How To Fix Pool Liner Out Of Track
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Do you have a vinyl liner swimming pool and are currently dealing with a problem with your liner having slipped out from the coping track that normally holds it in place? If you are new to vinyl liner pools this can be fairly alarming to see when you look out at your pool. Especially if you have a new liner installed maybe even as recently as yesterday and here you are seeing the liner falling out of the track already. First things first it is hard to find help online for this problem because you are not exactly sure what to search for. "Liner slip", "Liner out of track", "liner pull" are all ways that people can describe this problem of the liner bead slipping out of the coping track and your terminology might not match these. So if you do not find help with your searches online you will probably try posting questions and pictures to social media like Facebook looking for help. That is how I came to write this article after seeing a deluge of bad advice to a vinyl pool owner in this exact situation.
You do not have to look very far to find bad advice on the internet to be sure. Pool advice specifically is the type of thing that people seem inclined to give even when I can tell as a pool specialist that they have no idea what they are talking about. If you do not work on vinyl pools for a living you should probably refrain from offering advice as to what to do with a problem with a vinyl pool. I fail to understand the logic behind giving advice for something you do not understand, and in this case the advice people are giving about how to deal with a liner slip out of the track could actually cost people a lot of money in damages. Before we look at the potential for problems and damage let's quickly talk about the right way to solve this (very minor) problem.
How to put a liner back in the coping track - If you are just here for the solution then what you need to know is that a boiling kettle of water is all you need to fix your liner. You might read a lot of alternative methods but in 30 years of installing and fixing liners I have never had to use anything other than a kettle of water. At most you will simply need more than one kettle of water. Now, there are a few little tricks here as well that will benefit you to know. One of the best is to use wooden clothes pegs (with the springs removed) to wedge into the coping as you are putting the liner back in the track. Pin the liner on both sides with clothes legs so it does not continue to run out as you pull on it. Pour boiling water over the entire area of liner you are working on. Immediately grab the liner in the middle of the slipped area and lift. As you lift you bend the liner bead towards the coping track and push it in. Do not let go, and place another clothes peg right in the spot you just put in the track so it does not come back out. Now simply repeat until you are done by pouring more boiling water and starting in the middle of the slipped area, lift it in an put in the track. Once all of the liner is in the track the weight of the liner pulling down will actually help to keep the liner in the track. You can probably remove all of the clothes pegs now.
The older a liner is the harder it is to stretch back into the coping track. In extremely challenging situations with large liner pulls and a very old liner (7 to 10 years is "old") then you will benefit from lowering the water level in the pool. The more vertical area on the wall you expose above the water level the more you will be able to stretch even very old liners. Liner under the water level will not move or stretch at all due to the weight of water pushing on it.
Never use a heat gun to stretch a liner - The first piece of terrible advice you will find is people telling you to use a heat gun to warm up a liner for pulling it back into the coping track. If you did that on my jobsite you would catch an earful of hell for such a maneuver. There is no acceptable answer for why you use a heat gun for this. Boiling water is the only method ever needed. If you go one inch too close with the heat gun you will burn a hole in the liner before you have a chance to swear appropriately at your own foolishness for using a heat gun. I have used heat guns my whole life. If you have one iota of dust in the heat gun that turns into a red hot ember that shoots out. A liner and a heat gun do not mix. If you tell me you use heat guns and "it's always fine" I just think less of you as a service technician. I do not take risks with other peoples liners and neither should you. You will never hurt a liner with boiling water. It also heats a much larger area more quickly which is important as you only have a few seconds of stretch before the liner cools. I can hammer a post in with a rock but I don't because I am a technician. You can put a liner back in with a heat gun, but you should not because there is a better method, lower risk with higher chance of success.
Do not use liner lock to hold the liner in place - Wait, what? That advice is contrary to almost everything you will read online about fixing this problem with liner popping out of the track. Simply jam some liner lock into the coping to hold the liner in place...what could be the problem? The problem is that most liner pools do not need this and just because your liner came out of the track once does not mean that you need it either. In fact, adding liner lock can make this problem much worse. Why is the liner slipping from the track in the first place. Two common reasons are some sand / grit / a bug got behind the liner bead in the track and the liner just slipped out. The next most common is the liner track is bending and starting to sag. When you have a liner slip / liner pull the first thing to do it put it back in the track and absolutely nothing else. No liner lock. In most cases the liner will not come back out again. In many more cases you might have the liner out in the spring (especially in freezing winter climates) but simply put it back in and you are good for another swim season. Adding liner lock to the track can actually serve to make the problem worse. Forcing the liner lock into the same track as the liner does help to hold the liner in place at the bead, but puts WAY more stress on your coping track. If you have an older coping track that is starting to sag you will put the nail in the coffin by adding liner lock. It will be even more stretched out than before. Now when you go to do the next liner you might have to replace the coping as it is cracking or stretched out.
People have used many things for liner lock over the years from pennies to wooden popsicle sticks and honestly they all work. If you have a problem with the liner coming out of the track I would encourage you to use boiling water to fix it, not a heat gun, and use liner lock only if absolutely necessary. To that extent, do not add liner lock to the whole pool because one area slipped out. I would liner lock that one area only and leave the rest of the pool as-is. In most cases the liner was not seated correctly in the coping track and this allowed it to slip out and once you get it back in there properly you never have a problem with it again.
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Swimming Pool Steve is an award winning, second generation swimming pool and spa specialist from Ontario Canada. With over 10,000,000 views on the Swimming Pool Steve YouTube Channel, winner of the 2018 Pool & Spa Industry Leadership award and author of hundreds of pool and spa articles both online and in print Steve is committed to helping pool and spa owners as well as pool and spa industry workers learn more about the technical side of building, renovating, repairing and maintaining all types of swimming pools and spas. Follow Swimming Pool Steve on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
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