Leak Detection & Repair

If your pool always seems thirsty - the level dropping faster than evaporation explains, the auto-fill running constantly, a soft or damp patch on the deck - you likely have a leak. Left alone it wastes water, throws off your chemistry, and can quietly undermine the deck and equipment pad. We track leaks down methodically, at the fittings, the plumbing, the shell, or the equipment, and fix them properly. No guesswork, no tearing up your whole deck.

## How to know whether you actually have a leak

Before anyone charges you to look, it is worth establishing that the water is really going somewhere.

Florida pools lose water to evaporation, and more of it than most owners expect - a quarter of an inch a day is unremarkable in summer, and considerably more with heat, wind and a warm pool. Add splash-out from swimmers and backwashing, and a pool can look thirsty without leaking at all.

The bucket test settles it. Fill a bucket with pool water, set it on a step so it is partly submerged, mark the water level inside the bucket and outside it, switch off the auto-fill, and leave it a day or two. Evaporation acts on both equally. If the pool level drops more than the bucket level, water is leaving the pool by another route.

Other signals worth taking seriously: an auto-fill that runs constantly, a soft or persistently damp patch on the deck or in the lawn near the equipment, unexplained cracking in the deck, air bubbles coming back through the returns, or a pump that keeps losing prime.

## Finding it without destroying the deck

The reason leak detection is a specialty is that the wrong approach means digging, and digging around a pool is expensive and irreversible.

We work through the possibilities in order of likelihood and access, and only excavate as a last resort once we know where to go.

**Fittings and penetrations first.** Skimmers, returns, main drains, lights and their conduits account for a large share of pool leaks, and they are checkable without breaking anything. Skimmer throats are the single most common culprit - the joint between a plastic skimmer and a concrete shell moves over decades.

**Then the shell.** Dye testing at suspect areas, with the pump off so the water is still, shows exactly where water is moving into a crack.

**Then the plumbing.** Pressure-testing lines individually isolates which run is losing, and acoustic listening equipment narrows where along the run. That is the difference between opening one square meter of deck and opening ten.

**Then the equipment pad.** Leaks at the pad are easy to see and easy to overlook, because water disappears into the ground beside a pump without ever showing anywhere near the pool.

## Why waiting costs more

A pool leak is one of the few problems that reliably gets more expensive, and not only because of the water bill.

Water escaping under a deck washes out the material supporting it, which is how a leak turns into settled and cracked paving. On the equipment side, a pool that keeps dropping below the skimmer causes the pump to run dry, and a dry-run destroys seals and eventually the motor - so a plumbing leak commonly presents as a [pump failure](/services/equipment-repair) months later.

There is also the chemistry cost. Constant auto-fill dilutes stabilizer and adds fresh calcium continuously, which on our hard water pushes hardness up and makes the pool progressively harder to keep balanced. Owners often report their pool "will not hold chlorine" long before they realize it is leaking.

## What we tell you

Where the leak is, what it will take to fix it, and what it will cost - before we do the work.

Where a leak is minor and the repair is disruptive, we will say so, because that is occasionally a reasonable thing to monitor rather than chase. And where a pool is close to due for [resurfacing](/services/resurfacing) anyway, we will point out that shell repairs are far cheaper carried out while the pool is already empty than as their own job.

## Where leaks actually turn up

After enough of these, the pattern is fairly consistent, and it is worth knowing where the odds sit before anyone starts opening ground.

**Skimmers** are the most common single location, particularly on pools past twenty years old. A plastic skimmer set into a concrete shell expands and contracts differently from the concrete around it, and eventually the joint opens. The tell is a level that drops to just below the skimmer mouth and then stops.

**Light niches and their conduit** come next. The conduit runs from the niche back to a junction box, and water can travel along it and away.

**Returns and their fittings**, where a threaded fitting has been over-tightened at some point in the past and cracked.

**The plumbing runs themselves**, most often at a joint rather than in the middle of a pipe, and most often on the pressure side where the system is pushing water rather than drawing it.

**The shell**, which is the one people fear and the least common of the group on a well-built pool.

The level itself tells you a great deal before anyone arrives. A pool that drops to a particular height and holds there is leaking at that height - almost always the skimmer or a light. A pool that keeps dropping regardless of level is leaking through the main drain, the plumbing or the shell.

## Leaks that only happen with the pump on

Worth mentioning because they confuse people.

If a pool loses water only while the equipment runs, the leak is on the pressure side - the return plumbing, downstream of the pump. If it loses water only when the equipment is off, it is more likely on the suction side or the shell.

That single observation narrows the search enormously, and it costs you nothing but attention. If you have noticed a pattern like that, tell us when you call.

## What repairs typically involve

Once we know where the water is going, the fix depends entirely on where that turned out to be, and the range is wide.

**Skimmer and fitting repairs** are usually straightforward and often done in the same visit - resealing a skimmer throat, replacing a cracked return fitting, dealing with a light niche.

**Shell repairs** are done at the crack rather than across the whole surface, and hold well when the shell itself is stable. Where a pool is close to due for [resurfacing](/services/resurfacing) anyway, doing shell work while it is empty is far cheaper than as its own job.

**Plumbing repairs** are the ones that can involve opening deck, which is why the detection work matters so much - the difference between knowing the leak is in a two-meter section and knowing it is "somewhere in the return line" is the difference between a small repair and a large one. Where a run is badly deteriorated, rerouting a line can be cheaper than chasing repeated failures along it.

**Equipment-pad leaks** are usually the cheapest of all, and are worth ruling out first for exactly that reason.

## The costs a leak hides

The water is rarely the expensive part.

Chemistry is a bigger cost than most owners realize. Continuous auto-fill dilutes stabilizer and adds calcium with every gallon, so a leaking pool on our hard water climbs steadily in hardness and becomes progressively harder to balance. Owners report a pool that will not hold chlorine and buy more chemical rather than looking for water loss.

Heating is worse. Every gallon of replacement water arrives cold and has to be heated, so a leak on a heated pool runs a gas bill or a heat pump continuously against water that is draining away.

And there is the structural cost. Water moving through soil under a deck carries fines with it, and the void that leaves is what eventually shows up as settlement and cracked paving - by which point the repair is the deck rather than the pipe.

## Pools that have been leaking for years

A slow leak often goes unnoticed for a long time, because an auto-fill quietly hides it and the level always looks right.

The tell is usually indirect: a water bill that has crept up, chemistry that has become harder to hold, hardness climbing year on year, or a patch of deck that has started to settle. Owners frequently discover a leak only when the auto-fill itself fails and the level finally drops.

If your pool has an auto-fill, it is worth switching it off for a couple of days once a year and simply watching the level. It costs nothing and it is the only way to find out what the fill is really doing.

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