Cracked & Leaking Pool repair and renovation, Sotogrande, Cadiz
Cracked & Leaking Pool repair and renovation, Sotogrande, Cadiz. The urbanisation of Sotogrande Alto is one of the most prestigious in Southern Spain, located near the popular Valderama golf and the town of Guadiaro and Castellar de la Frontera.
This is one of the most flawed pools that we have seen in a long time. The list of places that the pool was leaking from is quite comprehensive, considering that it is only 4 years old. We couldn’t believe that it held water, the maintenance team told us that the pool was using 30,000 litres of water per week. The water bills must have been in the thousands, as the hose filling it had to be left running constantly.
The first leak diagnosed was from the swimming pools hoover point. All of the pipes were bunched together and laid on top of building rubble. As the ground settled, a sharp point from a rock broke the pipe. Once the pipe started leaking, the tree roots worked their way into the area, making the leak worse. A local repair was almost impossible as all 4 pool pipes were touching each other, had 3 electrical pipes and 2 water pipes running along side and above. There simply was no space to make a repair, without cutting all the pipes. The solution was to make a bypass with new lengths of pipe.
The second leak was a broken skimmer. The pipe entering the bottom of the skimmer had cracked, again caused by the poor ground works, causing the soil to settle and put pressure on the pipe.
A third leak was found in the drain of the pool. The PVC fitting in the base of the pool was broken, allowing ground water to come up through it with the pool empty and allowing the pool to leak when full!
The fourth and most significant leak was from a crack running across the shallow end of the pool. Leaks in the plumbing can be repaired, but structural problems need a permanent solution.
On top of all of these problems, it was discovered that the pool structure was made using only 120mm of concrete, which was not very hard and had little steel in it for reinforcing. This explains why the pool had cracked.
Once the leaks in the pool’s pipes had been diagnosed and repaired, we could tackle the structure. We installed a Renolit AlkorPlan liner in Persia Blue. The structure is guaranteed to be leak free.
LED AstralPool par 56 lamps were the finishing touch, significantly reducing energy consumption.