08/09/2025
Hi POOL GUY fans.
Along with the information packet I send out I will now be sending the following to people requesting service. I have been meaning to put this together for a while and finally have taken the 10 minutes to sit down and do it. This is good information for anyone to have so please read it. Please share it. I hope you find it useful.
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Common sense pool advice.
1. If you think you have a leak, you most likely do. If you have been a pool owner for several years and you know approximately how often you normally have to add water to your pool this does not suddenly change because we had some warm weather. If you talk to clerks at a pool store or people who are just trying to be helpful they will innocently lead you to believe your sudden water loss is due to heat, and sometimes they even throw in “humidity”, which means the air is saturated with water and certainly not pulling water from your pool.
2. Unless you are heating your pool extremely, daily water loss to evaporation is next to nothing. My thoughts on this are if you are marking your water level with a piece of tape and you see that the water is slightly off your tape mark, that is probably your evaporation rate. However, if you are coming out and from across the pool, you can see that your water level is down from the day before that is likely a leak.
3. Some pool companies will sell you a bottle of dye and tell you to sq**rt it around things and this will find the leak. Save your money, save your time dye will not find a leak. A dye test will merely confirm something that you have found is a leak or is not a leak and unless it is a big gully washer of a leak the dye test has to be done very carefully or you will get zero results.
4. A underwater swimming pool light not working is not an indication of a leak at the light
5. You cannot rule out plumbing as the source of the leak by plugging up one port at a time. If you’re going to do the plug up test, everything in the pool, including the main drain needs to be plugged at the same time. If plugging everything up stops the leak you have now taken the plumbing out of the picture and if you unplug and begin running again and the leaking resumes, this confirms the leak is in your plumbing. The reason everything needs to be plugged is once you have your prime established, and all your piping is full of water. You have a never ending circuit of piping underground coming from the pool, leading to the filter, then back to the pool. If the water is getting out of the system anywhere, it is going to draw water in to replace that which is getting out from whatever port is open even if that port is the main drain.
6. If your pool leak suddenly stops, and you have not done anything to the equipment or to the pool itself in most cases, it hasn’t fixed itself. The only time a pool leak might resolve itself is if it is the hydrostatic valve, which is something they put in some inground pools, but not all of them. Most people don’t even know whether or not they have a hydrostatic valve or not. Most of the time when a leak in a pool stops it is because the leak has become plugged with debris. Even the cleanest pools have dead bugs, pieces of grass, etc. floating around in them. They may look crystal clear from the top but once you get in with a pair of goggles on, you can see it is not crystal clear Poland Springs drinking water under there.
7. I have been meaning to put this list together for years in and finally taking the time to do it. I will add to it and tweak it as I come up with clarifications or other things that should be on this list. I hope you find it helpful.
