Well things didn’t look normal around the pool this Feb, and as the snow pack in the yard reached level with the top of the pool the end of March it was obvious. “Houston We Have A 24′ Problem”
Our pool had a large block of ice in it an no water. I could see air between the ice and the pool wall, this wasn’t normal. As I walked around to the back side I could see there had been a massive failure. I called the insurance company to report a claim hoping they would cover the loss. I also took some pictures to show the damage.

An adjuster came out took one look and said oh yeah it’s gone. Explained that hundreds had failed due to the record snowfall this past winter and said he would be in touch. As it turned out Liberty Mutual would cover it and wrote us a check for replacement.

I priced pools and installers and thought installation should be way less than $1000.00-1650.00. So i started disassembling mine studying how it went together and studying other peoples installs on the net. It looked doable, the ground work was done, why not do it ourselves?

So I purchased some stone dust from down the road and prepared the ground work. I actually filled in the center couple inches since one installer thought it was simply way deep and could have contributed to my initial failure. I also brought a lot of stone dust into the pool edges to build up a large cove at the base of the wall as shown in the instructions. My original installation didn’t have nearly enough based on what I read. Other than that same pool, same location.

We had the assistance of Shane, Rose, Buck on install day. I placed the track and we started unfurling the wall. This is tricky and it’s best to have more than 4 people. I made several dead men hooks with stakes to hold the wall as we went and these worked awesome. In general we followed the directions and all went well I won’t go through all the steps here in this forum but it’s safe to say follow the instructions even if they seem wrong. Emily showed up later in the afternoon and was a huge help getting the uprights and caps in place. It all looked good, except for one minor problem, the skimmer hole landed under the edge of a post. There was no way to move the wall at this point, it must have slid back as we worked it in. I decided I would re-cut the opening since I really had no other options and I wasn’t taking it apart.

We filled the pool about 6 inches and ordered water from a local trucker a couple days later. In the meantime I took some sheet metal and made a sandwich plate shifting and cutting the skimmer hole over in the clear area. I taped my bolts as was done with the wall joint and that all went very well, actually this work stiffened the skimmer area considerably. At this point we could top off the pool which took another 6 hours by hose. – BTW Don’t cut you’re liner until it’s nearly full with water and the liner stretched or you risk losing it.

I think it was later the next day that Shane and Sean had a cribbage game and the looser had to jump in the pool. Based on the pool thermometer the water temp was 57 degrees …ouch. So needless to say the person below was the looser and credited with christening the pool. Last time it was Alex and Christy this time Shane, Hopefully there won’t be another “next time pool christening” for a long time. At least Shane christened it in style.