I’m stumped….

[YippeeSkippy]

Air in the line not allowing a manual siphon. When you hook it up to a pump the water pressure pushes the air out.

 

[DonnieTheMan]

You would be best served by buying or renting a sump pump to drain. Place the sump pump in a bucket, then place the bucket/sump pump combo on the pool floor. The bucket protects the liner.

HD rents sump pumps by the 1/2 day and full day - and usually will supply a 1.5" or 2" drain hose with it.

If water is cheap, I'd drain all but the last foot of water from the pool and replace with fresh water.

As for the hose, can you hook it up to a hose spigot and see if water flows out of it?

I thought about a pump, but we aren’t in a rush to use the pool. It’s draining at about 1/2 a inch per hour . Hose works fine on the spigot, even works fine just laying in the bottom of the pool after siphoning the water through it. I even tried hooking it up on the pool drain a 3rd time and still did the same thing. Very weird.

 

[PoolStored]

Did you try to suck on the hose after connected to the drain? I'm assuming that's what you did with the siphon...

 

[DonnieTheMan]

Did you try to suck on the hose after connected to the drain? I'm assuming that's what you did with the siphon...

I used the return in the pool to push water out of the water hose. After that, it created suction and I just anchored the hose inside the pool. Been working fine so far.

No, didn’t do that. Didn’t think I’d have to with the amount of force coming out of that drain plug.