What happened? Over the winter, the pool was covered with the security cover, and part time cat trampoline.
When we first took the cover off, we found that the liner was all wrinkled up, like on of my T-shirts in the back of the wardrobe. Even stranger, when I tried to clean the bottom of the pool, the whole liner moved, like there was a giant bubble under it. Also, the filter box was full of water, so much so that the pump was submerged.
We got straight on the phone to the pool company and e-mailed some pictures to see what they thought. We thought that the liner might have a leak, but it turns out that the problem was caused by groundwater getting underneath the liner. They said that we would have to wait until the water level dropped, then they could come and inspect the liner, but that they would probably have to empty the pool and refit the liner.
I flunked out of geography when I was about 13, so I didn't know much about water-tables, but after a bit of research on the interweb, we found that this was not unusual and that in some cases the water-table is so forceful that it can lift a pool out of the ground, like a cork out of a bottle.
We waited for it to stop raining, then waited some more, but after a few weeks it still hadn't stopped raining, so we decided to take action ourselves. Under the filter box, there was a bed of sand that was supposed to drain away any excess water when the pump gets disconnected for the winter. This was surrounded by a bank of earth when the pool was landscaped.
If we had the same soil as Wiltshire, this would have been fine, but as our soil over here is full of clay, we decided that we might have accidentally built a dyke to hold up all the water. I dug a trench down as deep as the top of the sand bed, and as I dug out the last bit of dirt, by the filter. there was a glugging sound and the earth wall cracked, just like the Dam busters. The water rushed out like I had hit the mains.
The water drained for a good week or so and we didn't notice that the liner had dropped back into position. It was only when we got a digger man round to quote for some proper drainage that we realised that the pool was OK again. I went to show the digger man the liner to explain the problem and it was perfectly straight. Yippee. We had lucked out. The pool had fixed itself without us having to empty it and then wait for the pool company to fix it.
Now it was time to get the pool working again. I connected the pump back up, primed it an switch it on. Nothing. I checked the electricity supply to the pool, and that was all fine, so it had to be a knackered pump. We got back on the phone to the pool company, and they talked me through how to strip the pump down, and get it working again. First we tried cleaning it up, as it had spent the winter immersed in sandy water. Then downloaded the instructions of of the Internet and tried to turn the shaft with a screwdriver but it wouldn't move . Next of was the fan cover, but it still wouldn't budge. Finally, I took the impeller off and managed to turn the shaft using a giant pump spanner. That did the trick.
Excited, we put the pump back into the filter box, connected it up turned the switch and nothing happened. It was buggered, but but a least I now know a lot about pumps The pool people sent us a replacement, and the pool is working fine. Tina has been in a few times, but it is still too cold for me.
The digger man came round the other week and worked the pair of us into exhaustion. He dug out a soak-away next to the filter box, but the earth started to collapse into it, so Tina and I had to quickly fill it up with a tonne of rocks. This is now connected up to another soak-away (tonne of rocks) by a pipe surrounded by gravel. We also have a long drain, running past the pool, to take water away from the pool and out into the ditch.
In one day we managed to fill a lot of the drains back in. Richard Grant, the digger man, even helped us load up wheelbarrows when we started to fall behind his pace and he had nothing left to dig. He was really good, hard working and he knew his stuff. If anything, he was too hard working, as we could hardly move when he had finished.
It took us a couple of days to fill it all back in( six tonnes of gravel). The drain seems to work OK, but I suppose we won't know properly until next winter. Now we just have to landscape in all the left over dirt.
So there you have it, owning a pool is not as easy as you think.
