I have a vinyl liner pool that has a leak. I am not sure where the leak is.?

Question

I have three suctions for pump, two surface and one deep. I have one lamp and pool steps. I have done an inspections of the bottom and sides and I find no noticible tears. I have tried to seal the lamp cord once. The liner is one year old and have not had problems with it.

Answer 1

You need to figure out if the leak is in the pool or in the lines, before proceeding any further. You may be chasing a ghost, by looking only in the pool and not considering lines. If you can post your rate of loss and pool temp as well as average air temp it would be helpful as well. Is this an intermittent leak or constant?

There's a really simple way to do this. It's called a bucket test.
Take a plastic pail and find a suitable weight, like a round river rock, anything that has no sharp edges. Put it in the bucket and place the bucket in the water on your steps, so that it's in the water but not submerged totally. Fill the pail with pool wtaer until the level in the bucket is equal to the level of the pool water as seen from the side. Shut off your equipment and plug off all your suctions and returns. You won't be able to do anything (unless you dive it to plug) about the main drain, but they are never the culprit in 99% of pool leaks anyway.
With everything shut down and plugged, leave it for 24 hours.
Check the next day. If the levels are stil equal, you may have a leak in a plumbing line. It won't be in the liner at all,or even your light conduit (see step #2). If the level in the bucket is higher than the pool, you have a leak pool side. Now you don't have to hire someone to pressure test a line that ain't leaking and have saved yourself about 100 bucks.(see step #1) The bucket test works no matter what. It won't matter if it rains or is hot as Hades. The bucket fills at the same rate as the pool and evaporates at the same rate as well.

!/ If it's in the pool, there's nothing else for it, but a visual inspection with an old bottle of phenol red (Ph reagent). Use it as dye, it works better than food colouring, just remember to mark the bottle as dye, you can't use it anymore for water testing. I always ask if there are kids in the house. If there are (6-14 yrs), then the first place I look is in the deep end. Kids use pool poles to get dive masks and fins off the bottom and they always forget to put a brush or net on the end. The water refraction makes them miss their mark and they stab the liner. Look for a "smiley face" that a pool pole may have made. Look under ladder bumpers (common place for a hole), squirt around light niches, and other face plates. A cracked face plate will leak as well. Look under the bottom stair strip as well. It's hard to do, but sometimes a liner will let go there if it was tight during the install. When you're using the dye, have your pump off for an hour prior so there's no currents messing up your observations.

2/ If you've ascertained that the leak is NOT pool side after the bucket test, you ought to get a pro in to find it. When we pressure test we can figure out what line and where, within 6 inches , 4 feet down and under a concrete deck, no problem. There's still one thing you can do to further rule things out and save a bit more money and that's to look at the amount you're losing and how it's going. Anything over 1 inch in a week, with a air/water temp differential of not more than 8 degrees or so, will be a leak in the return line most likely. Under 1 inch and it's evaporation at those temperature differences or a suction leak. You can try this. Turn off your pump and mark the level on the skimmer face plate with a pencil. Leave it over night and measure the drop.Turn it on and remark the new level and leave overnight again. If you lose more when the pump is off, the leak is in your suction lines. If you lose more when the pump is on, it's a definite return line or leaky multiport valve on the filter spitting water out a backwash line (if it's buried and you can't see it).
Those are the things you can do yourself, to figure out where and why. Once you've determined where it is, only you can decide if you want a pro in, but you'll have saved him a lot of time and yourself a lot of money and maybe you can fix it yourself.

Answer 2

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RE:
I have a vinyl liner pool that has a leak. I am not sure where the leak is.?
I have three suctions for pump, two surface and one deep. I have one lamp and pool steps. I have done an inspections of the bottom and sides and I find no noticible tears. I have tried to seal the lamp cord once. The liner is one year old and have not had problems with it.

Answer 3

I've had the same problem with a liner . If as you say there are no visible tears, fill a syringe with food colouring and pretty much check seams , round the inlets and outlets...just injecting a bit at a time as close as you can get. When you find the leak You'll be amazed at how fast that colouring gets sucked out

Answer 4

you may have to do a dye test...my parents had an in ground pool and had just put a new liner in, filled the pool and the next morning the water was 1/2 gone. SO...they bought some standard dye and put it in the water and found the leak because they found the orange color on the grass
they were also told to put soap in it because it would cause bubbles

Answer 5

Take the liner out, at night go inside (under it) and have some one shine lights on it and you look for where the light gets in. Wipe the spot dry and patch it.