Do You Have a Leak?

If you’re topping up your pool manually with a hosepipe, you’ll probably realise that you are having to top it up more frequently.  An outdoor pool in the UK, should, when heated lose no more than around an inch of water per week due to evaporation.  The loss may be slightly more when allowing for water lost due to backwashing.  If you are losing more than that, the pool could be leaking.

If you have an automatic top up system and therefore don’t monitor how much water is added each week, you may notice the pool is leaking by one or more of the following:-

• Increased water charges – obvious one this!
• Higher heating bills as you’re heating large amounts of fresh cold water
• Taking longer to heat than usual (same reason as above)
• Higher use of Chlorine and other chemicals as previously treated water becomes diluted
• Ph continually going out of balance due to high or low ph/TA of source water
• Increased calcium staining around tile band if water being added is high in calcium

What should you do?

Don’t Panic!

The first thing is to try and quantify how much water you’re losing over a 24 hour period.  Place a mark on the pool wall with sticky tape or take a picture of the water level in relation to the coping stone.  Turn the filtration pump off and check again in 24 hours and record the drop.  Turn the filtration pump on constantly and measure the drop over the next 24 hours.  If this drop on either day is more than around 5mm, you probably have a leak.

Give us a call and we will come out and find the leak(s).  We say leaks because it’s not uncommon for a pool to have more than one leak and some other pool companies stop when they find one!

You may for example have had a small leak for some time which you hadn’t noticed and then a larger leak appears that draws your attention to it.  It may be easy to find the new large leak but we will check everything to ensure that all leaks are identified and categorised accordingly.

What happens next?

Once you call us, we will make an appointment to come out and look at the pool.  If you haven’t managed to ascertain how much water you’re losing, don’t worry as we’ll do that for you.

In order to carry out the detection, we do need the pool filled to it’s normal level and clean.  Any leaves or debris in the pool will hinder the process of leak detection.  If you’re unable to clean the pool, just let us know when making the booking and we can allow extra time to clean it before we start with the leak detection.

We will assess the pool and filtration, look for obvious signs of leaks and then carry out a full hydrophonic survey of the pool and static water pressure test.  If any leaks are found, we will identify the precise location of these leaks and mark them accordingly and inform you of them.  We will then produce a quotation to repair these leaks.  It’s then up to you whether you have us repair the leaks at this time or not.

We will warranty any leak detection and repairs carried out by us for a period of not less then 3 months depending on the nature of the leak (average warranty – 12 months).