Just say NO to Vinyl

Bet you’ve NEVER seen a vinyl liner pool in ANY hotel, motel, college, apartment complex, swim club, gymnasium, campground or city community center. Why not? If liners are such a good deal, why don’t we ever see them in public? Well, the developers of these projects have a reputation and image to convey. The loss of prestige could be enormous. Also, they cannot afford the tedious responsibility and cost needed to maintain a vinyl liner pool.

A vinyl liner pool is ill-equipped to withstand expansive soil conditions or ground movement. Don’t you find it curious that a vinyl builder wants you to wait a year before pouring a deck on his somewhat uncompacted backfilling of the pool walls? Voids and pockets can develop in the sidewalls or under the floor of the pool. These voids can undermine and collapse the structure especially if there is any water build-up due to serious rainfall. Every year we tear out a handful of vinyl liner pools and replace them with gunite… AT A CONSIDERABLE EXTRA EXPENSE!!!!

Don’t buy into the notion that a vinyl liner has some fabulous warranty program that will cover cracking, splitting, peeling, blistering, yellowing, tearing, stretching, fraying or puncturing of the body of the liner. The warranty typically covers ONLY the seam of the liner, which like a waterbed, comprises LESS THAN 2% of the entire liner area. A liner is destined to fail because the replacement of a vinyl liner represents a HUGE profit center for a company that builds liner pools. A typical liner replacement can run $2,500 – $3,500 before you can blink! Almost daily, we receive calls from people wanting us to replace the liner. We’re not in that business and we constantly suggest they call the builder who put their pool in. They say they’ve tried but can’t find them…

Remember how years ago everyone wanted a vinyl top for their car? People even paid extra for them… maybe you did too! But we all found out that because of the wind, rain, snow, salt, heat and chemicals battering those vinyl tops, they become brittle and cracked or peeled. That’s why they’re not made today. Do you think a swimming pool liner is any different?

The ONLY reason someone thinks about building a vinyl liner pool is the initial perceived cost savings over building a gunite pool. Fifteen years ago, a typical gunite pool was about $30,000 as opposed to an average cost of $15,000 for vinyl, or about twice as expensive. Today, that same gunite pool (excluding decking) might be $50,000 but the vinyl cost would be $40,000. Though gunite costs have gone up, the vinyl pool is no longer half the price of gunite. It’s only 20% less. Vinyl builders realized they didn’t need to be half our price, they just had to be less. VINYL POOLS ARE GROSSLY OVERPRICED!!!

Lately, we have run into a curious phenomenon. Builders have started constructing simple vinyl liner pools and then adding expensive treatments like brick and stone coping or deck textures like stamped concrete or brick pavers, all in an attempt to try to EMULATE the look of a gunite pool. Can you believe it! That’s like putting makeup and earrings on a pig! No matter how hard you try, IT’S STILL A PIG!