How do you find a swimming pool leak?

Are you wanting to know how we find swimming pool leaks? Well, the simplest answer is, experience. Many times swimming pool leaks can be very difficult to find. When we first started doing this over 20 years ago we thought it would be a simple and easy business to get into. Coming from the swimming pool maintenance and construction side of things we thought it would be something we could jump right into. We were wrong. I remember spending days trying to find a leak that would normally take me just a few hours now.

But to be more specific about how we find leaking swimming pools, the first process is information gathering. How much water are you losing? How long have you owned the pool? How long has it been leaking water? Does it go faster or slower with the pumps off? Do you have any water features? What kind of filter do you have? How often are you having to add water? There are many different questions we're going to ask to help us and finding your leak.

Once we get to your house and start the leak detection process it depends on the answers to the previous questions on where we start first. Most of the time we start with pressure testing the lines. We will pressurize the return lines, the suction lines and any other plumbing connected to the swimming pool. If your plumbing holds pressure then it is good and that is not where you are leaking from. If the plumbing does not hold pressure then that means there is a break in the line somewhere that needs to be found. If that is the case we will get out our ultrasonic listening device and pinpoint it by listening for bubbles in the ground. This can be very difficult because many times the bubbles come from many different areas and the sound reverberates through all the plumbing. We don't want to dig up your whole deck or make several holes in your deck so we have to make sure that we're at the right spot.

If the pressure test fails and we find a leak in the plumbing then we will move on to dye testing a few areas around the pool where leaks are most common. Skimmer throats, return Jets, lights and more are all things we will usually dye test. Dye testing is just taking a special type of thicker dye and putting it close to a suspected leak. If the dye gets sucked into the suspected leak area then we know it is leaking. Many times when we find this type of leak it is a simple repair.

Well all of this may sound simple and easy to do, we assure you that in most cases it is not. It takes a leak detective to know what questions to ask and where to look to find many leaks. What used to take us days to find we can now find an hour's because of the hundreds of other times we've done leak detection. So if you are looking for somebody to find your leak please don't hesitate to give us a call.