*Sigh....
Fighting leaks. Bought my wife's grandmother's house. Pool installed in '94, she had it maintained by a pool guy, but for the few years before we bought the place, it was vacant and pool went uncared for. Last summer was our first in the house. Cleaned the pool, changed the old salt chlorinator to a Hayward SWG....all was great for a while, until the end of summer. Started leaking pretty badly. Gave up for the winter.
Here we are again, trying to get it up and running for the summer. Without the pump running, it holds water fine. With the pump running, the water is down far enough for the skimmers to be sucking air within a few hours. So I belive I have established it to be a pressure side leak. I went through isolating each skimmer and the drain, with no change on how much water is lost. Now, I just rebuilt the top half of the multi-port valve, which was leaking. The spider gasket was almost non-existent; I never noticed a problem with it b/c there is a shut off valve added to the waste/backwash line so no water ever leaked out. Since the rebuild of the top half, I am now getting leaks from several places....where the multiport meets the filter tank is leaking in several spots, a few plumbing unions/couplers, 90s have drippy leaks...obviously all this needs to be fixed. My plan is to change the multiport and replace all the above the ground plumbing. I'm have fairly advanced DIY skills and am not concerned about handling this. What i am concerned about is doing all this work and finding out that there is a below ground leak somewhere. Which could mean breaking cement...a large investment. If we end up doing this I want to wait do the plumbing and just have the entire system redone at one time.
So here's the plan; tell me if this makes sense.
I want to run pvc straight up out of the pump, run it across, and connect straight into where the return goes into the ground, effectively bypassing the filter, swg, heater, everything. I know it won't filter, but if I run it like this for a couple days, and don't lose water, I'll know my leak is from the plumbing at the pad. If i still lose water, then I shut it down and try to find a pro to do some leak detection under ground.
Opinions?
Fighting leaks. Bought my wife's grandmother's house. Pool installed in '94, she had it maintained by a pool guy, but for the few years before we bought the place, it was vacant and pool went uncared for. Last summer was our first in the house. Cleaned the pool, changed the old salt chlorinator to a Hayward SWG....all was great for a while, until the end of summer. Started leaking pretty badly. Gave up for the winter.
Here we are again, trying to get it up and running for the summer. Without the pump running, it holds water fine. With the pump running, the water is down far enough for the skimmers to be sucking air within a few hours. So I belive I have established it to be a pressure side leak. I went through isolating each skimmer and the drain, with no change on how much water is lost. Now, I just rebuilt the top half of the multi-port valve, which was leaking. The spider gasket was almost non-existent; I never noticed a problem with it b/c there is a shut off valve added to the waste/backwash line so no water ever leaked out. Since the rebuild of the top half, I am now getting leaks from several places....where the multiport meets the filter tank is leaking in several spots, a few plumbing unions/couplers, 90s have drippy leaks...obviously all this needs to be fixed. My plan is to change the multiport and replace all the above the ground plumbing. I'm have fairly advanced DIY skills and am not concerned about handling this. What i am concerned about is doing all this work and finding out that there is a below ground leak somewhere. Which could mean breaking cement...a large investment. If we end up doing this I want to wait do the plumbing and just have the entire system redone at one time.
So here's the plan; tell me if this makes sense.
I want to run pvc straight up out of the pump, run it across, and connect straight into where the return goes into the ground, effectively bypassing the filter, swg, heater, everything. I know it won't filter, but if I run it like this for a couple days, and don't lose water, I'll know my leak is from the plumbing at the pad. If i still lose water, then I shut it down and try to find a pro to do some leak detection under ground.
Opinions?
Welcome to TFP!!!