First, Make Sure It Is Actually a Leak
Every pool loses some water, especially during a hot, dry, windy Kansas City stretch, so step one is making sure you are leaking and not just watching evaporation and splash-out. If you want to check before calling anyone, our bucket test guide walks you through it in about a day.
The quick gut check: are you losing noticeably more than usual, after you account for how many people have been swimming, how hot it has been, and normal splash-out? If yes, it is time to find the source.
How We Find a Hidden Leak
Finding a leak is detective work, and every pool is different, so it can take one visit or a few. Here is the order we work through.
- Look first. We check the equipment pad for anything wet or leaking and scan the yard for soggy or unusually wet patches, which can mean water is escaping underground.
- Dye test the fittings. Usually the fastest win. We release dye near the skimmers, returns, and lights and watch whether it gets pulled into a gap.
- Let the pool find its level. If the dye test comes up empty, we often have you let the water drop until it stops. Where it settles tells us a lot.
- Pressure test or sonar. From there we can pressure test the plumbing or run sonar to pinpoint it. Some leaks turn up in ten minutes. Some take real patience.
Some leaks are stubborn. Anyone who promises to find every leak instantly has not chased enough of them. If you want the fuller picture of what the process looks like on site, our leak detection and crack repair page covers it from the first visit through the repair.
When a Repair Beats a Replacement
Read this before you decide to get a replacement quote. People call us certain their pool is done for, ready to tear it out and start over. Then we come look, and it is fixable.
One owner was holding a quote to replace the whole thing. We repaired it and refinished with ecoFINISH instead, and it saved them somewhere around seventy thousand dollars on that one job. Their read was that the pool was shot. Ours, once we were standing in it, was that it needed the right repair and a new surface.
The mistake to avoid is the opposite one: letting a fixable pool sit and deteriorate, year after year, until it really is too far gone. There is a point where you stop kicking a dead horse, but most pools are nowhere near it yet.
Where People Waste Money First
The most common money pit we see is pool paint. It looks like a cheap fix, so people grab it. Then it flakes in a couple of years, and now you are paying to strip it off before anything can be done right. You paid to put it on and you are paying to take it off. If your surface is failing, going straight to a real, long lasting finish almost always beats buying two years with a bucket of paint.
What Kansas City Winters Do to a Crack
Here is why a small crack in this climate is on a clock. A crack is an opening, and an opening lets water get down into the shell where it does not belong. That water freezes, and freezing water pushes outward hard enough to widen the space it is sitting in. Then it thaws, a little more water works its way in, and the next cold snap does it again. Every swing makes the opening slightly bigger than the last one.
Which is why the calendar matters. A crack you find in October and deal with in October is a small repair. The same crack in April has had all winter to work on itself. If you are looking at one right now, this is the wrong season to wait and see.
The One We Could Not Out-Fix
Not every story ends with a save. The toughest leak we ever chased was on a vinyl liner, and we could not find it. It was almost certainly hiding in a welded seam, which is one of the ways liners fail. Rather than keep the owner bleeding money on the hunt, we drained it and replaced the liner, and that solved it. The leak got fixed, even when finding it was not in the cards.
