Very small hole vinyl liner deep

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sjoefl01

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Jul 16, 2007
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I have a very small hole in the wall that is about 2 inches from the bottom of the pool. I also have no experience patching vinyl pools.
I found this in the summer. We bought a patch kit and tried it. The instructions were pretty weak and I didn't like the way the whole thing went down. The leak is so deep that by the time you get to it there are only seconds before you run out of air. My daughter was able to get the patch over the hole and it lasted until the cleaner dislodged it.
1. I didn't like the glue. It didn't say to wait till it gets tacky. We folded the patch over on itself like the instructions said but I can't imagine this stuff sticking to anything. It had the consistancy of motor oil. Is this normal? Should we have waited some time before we applied the patch?
2. Is it normal for a patch to be temporary? I thought it should last for the life of the liner.
3. I went to the local pool store and talked to the biggest jerk there. I was thinking I would have somebody professional patch the pool and get it over with. He said they would have somebody with tanks patch the pool for 150 bucks and they wouldn't come till the water warmed up.
4. My wife managed to get another piece of tape over the hole with a long pole and a lot of patience that seems to be working for now.
5. I am open to suggestion. I don't know anything about vinyl patches except that they can be screwed up really bad by stupid people.
 
My mom has an AGP and I have done this before, albeit, in a much shallower pool than you probably have.

You should be able to simply get a kit to do it. Sounds like your pool is pretty deep since you say that you "run out of air" just about by the time you get there. This can be problematic because the key to getting it to set up to hold is by being able to smooth it out and hold even pressure on it for a minute or two straight.

What you may need to do is put something heavy into the pool near where you need to make the patch so that when you slap the patch on, you'll have something immediately available to place on top of it to hold the pressure for you. Something with weight. Perhaps a heavy (thick liner) plastic bag with sand in it.

The glue should be fine. I think that the glue "activates" once exposed to the water, so time is of the essence.
 
Here is what I did. My wife happens to have plastic weights that velcro on to your ankles. I just slapped that on and walked down the pool. I got some good glue from the local pool store, found a left over peice of liner that the previous owners left for me thank goodness, and then to help me with the air issue, I grabbed a 1" clear hose that you can purchase at any lowes and had ductaped the other end to the hand railing, and put on my goggles as well. This now gave me air. Then I simply walked down to the deep end and slaped the patch on, oh and be sure to cut the patch in a circular form, and then i pushed it on the hole and held it there till it setup.

Worked like a champ, and its been over a year now with no problems at all.

Good luck, I hope this helped. It is a bit crude, but its cheap, and it worked for me.

My wife grabbed the neighbors cause she thought it was the funniest thing ever. At least somebody was ammused by this whole adventure. :goodjob:
 
I really do apreciate the advice. I think our problem was we just pushed the patch on and hoped it would be okay. It sounds like the secret is to hold it for a minute. That makes sense. I thought about jumping in with a concrete block but then my hands would not be free to work the patch. My second thought was to tie the block to my feet so I could use my hands but I knew when they found my body they would think it was suicide. This 1" hose sounds like the trick.





reindeerboy said:
Here is what I did. My wife happens to have plastic weights that velcro on to your ankles. I just slapped that on and walked down the pool. I got some good glue from the local pool store, found a left over peice of liner that the previous owners left for me thank goodness, and then to help me with the air issue, I grabbed a 1" clear hose that you can purchase at any lowes and had ductaped the other end to the hand railing, and put on my goggles as well. This now gave me air. Then I simply walked down to the deep end and slaped the patch on, oh and be sure to cut the patch in a circular form, and then i pushed it on the hole and held it there till it setup.

Worked like a champ, and its been over a year now with no problems at all.

Good luck, I hope this helped. It is a bit crude, but its cheap, and it worked for me.

My wife grabbed the neighbors cause she thought it was the funniest thing ever. At least somebody was ammused by this whole adventure. :goodjob:
Click to expand...
 
Yea, its nothing fancy and what I actually did was to buy a cheap snorkle set and put the 1" hose around the snorkel and stuck a hose clamp on it. That allowed me to breath easily and have my hands completely free to apply the patch carefully in place and then hold it there for a minutte or so. The patch is still there and it is holding in -40 degree weather we are having so even though its a big block of ice now, I know it will be just fine when spring arrives.

Be careful with the glue because if you are not carefull you can glue your fingers to the patch while you are holding it and that would be bad.

Have a good one!
 
I'd like to just suggest that whatever you use for weight, make sure that you can get rid of it quickly if the need should arise. Like avoiding knots and complex buckles, favoring velcro and quick-releases.

My $0.02
 
I had someone on the other end monitor the tube. My tube was only about 6 ft long as I only had to go down about 5-6 ft. My wife held the tube while I did it just for safety concerns.

Just wanted to comment so that someone doesnt try what I did and get hurt doing it in the process.

Thanks
 
I sure do apreciate all of the advice. It sounds like we just need to hold the patch on for a minute. I talked to a guy down the street that says he will come up with some tanks and patch the pool when the water warms up a little. The tape seems to be holding for now. It is really surprising how much water you lose through a small hole. It is also surprising how much money was floating from my pockets to the pool store before I found the smart people here.
If I could just get stablizer and chlorine somewhere else they would never see me again.
 

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Thanks Dave! After 13 years of marriage I would hope that she would still want me around and I am still here so she must! :lol:

sjoefl01, If you need chlorine you can use bleach from lowes or walmart? The only thing I go to the pool store for now is for their spring sale and I can then buy concentrated 12.5% chlorine for a cheap price in the spring as that is when I am working on cleaning up the pool and using the most chlorine anyway. I dont use stabalizer at all as I use a combination of trichlore pucks and chlorine to balance out what I need in the spring and then in the summer I switch to bleach!

Hope that helps as I am sure others on here more experienced than I would say the same! Have a good day!
 
reindeerboy said:
Yea, its nothing fancy and what I actually did was to buy a cheap snorkle set and put the 1" hose around the snorkel and stuck a hose clamp on it. That allowed me to breath easily and have my hands completely free to apply the patch carefully in place and then hold it there for a minutte or so. The patch is still there and it is holding in -40 degree weather we are having so even though its a big block of ice now, I know it will be just fine when spring arrives.

Be careful with the glue because if you are not carefull you can glue your fingers to the patch while you are holding it and that would be bad.

Have a good one!
Click to expand...

Safety concerns aside, I applaud your ingenuity! :goodjob:
 
No stabilizer at all?? I don't seem to get much out of the pucks. how do you keep chlorine in the pool without something to protect it?



reindeerboy said:
Thanks Dave! After 13 years of marriage I would hope that she would still want me around and I am still here so she must! :lol:

sjoefl01, If you need chlorine you can use bleach from lowes or walmart? The only thing I go to the pool store for now is for their spring sale and I can then buy concentrated 12.5% chlorine for a cheap price in the spring as that is when I am working on cleaning up the pool and using the most chlorine anyway. I dont use stabalizer at all as I use a combination of trichlore pucks and chlorine to balance out what I need in the spring and then in the summer I switch to bleach!

Hope that helps as I am sure others on here more experienced than I would say the same! Have a good day!
Click to expand...
 
Nope, No stabalizer at all. Remember every pool is different and the water source is also different for me. My stabalizer level starts the year at about 10 and slowly creeps higher as the swimming season goes on. Once I get to 20 ppm, I stop using the trichlor pucks completely and go 100% to using bleach/liquid chlorine. My stabalizer crept up to 80 last year before I winterized the pool so maybe in your area, its more of an issue for you.

In that case you would need to get stabalizer, but you could order that stuff online cheaper then going to the pool store. I use intheswim.com as I find their prices and delivery to be dang good and the quality I found to be good as well.

I also use my solar blanket as that really helps a bunch to subdue the chrlorine usage when the pool is not in use.

Hope that helps.
 
pretty smart ideas for handling a repair like that. 8)


I could help but think of that as some lifetime movie where the wife out smarts her husbands "bright" idea as a way to rid of him.

if it were me i would have tried a snorkle mask with a very long tube minus the wife. :-D
 
reindeerboy said:
I had someone on the other end monitor the tube. My tube was only about 6 ft long as I only had to go down about 5-6 ft. My wife held the tube while I did it just for safety concerns.

Just wanted to comment so that someone doesnt try what I did and get hurt doing it in the process.

Thanks
Click to expand...



Um...no. I could show you some fancy physics to tell you why this would not work, but it's easily testable by anyone. Get in the shallow end of your pool, say four feet, with a garden hose, lay on the bottom (use a weight if you have to) and try to breathe. You will find it to be impossible. Now move up a foot at a time and try again. You'll hit a spot when the center of your lungs is less than two feet from the surface (by that time your head is touching the surface if you're upright) where you'll be able to suck in air with difficulty.

The maximum length of a usable snorkel tube by even individuals with the strongest diaphragm would be less than one meter (~3 feet.) At four feet, the pressure differential between the air at the surface and the (now compressed) air in your chest cavity is quite a bit greater than a strong vacuum cleaner creates. (Try using a vaccum cleaner hose for a snorkel with it running, and you get a decent example of what I'm talking about.) Even if the top of your head is touching the water, and you are standing upright, you would find it significantly difficult to breathe, as the center of your lungs is at that point over 18 inches below the surface.

My point is not to embarrass anyone, but to encourage you to scrap this idea as a solution and not waste your time, or worse yet, get to the bottom of the pool expecting to breathe like a surface snorkeler, and end up panicking and taking in a lungful of water.
 
Wolfgang is entirely right about the pressure effect making it impossible to breathe below a certain depth. In an earlier message, spishex (indirectly) also makes the point that even if you're at the surface, if the volume of the hose is more than how much your lungs can manage to breathe in and out, then you're just going to be breathing the same air over and over. And Wolfgang is right that the volume of an appropriate hose is much smaller than you might think.

I know all of this because I'm a physics professor. And now let me completely embarrass myself by telling you what prompted me to do the calculations ...

A couple of years ago I also had a repair to attempt in the deep end. Snorkel didn't give enough bottom time, especially since I didn't have any weights handy. So one Saturday afternoon I got mad and decided to figure out a solution. Without thinking about the physics. And before you ask, this was several hours BEFORE Happy Hour.

I got my snorkel and duct taped the pool vacuum hose to it. For weight I got a 5-gallon Homer Bucket, filled it with bricks, and started off on my walk from the shallow end with the bucket of bricks in my left hand and a screwdriver in my right hand. About halfway down the air is getting seriously stale (volume of the hose), and by the time I reached the deep end I couldn't breathe at all (pressure effect). Came blasting back to the surface still holding the Homer bucket full of bricks. Lost the screwdriver, but made the youngest dive down to recover it.

The most embarrassing thing is that all of this was done with an audience comprised of my wife, both sons AND the in-laws. The wife took lots of pictures, BTW. To this day this is worth a minimum of 30 minutes worth of belly laughs whenever we get together with the in-laws while everyone tells the story from their particular point of view.

True story ... Gary

P.S. The wife keeps asking why I swam to the top still carrying the Homer bucket full of bricks. When I explain that I didn't want to drop them and risk dinging the new fiberglass surface, she just gives me "that look". But I'm sure you all will agree with me about that part, right?
 

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