When you look for a company to repair a roof, you don’t call a painter. When you have a pool leak, you should call a company who specializes in pool leak detection. Many homeowners are unaware that pool leak detection is a specialty.
We receive many calls from homeowners about leaks in their swimming pools. Appointments are made, we meet with the homeowner and many times this is what the homeowner says, “When I told my pool service man the pool was leaking, he told me he was able to find it. It took him weeks, my pool kept losing a lot of water and he wasn’t able to find the leak so he gave up and left me with a half empty pool”.
Our response to that……let the pool service company perform the service and cleaning of your pool, leave pool leak detection to a company such as Caltech Pools who specializes in locating leaks and repairing pool leaks.
We received such a call from a homeowner who asked us to perform a pool leak detection in Northridge. At the time of the initial call we try to find out as much as we can and ask many questions such as if there are any additional water features such as a fountain, spritzers, etc. We ask if there is an idea on the amount of water the pool loses, if there is an automatic fill system, or if it was noticed if the pool loses more water with the equipment on or off. These are just some basic questions we ask, but not everything.
Many times when we arrive at the residence, homeowners are in amazement with just the equipment we carry with us. Then we’re usually told that their pool man dove in the pool and put dye in the water to test different areas. Homeowners are usually misled to believe that dye testing and pressure testing is the only way to locate leaks. This is very far from the truth. The homeowner in Northridge found that out. We brought our equipment in the yard, put on our headphones and dropped our hydrophone in the water to listen. Running water makes noise. Although locating leaks may be simple at times, this specific leak detection was not. This one took us some time and many different tests to locate the leak, but we did it. We were able to locate the direction the lines were running underground and found that the leak was entombed under the skimmer, in the main drain line where it comes up the wall to meet the skimmer. Not very easy to find. At this specific leak detection, we used hydrophones, pressure testing, the LeakTronics Slide Mic, and the Hand Held Video Pro also by LeakTronics. We were able to visibly show the homeowner the leak for which she was very grateful.
We have the work repair scheduled to be performed at the end of February.
Moral of the story, there are specialties for almost everything out there. Shouldn’t you use a company such as Caltech Pools who specializes in pool leak detection to locate the leak in your pool?