Liner Fade?

[CarlD]

As I'm rebuilding my pool, you can see, without water, how much the liner has faded in 12 seasons.

The floor of the pool is almost white, but where the drop-in steps sit it's much closer to the original color. And, if you can see the patch on the top right of where the steps were, that's the ORIGINAL color of the liner when it was new. I saved the old liner for patches (it only lasted 10 days).

[FormerBromineUser]

Whoa, Carl! That is an incredible amount of fading! Besides the debacle this summer where you took FC way high and were low on caffeine, what do you think caused all the fading???

[CarlD]

Some of it, is, of course, 12 summers in the sun. It's quite possible, as Ben has discussed the extreme variability of vinyl quality, that this vinyl was less impervious to UV rays. The floor of the liner faded far more than that walls of it (you can only see a little on the right of the picture) which leads me to believe UV more then FC faded it. That wall portion you see is on the South side of the pool, so always a little more shaded as it looks North. Some is due to my preferring to kill a bloom fast, so we can swim faster, such as when we came home from a month away to a green pool, knowing I was planning to change out the walls and liner, I simply hammered the FC (and replaced the coffee maker! )

I suspect that over a decade most liners fade and fade a lot, but if you don't have a reference point, as I do, you only sort of notice it.

[JimK]

Our liner has faded below the water line since 2004. It's only noticeable if the water level is below normal and you look at the border pattern.

Since the fading is below the water line I assume it's from exposure to chlorine all these years.

[FormerBromineUser]

Liner reference comparison.... Kinda reminds me of how I feel when I look at my wedding pictures and then look at my hubby. Who IS that old (faded) fart, anyway? How did THAT happen???

[CarlD]

Funny, the liner doesn't bother me, the mirror does. But I sometimes think my wife has her own "Dorian Gray" portrait.

"The way she sees and the way he looks they're a poifect match!"--Classic line from "A Fiddler On The Roof"

[FormerBromineUser]

"Poifect" hahahaha!

[J_Palmer_Cass]

That liner fading looks similar to the look of the liner I replaced last year. It is probably caused by a combination of UV and chemicals.

My last liner was an overlap liner. The area covered by the coping was still the original color when I removed the coping. The top foot of the liner faded different depending on which side of the pool you looked at.

How "brittle " is the vinyl on the floor of the pool?

[CarlD]

Since there was a different pattern at the top of the liner, you didn't see fading there. I suspect some was due to my Blue Diamond robotic.

The vinyl all over doesn't seem particularly brittle. Perhaps being dry and in the air may change that.

[J_Palmer_Cass]

I had my liner exposed to the sun for about 2 months during my rebuild, so near the end it was pretty brittle relative to new vinyl. More a stiff feeling than brittle, but easy to puncture as compared with new vinyl. The old liner was great protection for the sand during the rebuild.

I never had to patch that 2nd liner over 14 years of use, so I made out pretty well. The original liner was installed poorly, and needed mutiple patching.

I am still running low chlorine (around 1.0) along with Nature 2 with the new liner. Trichor in an auto chlorinate dispenser. One chlorine fill of 8 to 10 of the 3" tablets about 4 weeks apart. Once a month "super" chlorination, but not as "super" this time. I use a 1/2 a gallon of liquid chlorine to super chlorinate. PH plus every once and a while (depending on "acid rain" amounts). A small amount of algaecide once a month.

This time I am being very careful about "super" chlorination levels.

This year I also installed new sand and replaced the internals to the Hayward sand filter. Plastic gets brittle over the years.

Zero algae this year. Then again, it was kind of a cold summer this year.