Mid-Atlantic Pools

Preparing to build a new swimming pool can be a challenge especially when weighing all of the stories that your neighbors will tell you. Vinyl liners are frequently replaced and fiberglass pools float are the two most popular I routinely hear but one thing is true, fiberglass pools can and will float.

Floating fiberglass pools in Virginia Beach never made any sense, not when I sold or installed them professionally. It is true that when the pool tub has its plumbing fully installed that you basically have a boat sitting in your back yard, but after doing the math floating makes no sense. The smallest fiberglass pool that our company typically installed held about 11,000 gallons of water which is approximately 91,799 pounds holding it down. Then it happened, I witnessed a fiberglass pool literally float off of the ground before my very eyes. This article is more for the person considering installing a fiberglass pool for themselves or even another pool professional looking for a good laugh.

Before we get carried away let me share that the excavated hole for which this floating pool sat was solid clay. If you have read any of my other pool related articles then you might already know that this situation closely follows the theme of "Swimming Pools and Smithfield Clay" but I'll admit that in this case we didn't follow our own advice. Yes it's true, even the pro's can make a goof and I'm not shy about sharing my mistakes to help you from doing the same. Luckily the truth doesn't hurt too much, there was no permanent damage and it cost me and my company less than a thousand dollars to repair.

Two days from the day we broke ground our fiberglass pool arrived. Normally I wouldn't advise preparing a fiberglass floor several days in advance but the location to this particular project was very remote. We prepared the floor with a two inch compacted surface of masonry sand which was probably mistake number one as we should have used pea gravel in this scenario. The second mistake was not installing a well point in the deep end of the hole as I almost always suggest whether ground water is present or not. The problem arose after the fiberglass tub was installed and our crew began to backfill the project with washable sand fill. During the backfilling process of a fiberglass pool it is always recommended that you use water to wash in the sand. The water accelerates the compacting process and helps the material reach voids around the pool walls to secure it into place. As you can imagine it takes allot of water to wash in sixty tons of sand. In a hole made of clay the water had nowhere to escape to fast enough, had we installed a well point this wouldn't have been a problem. Also, filling the swimming pool tub at a faster rate would have offset the water being held in the hole but in this story we didn't do either. A simple error of getting carried away with the backfilling process and failing to pay attention to physics caused the fiberglass tub to literally lift off of the prepared floor. Before realizing what had happened our perfectly level swimming pool now sat a full six inches higher than where it started. There is only one way to safely fix a goof of this magnitude and it requires a crane for half of a day and allot of physical labor to remove all of the material we so impatiently washed underneath the pool.

So there you have it, fiberglass pools can and do float in Virginia Beach.