Grounding in Gravel for a Pool Repair in Catawba

We recently went out on a pool repair call in Catawba to track down a leak on an above ground pool. Leak detection work looks pretty strange from the outside — a technician walking around with a beeping box and a wired pool stick — but getting an accurate read depends on something most wouldn't think about: a good, solid electrical ground.

Our electronic leak detection tool works by putting an electrical current into the surface of the water with a floating metal plate, which then seeks to complete it's circuit by going through the water - through the holes in the liner - into the ground, which the connects back to the agitator. Our pool stick has a sensor on it that can detect the concentration of electrical current, which occurs at the tears in the liner, letting us know where to patch! This only works with Vinyl pools because the liner is an insulator to ground. Under normal conditions, we drive a grounding rod (a screwdriver) into the soil next to the pool and get a clean, stable reading instantly. This job wasn't normal conditions.

This particular pool was surrounded by a bed of #57 gravel. This loose, rounded crushed stone was used to feed a french drain that surrounded the pool. Gravel like that drains well and is an interesting idea to prevent washout in storms, but it's terrible for grounding equipment. Because it's just loose stone with air gaps all through it, there's not enough contact with the earth underneath to carry a steady signal. Instead of the clean ground we'd get in packed native soil, we were fighting an inconsistent, weak connection at the beginning.

Getting a workable ground in that situation was a quick fix — repositioning the ground rod to jam in at an angle underneath the pool through the gravel. It's the kind of behind-the-scenes troubleshooting that doesn't show up in a five-minute video, but it makes the difference between a guess and an accurate diagnosis. All told, we spent a bit under an hour and a half on site working through it, as there were quite a few punctures to patch outside of the grounding difficulties.

The photos below show the before and after from this visit, so you can see the setup we were working with and how the vinyl liner patches turned out! We typically try to match the vinyl patches to the original liner, so we used a light blue which will fade to match soon. For the pinhole we use a quick set flexible sealant rated for the underwater chemical conditions pools face.

If your above ground pool sits on gravel, crushed stone, or another loose base material, it's worth keeping in mind for any future electrical or leak detection work — it's not a flaw in the pool or with the tool, just something that takes a little extra care to work around. As with all our pool repair visits in Catawba and the surrounding area, the work we performed is backed by our 12-month warranty. Thank you Melissa for trusting Pool Patchers!

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