aleathorn

Hey everyone,I am just looking for opinions on a recent installation of a liner. A company came out to replace our liner. We noticed the pool losing water the next day. I filled it and called the company the next morning to inform them. They told me to wait until the water was below the lowest line in order to rule out our lines. Instead of this I plugged the lines and filled them with water. They didn't drain at all and the pool was still losing water. I was worried about 3+ inches of water leaking into the ground. 5 days after we told them about the issue they finally came to take a look. They first claimed that all they did was tighten a few screws near the stairs. The pool didn't lose any water over night. Issue resolved, or so I thought. After trying to get them to pay for our water (they refused - it was over $100 to fill back up) I inspected the pool because my fiancee saw them doing something for a while in a specific area of the pool. I found what looked to be a patch (I posted a pic of it here a few days ago).After going back and forth with the owner of this company, and explaining that I was going to be getting an expert in to see if that was in fact a patch, he came clean and said the puncture was caused by us. We did absolutely nothing with the pool until after we noticed the leak. There is no way it was us. The puncture is almost right where the wall and the cove in the deep end meet. I'm not sure if it's called the cove in the deep end, but the 45 degree angle wall meets the 90 degree angle wall - that's right about where the puncture is. I'm told, by another expert, that if a puncture is going to happen during installation, and it's unfortunate, but it does happen from time to time, it would likely be in an area like this, due to how they install the liners. He also said it is extremely unlikely that we could have done anything to cause this - vacuuming shouldn't do that to a new liner. I didn't vacuum before I knew about this issue, so I'm sure it wasn't that either way, but he said the likeliness of this being caused by us is less than 1%. I've also owned this house for 5 full summers - I know a bit about pool care now. I've also been told that the little 10 dollar patch the guy applied would likely stretch during winter and fail - it likely wouldn't last one winter. The guy I was talking to said that their policy is to either replace the liner when this happens, or they have to properly fix it by using vulcanizing techniques (not sure about the terminology there) in order to ensure it is properly "patched" from the bottom and the top, and is as strong, or stronger than, the seams. I guess you also do this when the liner is dry, and you have to heat it up. So, I guess it's quite the process to do. I think the guy that install this is trying to avoid a large fix and pass the buck on to me. Does anyone have any insight as to what should be happening here? Anyone know where I can take this to get them to replace my liner? Also, we lost a lot of water and the base of the pool is now all squishy and bumpy (it's an on-ground pool - deep end and shallow end, but sand base). The cove also doesn't seem to be done properly, as it is squishy and seems like it doesn't sit on the cove properly. It's an extended hexagon as well, and the places where the angled pieces meet the other places is kind of off the wall a bit. I think that's normal, as that's the way the old liner was. The old bottom also want's perfectly flat, but it was much more flat and solid feeling than it is now. I fear the water leak ruined the ground underneath. Can anyone shed light on this? Anyone know what I can do about this? Does this guy have any legs to stand on when he claims this is my fault? Are we supposed to use HTML tags?

This can be deleted - I didn't realize I originally posted the story in here as well