Pre-Purchase Pool Inspections

Buying an island home with a pool? A pool can hide expensive surprises - a failing heater, a leaking shell, a salt system on its last legs, a surface due for resurfacing. Before you close, we give you an honest, plain-English assessment of what you're actually buying. You get a clear read on the equipment, the surface, and the plumbing, plus a sense of what it'll cost to keep the pool healthy in our coastal climate - so there are no unwelcome surprises after the keys change hands.

## What a pool can hide from a buyer

A pool shows well. Clear water, a working light, a pump that runs when someone flips a switch - and none of that tells you what you need to know before closing.

A general home inspection is not a pool inspection. Most home inspectors will note that a pool exists, confirm it holds water, and disclaim the rest, which is entirely reasonable and leaves a buyer with no information about the single most expensive system on the property after the roof and the air conditioning.

The surprises that arrive after closing tend to be large ones: a heater with a failed heat exchanger, a shell that has been slowly losing water for years, an interior finish at the end of its life, or a salt system with a cell that has months left.

## What we look at

**The interior finish**, and roughly where it sits in its service life. This is often the largest single number a pool can present a new owner with, and it is assessable by someone who knows what an ageing surface looks and feels like.

**The equipment pad as a system.** Pump type and condition, filter, heater, salt system or chlorinator, plumbing, valves and the electrical side. We note age where it can be established, condition, and anything that looks like it was fitted in a hurry.

**Evidence of leaking.** Water level relative to the skimmer, condition of the deck, damp ground near the pad, an auto-fill that is running. A full [leak detection](/services/leak-detection) is a separate job, but an inspection will tell you whether one is warranted before you commit.

**The deck, coping and tile**, including waterline scale, which says something about how the water has been looked after.

**Safety items.** Main drain covers, barriers and gates, and whether the light and its bonding look as they should.

**Circulation and function.** We run the system and see how it actually behaves rather than confirming it switches on.

## What you get

A plain-English report - what is sound, what is near the end of its life, what needs attention now, and where we could not see enough to be sure.

We will not give you a number for a house we have no stake in dressed up as certainty. Where something cannot be determined without draining or dismantling, the report says that rather than guessing, because a buyer is better served by a known unknown than a confident invention.

## When to have one done

Early in your inspection period, so there is time to act on it.

If the report turns up significant items, they are ordinarily a matter for negotiation like anything else a survey finds. Buyers regularly recover the cost of the inspection many times over on a single item, and occasionally the more valuable outcome is finding that a pool is in genuinely good condition and being able to stop worrying about it.

If you go ahead with the purchase, you also start ownership knowing exactly what you have - which makes the first year of [weekly service](/services/weekly-cleaning) far more useful, because we already know your equipment.

## Reading a pool's history from what is there

A good deal of what an inspection produces is inference, and it is worth explaining how, because it is the part that distinguishes a useful report from a checklist.

**Scale at the waterline** says the water has been running high in pH and calcium, often for years. That matters beyond the tile, because the same water was going through the heater and, if there is one, the salt cell.

**A rough interior surface** says the finish is late in its life, and combined with scale it usually says the chemistry has been inconsistent rather than that the pool is simply old.

**Mismatched equipment** - a new pump beside a heater from a different era beside plumbing that has been modified twice - tells you the pad has been repaired reactively rather than maintained, and that the remaining original components are on borrowed time.

**A pristine pool with a tired pad**, or the reverse, usually means the property has been prepared for sale rather than looked after. That is not sinister, but it changes what a buyer should expect in year one.

**Corrosion patterns** on a coastal property tell you how exposed the equipment location really is, which is a good predictor of what the next set will cost.

## Questions worth asking the seller

An inspection is more useful when it is paired with a few direct questions, and a buyer is entitled to ask them.

How old is the interior finish, and is there paperwork? When was the heater last serviced, and by whom? Has the pool ever been resurfaced, and when? Has there ever been a leak, and what was done about it? Is there a service company, and how often do they come?

Vague answers are information too. A pool with a documented history and a regular service company is a materially different proposition from one where nobody can say when anything was last done.

## Second opinions and existing pools

We also inspect pools people already own, and there are two common reasons.

The first is a second opinion, usually when an owner has been given a large quote for something and wants an independent view on whether it is necessary. We are happy to do that, and we will say plainly when we think a proposed job is not warranted.

The second is an owner who has inherited a pool with no history - a recently bought house, or an estate - and simply wants to know what they have and what is coming. Knowing that a heater has a couple of seasons left, or that a surface is due within five years, turns an unpredictable liability into something you can plan and budget for.

## Timing and access

We need the equipment to be operable to inspect it properly, which means power on and the system able to run. On a vacant property that occasionally needs arranging in advance, and it is worth doing rather than accepting a report that says the equipment could not be tested.

Arrange the inspection early in the period you have to act on it. Reports that arrive with two days left are much less useful, because there is no time to have anything looked at further.

## What it costs and what it saves

A pool inspection is a small fraction of what a pool can cost you to put right, which is the entire argument for having one.

The items a report most often turns up in a buyer favor are the large ones: an interior finish at the end of its life, a heater that has failed or is close to it, or evidence of water loss that needs investigating properly. Any one of those is ordinarily worth many times the inspection fee in a negotiation, and all three are invisible to someone standing at the edge of a clear pool on a sunny afternoon.

The less obvious value is in the pool that inspects well. Knowing that the equipment is sound, the surface has years in it and nothing is leaking is worth having before you commit to a house, and it means the pool stops being the thing you are quietly anxious about.

## What we cannot tell you

Being clear about the limits of any inspection, because an honest report is more useful than a confident one.

We cannot see inside a heat exchanger without dismantling the heater, so a heater that runs correctly on the day may still have internal corrosion. We can tell you its age and condition and what the water chemistry suggests about how it has been treated.

We cannot confirm the absence of a leak from a visual inspection. We can tell you whether there are indications worth pursuing, and [leak detection](/services/leak-detection) is the job that settles it.

We cannot see underground plumbing, and we cannot establish what is beneath a deck.

And we cannot tell you what a pool will cost over ten years, because that depends largely on how it is looked after from here. What we can do is tell you honestly what condition it is in today and what is visibly approaching the end of its life, which is what a buyer actually needs in order to make a decision.

See pricing