pool questions

[I R Baboon]

1) is there a good pool newsgroup my newsreader just isnt finding? 2) just purchased a house with pool. first time weve opened the pool. its a aboveground 16x24 with diff depths of 3' and 7' yes i know thats odd. during its neglect the liner seems to have unlocked from the top channel with some sort of plastic strip to lock it in. tried pulling it up too heavy of water. so i started draining. buddy stops by, says draining pool completly is worse thing to do to pool. ok. what do i do to get that to lock in then? thanks

[Steve B.]

1 - Not that I have found. There are several good Internet web pages. Google for pool maintenance and go from there 2 - It is a bad idea to drain an inground pool. The water table can rise under the pool and actually pop the whole thing out of the ground ruining the pool. On an above ground I don't see any reason not to drain it other than the expense of refilling it.

Steve B.

[SQLit]

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I know of no way other than draining the water to reposition the liner.

[jfalken]

I have an inground pool, but I have never been left without an answer at this site:

Hope that helps. There are even pros that post and answer questions there. By the way I'm new to my pool also and once you get it set up, the only hard thing is the chemistry.

[Ed H]

You can not fill a liner and then drain the water from it, it loses its elasticity. Time for a new liner. The life expectancy of a pool liner isn't very long anyway.

Ed

[Dan Espen]

I've drained a pool and then reinstalled the liner. No real problems. Not paying a lot of attention to what I was doing, I did have some creases in the liner after I reinstalled it, but it still lasted for a number of years.

Actually, the pool drained itself, due to a massive periodic cicadia attack from below. I removed the liner, put some metal window screening under the sand, patched the dozens of holes in the liner and put it back.

(It was still a bit leaky, either I missed some holes or the patches weren't holding.)

Since then I've installed a new liner. You can order new liners over the internet and some of them look great compared to the originals.

[Rich256]

It has been a good number of years since I had one of the above ground pools. As others have said you probably need a new liner. However, most of the damage to the line is that area above the water line where the intense sun rays hit it. I used an old liner to make an "apron" that hung down about a foot into the water. The liner then lasted for several years but had to replace the apron. I usually drained the pool each year.

[Bill]

you can pump water out to the point where you only have about 12 inches in the shallow end of the pool...you pump any more than that out and you will ruin the liner...it will have to be replaced. You never take all the water out of a vinyl liner pool...the water is what holds the pool in shape. After draining it down as much as possible wait until the sun is shining on it at the hottest part of the day...thats when you can stretch that liner as much as possible and try to reattach it to the coping or whatever the device is that holds the liner around the top rim of the pool. If the liner is more that a year old it may not be very pliable...may not stretch very much. The worst case scenario is a new liner which you can find on the Internet for $500 if you want to install it yourself.

Regards, Bill