IG Floating Vinyl Liner

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tillysaint

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Oct 14, 2007
6
The remnants of Fay have dumped over 6 inches of rain in our area within 24 hours. The weather people say the worst is over, however, there could be scattered intermittent downpours (40% probable) over the next 24 hours.

As a result of this rain several areas (spots) of my liner (2 years old, 24K Gals water, steel sides, pool cement bottom)) are floating; deep & shallow on the sides, and also a little on the bottom on the shallow end.

After doing numerous web searches on the web including this forum I appear to have the following options to prevent wrinkling with the understanding that water has gotten behind the liner:

1. Wait - the liner will correct itself. This sounds risky, is this true?

2. Use brush or squeegee to push the liner back. I maybe able to do this in some spots, however, when I try a few spots the liner floats again at that spot after a couple of minutes. Perhaps I should wait a while when the water table recedes a little and try again.

3. Remove liner from the track near the where the liner is floating, insert a small hose that's connected to a pump, and pump the water out & push the liner back properly with a brush or squeegee. Sounds reasonable but how hard is it to get the liner back again? Will this work?

Any recommendations or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

I have a call into the pool person who installed my pool & liner but apparently he has many calls from others regarding this same problem.

Thanks.
 
I would suggest a combination of 1 and 2.

As the water behind the liner starts to recede naturally, the liner will, of course, be pressed back into the wall. If you can monitor that process and gently pull, push, move and guide the liner, it will probably return to the wall with no wrinkles.

That's very easy to write and post those words and may not be so easy to do in real life. A factor is the age of your liner. They loose their "flex" over time so a fifteen year old liner may split or tear quite easily and a 6 month old liner may withstand a lot of tugging and pulling.

Generally, it seems folks report fairly good success getting the liner to return to at least an acceptable position.
 
I would stay away from #3. If and I say "if" you are going to do that, make sure you have some bead lock on either side of where you are going to pull the bead away. Also, I would do it on the sunny side of the pool where the liner is warmer. In general, I would not do it. Give Mother Nature a chance.
 
Thanks for the advice.

I did let the pool heal itself. In some places I helped it along with a squeegee. It took several hours but I have no creases.

The pool installer told me there shouldn't be a problem with my pool if I removed some of the liner & inserted a cut-off hose into it to pump water. Although I trust this guy (he has installed many pools over the last 20 years), I didn’t need to do it. He was going to come if the pool didn’t heal itself.
 
I had a few notes & discussions about water getting behind the liner if you let the pool overflow past the track where the liner is attached to the pool.

Apparently some people are under the impression that you could let a pool overflow since the more water in the pool the less likely the liner will float. I was told not to let the pool overflow.

Any comments?

Perhaps there's not a definitive answer to this question since all the people I've talked to haven't had a situation where they had to let a liner pool overflow. With all the tropical depressions & hurricanes around lately, it's been possible to get 6-8" of rain overnight. Of course, with a power failure you might not have a choice since you can't dump water out of the pool.
 
I have seen big problems with letting pools overflow and liners then floating. I fix floated liners pretty often by pumping the water out from behind them, just dont be the person who trys to do it with a sump pump. I just replaced a liner because a customer did that.
 
Thanks for the responses.

I understand to not let a pool overflow. However, there are a couple of inches above the liner attachment track before the pool overflows.

If you let the pool fill above the track but not overflow, is there a problem of water getting behind the liner through the track and causing the liner to float negating the advantage of having the extra water in the pool? In other words, do not let the water get above the track?

In my pool I would gain about 2 inches of area above the track while I have about 6.5 inches from the middle of the skimmer to track. In my latest situation the water was maybe a .25 inch below the track after the rain!

Also, if you know it's going to be a heavy rain, is it advantageous to bring the water level down before it rains to the bottom of the skimmer gaining another couple of inches? Someone asked me this in regard to his situation where he lost power & couldn’t dump water if he needed to. Like me, his water didn’t reach the track.
 

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Tilly, keeping it below the track is what's important. The track itself is not water tight like the liner and bad things can happen (under the deck where you can't see them) if too much water passes through it :(

They usually give reasonable estimates on how much rain to expect, lower the water as close to the max rainfall below the track and all should be good. If you expect to loose power, upping the chlorine in the pool before the storm would be a good idea, and probably not a bad idea anyway if you're getting inches of rain :)

:idea: Do you have a lower (then the track) place in your yard the you could syphon the water to with a garden hose? They make pumps that attach to a drill (a cordless drill would be perfect if you lost power) to start the syphoning.

HTH - we're all 'Dealing with Hurricane Season' :rockon:
 
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