Intex 14' Plaqued by decision

[jmborchers]

Worked real hard to level out the whole thing and once it was full is ended up settling down 2" over the whole diameter. If the center point of the pool is at 0" the 12 o clock position is 1" higher, 9 o clock 0", 3 o clock 0" and 6 o clock -1". I hadn't found this forum before and weren't aware of the tips for pavers; I had the legs sink into the sand on me and the low side wall was getting close to within 0.5" of vertical.

I didn't account for the legs having any significant verticle load on them which turned out to be a mistake. For some reason there is more load on the legs than to just hold up the frame which I still don't understand as the water load should be carried by the liner laying on the ground and the liner outer circumference gets an additional horizontal sidewall load from the water above it.

Anyway as it turns out with kids sloshing around in the pool the legs will sway back and forth and the legs will dig in without a hard pad. This is actually a pretty weak design having no horizontal support, X braces or what have you on the lower part of the legs. Yes there is a band and a rope here but that only prevents the legs from coming out too far on the bottom but never from going to far in, which would eventually overload and tip the pool if allowed to continue.

So now with the whole pool drained I'm trying to decide if I take apart the whole thing and relevel and tamp again or just put pads under the legs and leave it as is. My feeling is that the 2" across the entire diameter would be okay if it didn't increase more than that and the pool really was no longer sinking into the ground as far as the liner was concerned when I started draining it out.

If I do relevel and tamp again I'm going to have to do it alone and I had some help moving that liner in the first time so I didn't drag it across the ground. So it's either that or wait until this weekend when I have more manpower.

I also have seen some pretty ugly looking setups on this forum and have been surprised how off level this pool can be and not collapse.

 

[PhilGillis]

I would just put pads down and get swimming. On the low side, maybe do stacked blocks to raise them.

 

[Samantha Sabrina]

Great to hear you have done the responsible thing and drained the pool in order to make it right.

Since you started out level I would suggest just jacking up each support, do whatever you have to in order to place pavers under them and return to level at each leg, I don't see any reason to take it all down and re-level the whole thing.

Double up on paver under the worst few, or put small rock/gravel under those pavers, it might even be a good idea to dig a hole deep enough for each support to put a few inches of gravel down to level your pavers and set the supports back down on the pavers, you should be good to go.

At least doing it this way if a support does settle again, you don't have to drain the pool to re-level the paver, there is a way to jack it up when full and fix it.

 

[Jamison04]

I had a similar issue. Mine was that the pool over flowed on the lower side and caused the pavers to sink. I corrected it by jacking up the sunken side and re leveling the pool to bring it back up to level all the way around.