My story (so far
Chapter 1
Introduction to Pools and Their Problems
Hello, my name is Tim... (All: Hello, Tim.)
I've been a pool owner for 18 months. It's been six months since my last chemical purchase from the pool store.
This was my first experience with a pool, and oh, was I naïve. I didn't really know much about pools. I'd seen people vacuuming and brushing pools before, and I knew it needed chlorine. What could be so difficult about that? I will admit right up front that a lot of the problems I had were self-inflicted because I didn’t really understand what I was doing. I was also listening to the wrong advice.
We bought a house with a pool in the fall, so it was really too late to swim that year. The original owner was helpful in explaining the operation of the pump and the filter, and the fact that it had a tablet feeder. Beyond that, I was pretty much on my own. He had not closed the pool before we moved in, (because I had asked him not to,) so I got to play with it for a few days. We had the heater running, but since there was no solar cover, the heat loss was at least as great as the heat gain. Since the air temps were not very high, we didn't use it. I got in once, just to say I'd done it, but it was pretty cold. The only things I really did with it were to test the water, and vacuum it.
The previous owner had offered to come by and help me close it when I was ready. When I finally decided to close it, I let him know, and scheduled a time to get it done. I got the heater and pump shut down, and started draining the pool by siphoning it off with a garden hose. (That took a while!!) While that was happening, I tried to get the wedding cake steps out by myself, and without diving under the water to get the last sandbag out. BIG MISTAKE! (We'll come back to this later.) Finally got DW out to help me, and between the two of us we got them out.
I got the water level down to where I wanted it the afternoon that the previous owner was scheduled to stop by. As it turned out, something came up for him and I had to start the process myself. I got the drains open and the pipes emptied, and got the cover on by the time he showed up. It's a good thing he finally did, because I had missed one of the drain plugs on the pump. He also told me how to use the pump to drain the pool. That’s one of those things that
should have been obvious, but I didn’t think of it.
About mid-January, I noticed that the cover seemed to be sagging a lot more than I thought it should. There was a lot of ice on it, so I couldn't do much about it, but I thought it was odd that the ice was displacing all that water instead of floating. Since it was a block of ice, and the cover was very taut, I couldn't do anything about it, or even really check on the pool. (This was before I figured out that I could see into the pool by looking through the skimmer.) Around mid-March, things finally started to thaw enough that I could start draining the water off the cover, but before I got that complete, we had a really heavy rain. That was all she wrote! The cover came loose and fell into the pool. Of course when that happened, all the junk that had collected on the cover over the winter went into the pool with it. The water level was about 18 inches below where I'd left it in the fall - there was only about 18 inches of water left. Where the #$%@ did all my water go?
Nothing for it now, but to completely remove the cover.
Surprise #2: Once I took the cover off, I discovered that a good section of the liner had come loose from its track, and had started to fall in. Fortunately, I had bought some plastic alligator clips for another purpose when we moved, and so I was able to use those to hold the edges of the liner above the waterline. I called the pool store and their response was that there was nothing they could do until the daytime temperatures got to 70, since the liner would be too stiff to work with while it was cold. They came out and took a look anyway to see what shape everything was in. They discovered that the bead track was shot and that that, combined with stress on the walls from the cover was what had caused the liner to come loose. They also had never seen anyone tie up the liner the way I did. When they first saw the ropes running all over the place, they thought I had punched holes in the liner to tie it up.
Finally at the end of March, we got a couple of days in a row where the high was over 70. I called the pool store to send me some help. I wanted to be there when they put things back together, so I could learn how they did it. Unfortunately, I had to go to work, and I got back about the time they were finishing up. They also had found the leak and patched it in the process. If you've read this from the beginning, you know where the leak came from. Yes, I managed to tear a 1/4" hole in the liner trying to get the steps out by myself.
I must say that I really like these two pool guys. They're honest, friendly, and give me all kinds of advice on how to save money, mostly by teaching me to do things myself instead of paying them to do those things. (Don't tell the pool store!)
Once the liner was back in place, I had to fill the pool back up, so decided I might as well completely open it. I got all the drain plugs back in, got the pool filled, got the system running, and discovered a leak in one of the pipe joints. That joint had not been leaking the previous fall, so the only thing I can think of is that since I didn't actually blow the lines out, there was enough water left pooled in the joint to push it apart when it froze. I fixed that leak, and got things completely running again. I turned the heater on, hoping to get the water warm enough to swim in. Since I didn't have a solar cover, I was realizing about a 1 degree gain per day. (I'd probably have gotten almost that even without the heater.) My electric rates are pretty cheap, so the cost to run the heater wasn't a killer. The pool store convinced me to try something called a “Solar Pill - a liquid solar blanket that works almost as well as a real solar cover.†I didn’t really notice it helping much, but then again, I had nothing to compare it to either. It finally got warm enough to start swimming around mid-April, not that I could get the kids in there before May anyway.
