Moved from here.
In regards to the experience that we had by using sand as a base under the pool, it didn't work well at all for us. You wouldn't think that much water could get underneath the pool, but we had little ditches and holes inside the pool where the sand had washed out. My husband even added some soil to mix in with the sand so he could tamp it down. Another problem we had, which wasn't really a major one is that some of the sand was on the ground around the pool. As you can imagine, grandchildren often needing to get in and out of the pool for whatever reasons and sand sticking to little wet feet that gets rinsed off into the pool. Ha! Sand is not easy to vacuum up off of the bottom of the pool. As for what works best, except for draining and moving the pool each spring to do any needed repairs to the surface and adding any necessary ground liners, we never discovered a fullproof solution. One season, we had more moles than normal, and they decided to build tunnels underneath the pool. Of course, they were destroying our lawn too.My husband became a "mole hunter". He ran water down into fresh mole holes and waited with a pitch fork until he saw movement underneath the ground. He has previously tried other methods, but this was the only one that worked. We should have drained and resurfaced our area last spring. We had a sheet of a heavy duty 3-M material, in addition to a ground cover sheet and tarps under our pool. Somehow, there were some tree stubs that grew up through all of this protection and put numerous holes in our liner. It would've been the last year anyway for this pool, as we'd had it for about 5 years and the steel frame had completely rusted through in numerous locations so that it didn't have the "legs to stand on". Hope that this may help others.
Sincerely, a pool-less Missouri Gma Judy
In regards to the experience that we had by using sand as a base under the pool, it didn't work well at all for us. You wouldn't think that much water could get underneath the pool, but we had little ditches and holes inside the pool where the sand had washed out. My husband even added some soil to mix in with the sand so he could tamp it down. Another problem we had, which wasn't really a major one is that some of the sand was on the ground around the pool. As you can imagine, grandchildren often needing to get in and out of the pool for whatever reasons and sand sticking to little wet feet that gets rinsed off into the pool. Ha! Sand is not easy to vacuum up off of the bottom of the pool. As for what works best, except for draining and moving the pool each spring to do any needed repairs to the surface and adding any necessary ground liners, we never discovered a fullproof solution. One season, we had more moles than normal, and they decided to build tunnels underneath the pool. Of course, they were destroying our lawn too.My husband became a "mole hunter". He ran water down into fresh mole holes and waited with a pitch fork until he saw movement underneath the ground. He has previously tried other methods, but this was the only one that worked. We should have drained and resurfaced our area last spring. We had a sheet of a heavy duty 3-M material, in addition to a ground cover sheet and tarps under our pool. Somehow, there were some tree stubs that grew up through all of this protection and put numerous holes in our liner. It would've been the last year anyway for this pool, as we'd had it for about 5 years and the steel frame had completely rusted through in numerous locations so that it didn't have the "legs to stand on". Hope that this may help others.
Sincerely, a pool-less Missouri Gma Judy
Last edited by a moderator:
Thank you for sharing your experience. Have a nice weekend. 