When Is The Best Time To Get A New Pool Liner?
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A common question from vinyl liner pool owners relates to when is the best time to replace the liner? Usually this is a question of whether it is better to replace a liner in the fall at the end of the swimming season or would you be better of to replace the liner in the spring instead? There are actually a few things to consider in order to answer this question in a meaningful way, but all other factors aside the best time to replace your pool liner is early in the spring season as soon as the warmer weather arrives.
The reason why spring time is the best time to replace the liner in your pool is simply because you will get the new liner installed and then spend the rest of the summer using the pool. If there is any problems with the liner installation, fit of the liner, wrinkles, deformities or seam separations you are far more likely to notice this quickly when the pool is in use daily. A new pool liner that is installed in the fall season right before the pool is closed for the winter means that likely nobody will be swimming in the pool for at least a few months. In theory you should be protected with installation warranty against problems that you end up finding in the spring but there are a few considerations about this.
Damage to the pool over the winter - Let's imagine a situation where you have your pool liner replaced in the fall right before the pool is closed and winterized for the year. If there was a problem like a split seam, hole in the liner or significantly leaking gasket at the main drain, step flange or returns then you could end up losing water while the pool is closed. Since there is a cover on the pool you may or may not notice when the water level in the pool starts to go down. If you don't notice then the water level in your pool can continue to drop and you will eventually notice when the cover falls into the pool from the accumulating water / snow weight on top of it. If this happens you can bet there is going to be some damage to both the pool as well as the cover. Likely the liner itself could be damaged depending on how low the water level in the pool dropped...but now it is well into the cold winter season. What would you do if it was determined that you will need a new liner, a new cover, and maybe even some more repair work? Well, doing that work in the dead of winter will not be possible if you live in an area with freezing winter temperatures. So now you would be forced to leave the pool broken and leaking until spring when the warmer temperatures arrive and hope that the pool company will cover all of the repair work that your pool needs. If all of this sounds like a disaster to you then you and I are operating on the same wavelength.
Pool companies are busy in the spring - Pool companies, especially those in seasonal climate areas, are extremely busy during the spring opening season. If you were to have a new liner installed in the fall then the spring will be the first opportunity you have to swim in your new pool despite how the liner might be six months old now. What if you notice a big wrinkle in the liner you did not see during installation, or perhaps the floor has way too many imperfections and divots in it and you are not happy about this. Despite that your liner is six months old at this point and you want it fixed most likely the company that installed your liner in the fall is too busy to respond in an acceptable timeframe. Ideally in a situation like this you want to see the original installer in your backyard within 24 hours evaluating the nature of the problem. In a busy spring pool season it could easily be days or weeks before you see anyone about your pool problem. Most likely the pool company will try to push you off until the spring season rush is over but that means your pool will be on hold while other people are getting new liners installed daily. Further you will now have to have your pool down for repairs in the middle of the short swimming season that seasonal climates have. Again this all sounds like something that would be best to be avoided, and a spring scheduled liner change might be the best way to accomplish this.
When considering the best time to replace the liner in your pool a lot of the consideration is simply planning for a worst case scenario situation. Installing a new liner is actually not all that hard to do but you can't account for mistakes and accidents which could happen to anyone during manufacturing or installation of the liner. With winter on the doorstep you have little time to deal with problems in the fall before the weather is too cold to continue. This is however secondary to a very important consideration that all vinyl pool owners need to understand which is you should never try to put off replacing your pool liner as this can cause more damage than you realize.
Can I Wait Until Next Year For A New Liner?
The question of whether it is better to install a new pool liner in the fall versus installing a new pool liner in the spring is important however this is entirely secondary to something that all too many vinyl pool owners overlook. Do not try to get one more season of use from your old pool liner. It seems like such a simple thing to do in that you notice your liner has some deficiencies, but you would prefer to change your liner next spring which might still be many months away.
While I do endorse installing new liners in the spring ideally this assumes that there is nothing wrong with the current liner. Operating your pool for any length of time with known deficiencies is simply asking for problems with your pool. You can do quite a bit of damage in a relatively short period of time if you continue to operate your pool, especially with known leaks.
As your liner gets old and fails it will become brittle from age, UV and chemical damage. The liner will also lose elasticity every year after original manufacturing as the plasticizers used to make the vinyl supple escape or a chemically altered by sun damage and chemically treated water. The end result is that the liner will get stiffer and stiffer every year. Year one vinyl is soft, especially in the heat of the sun, so much so that it can stretch or be manipulated quite a bit. This means that you can easily stretch a tight liner into sharp corners or around curves where it seems initially like the liner might be too small. This works great for installation, and the first few years, but over time the liner becomes tighter and tighter in the areas that it was stretched.
It is this critical point where you need to replace your liner but unfortunately many pool owners do not since the liner still looks more or less okay. In reality the liner is stiff and stretched as tight as a drum which can cause a host of problems including leaks and even coping failure. On some pools like those with deck integrated bullnose coping having too much tension in the liner can cause the coping to fail, and fixing this involves removing and replacing the deck, coping and liner...which is many tens of thousands of dollars to do in most areas.
If you have PVC coping instead of the more robust (and more expensive) aluminum coping then it is even more important to avoid allowing your shrinking liner to put stress on the coping. Aluminum at least has the advantage of being able to stretch and then be bent back into place where as PVC coping will break when too much stress is placed on it. Once PVC coping breaks there is no repair option other than replacement unfortunately. It is worth mentioning that many aluminum pool coping options have a decorative PVC coping cap which is not the concern. Coping which is PVC where the liner connects to the track is the biggest concern as this is the area of coping that absorbs the most stress from the liner.
Tight corners - In many vinyl liner pools the first place where you will see obvious signs that the liner is reaching the end of it's service life is in the corners. The more tight the radius of the corner the more likely you are to have a problem here as the liner gets older. Eventually the liner will pull out of the track in the corners and you will not be able to get it back in as there is no stretch left in the vinyl. Some pool owners try to tape over the corners to get by until they decide to replace the liner but this will allow water to readily escape the system. This will cause wall rusting issues for steel kit pools, and water coursing in the corner is likely to cause some erosion damage to the floor in this area of the pool which will need to be repaired before the new liner gets installed. Since the liner is so tight in the corners if the liner does not manage to pull out of the coping track then you can end up with the stress of the liner breaking the corner coping pieces. Often this can be repaired, depending on what the corners of your pool look like, but sometimes a failed corner can be cause for the entire coping needing to be replaced on your pool.
Cracked flanges - As the liner gets tighter and tighter every year this will place more and more stress on the PVC flanges around the steps, lights, returns, skimmer and main drains. When you replace a pool liner you normally would install new faceplates on everything except the steps, but the additional stress from a shrinking liner can put stress fractures in the pool-side flange...the part the never gets replaced. If you crack a permanent flange on anything, return, steps or main drain, then this absolutely will need to be fixed before a new liner can be installed, and these repairs are not always easy to make.
Wall damage - Any time that you have chlorinated water escaping the pool system you can expect that this water is causing some sort of damage somewhere. In the case of galvanized steel wall kit vinyl pools, which are by far the most popular form of vinyl pool kit, you will end up with advanced corrosion issues on your walls any place where chlorinated water is able to get behind the liner. Interestingly when you remove an old pool liner from a steel kit you can see with a glance every single location there was a pinhole in the vinyl as there will be a large rust patch on the steel wall directly behind that location. Unfortunately in extreme cases where chlorinated water is allowed long term contact with the walls you can end up with the entire wall kit covered in deep, pitted rust from top to bottom. Fortunately the galvanized steel used for vinyl pool wall kits is quite thick and strong and usually you can remediate rusted walls by grinding and then applying a cold galvanizing compound to the walls. For more information about this repair you can read this article about how to fix rusted pool walls.
Floor damage - Usually the floor in a vinyl liner pool is protected by the weight of the water sitting inside the liner. In teh event of a leaking vinyl liner pool this dynamic changes as now you can have water both on top as well as under the liner which results in the liner becoming neutrally buoyant in the pool. As the liner lifts and floats it can fold over on itself and leave wrinkles when the water under the liner recedes. Sometimes the floating liner is not obvious or even visible at all, however there is water under the liner and as it moves through the ground it weakens the concrete in the floor of your pool. This can result in washouts, cracking and failure of the floor in your pool such that repairs or even replacement will be needed before you will be able to install a new liner. A new hard bottom in a vinyl liner pool can cost as much as the liner job itself so if you need a new floor from letting your liner go too long with deficiencies then you doubled the price of your new liner by trying to get more time from old one.
Coping failure - The biggest and most common failure from trying to get too much time from an old, failing liner is damage to your pool coping. There are a few kinds of pool coping that you could have and some are more of a problem than others. When the liner starts to pull on the coping this can cause the hardware holding the coping to the wall to fail. Quite often this is galvanized steel self tapping tech screws which hold the coping to the pool wall. These screws can rust over time which makes them weak and subject to having the head of the screw rust off completely. Also it is common to find coping installed with too few screws such as one screw every foot or two. Coping absorbs a lot of forces and tech screws should be installed every six to eight inches around the entire pool perimeter. Even when enough hardware is used, if the liner gets too tight and pulls too greatly on the coping you can experience a failure. At minimum this means you need new coping to be installed before the new liner. At maximum this failure requires a new deck, coping and liner renovation if the coping was integrated as part of the concrete deck of your pool.
The takeaway here is that spring time might be the ideal time to replace the liner in your pool as this gives you the most opportunity to closely observe your liner and look for potential problems. However it would not be worth trying to wait months or a year or more to get the new liner installed as you can actually do quite a bit of damage during this time that could add up to more expense than the liner was going to be in the first place. Sometimes a lot more. For more considerations for vinyl pool owners you can read this article that looks at pool liner replacement.
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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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