Best way to find a leak?

[Vince-1961]

Closed the pool, covered it, removed plumbing, all was well for a few months. Then the water level dropped drastically over a period of about a week. For the last month, the water level has continued to drop, but very slowly. Now there's about 5" of water left. Walk around inspection reveals no obvious leaks.

What's the best way to figure out how and where the water is getting out?

While reading here, I found this "fix-a-leak" product ( http://www.fixaleak.com/pools.html ). Does anyone know if it actually works?

P.S. - this is a duplicate thread, first posted under "start up and closing" forum.

Mod Edit: I deleted the duplicate thread. jblizzle

 

[JohnT]

The most likely spot would be a liner seam about 5" from the bottom of the pool. It isn't easy to track them down.

You need to get water in the pool to prevent wind from damaging it.

 

[Vince-1961]

I found 5 tiny holes on the bottom (not on the walls). All 6 were at the edge of the pavers on which the posts sit, 3 holes on 1 paver and 1 hole each on 2 other pavers. I moved the pavers out from under the liner as much as possible and placed some flat 1' thick Styrofoam in between the liner and each paver as a cushion. They are all fairly flat and level with the sand under the liner now. Patched the holes. Filled with about two feet of water. No loss of water over the weekend, so now I am refilling to the top. Keeping my fingers crossed. . . . . .

EDIT: P.S. - I found the leaks by raking everything away from the edge of the pool, then getting down on hands and knees and pushing the liner in and up from the bottom, hoping that the movement would create some pressure with the remaining 5" of water still in the pool and cause water to squirt out any holes. Made a full circle around the pool doing this. Got no squirts, but the outside bottom of the liner was ever so slightly wet in a few places and the movement was enough to make a few drops come through, thereby revealing the location of the holes. It rained a lot in February, so I had to wait for several weeks for everything to dry out from all the rain.

 

[Vince-1961]

Finished filling with water, added salt, CYA, 1 gallon of bleach, got the pump/filter/SWG/skimmer hooked up and operational, got all the leaves and almost all of the crud from the winter off the bottom, have been letting a submersible pump circulate the water overnight to get salt & CYA to dissolve. Just peaked at it and see that water level is not down, no visible granules on bottom, but there's lots of pollen on the surface and more crud (probably sunken pollen) accumulated on the bottom. Joy.

Will let the pump/filter/SWG run today and will perform water test tonight to see how close my off-the-cuff-did-not-measure-diddly-squat efforts are to goals. Even though the SWG did not complain about salt level being too high or too low yesterday, I'll toss a salt test strip at it anyway tonight.

 

[JohnT]

Glad you got it taken care of!

 

[Casey]

Good luck with the pool Vince! Can't wait to open ours next month!!!