3 Tips For Installing A Long-Lasting In Ground Pool In A Yard With Clayey Soil

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3 Tips For Installing A Long-Lasting In Ground Pool In A Yard With Clayey Soil

Adding an in-ground pool to your yard gives you a place to cool down and have fun during the hottest months of the year. If your yard has soil with a high clay content, however, installing an in-ground pool can be tricky. Clay soil expands rapidly when it gets wet, and it shrinks when it dries out again. The change in volume can cause the soil to shift, which can damage an in-ground pool.

Rain, water splashed over the pool edges, fluctuations in the water table, and leaks in the pool can all cause the clay soil nearby a pool to repeatedly expand and shrink. If you're planning to install an in-ground pool in clayey soil, read on to learn three tips that help prevent it from being damaged by soil shifting.

1. Choose a Fiberglass Pool

If you have clayey soil in your yard, it's best to select a fiberglass pool shell. Fiberglass can shift slightly without cracking, which makes it the perfect material to use for in-ground pools in clayey soil. Concrete pool shells are popular, but they can't flex very much before they crack. A crack in a concrete pool shell can also allow water to leak into the surrounding soil, which will cause the soil to expand further and worsen the crack. Fiberglass pools are more capable of standing up to the repeated expansion and contraction cycles they'll experience in clayey soil.

2. Backfill With Soil That Drains Well

Even when you're installing a fiberglass pool, it's a good idea to limit how much your pool shifts. Shifting soil can cause your pool to tilt, making the water line uneven. The easiest way to minimize soil movement around a pool is to install it using a backfill material that drains well such as loamy soil. The backfill material underneath the pool and around the sides of the pool will cause water to drain more quickly away from the pool shell, which reduces the impact of the repeated expansion and contraction cycles caused by clayey soil.

3. Use PVC Pipes for Pool Plumbing

Shifting soil can also move the pipes used for the pool's plumbing, such as the pipes connected to the pump and filter. When installing your pool, you'll need to make sure that a flexible material like PVC is used for the pipes. Connections between pipes should be kept to a minimum since pipes are most likely to break at the fittings where two pipes join together. Shifting soil can move the pipes and cause them to disconnect. Using long runs of PVC pipes to reduce the number of connections needed will help them stay intact regardless of the movement of the soil around them.

Overall, the most important thing to keep in mind is that a fiberglass pool is the best candidate for clayey soil. They're less likely to crack if the pool shell flexes. Additionally, proper installation will reduce the effect that clayey soil will have on your pool, so make sure that you use a fiberglass pool installer that has experience adding pools to yards that have clayey soil. When properly installed, soil shifting will be kept to a minimum and your pool will be able to withstand the tricky conditions caused by putting an in-ground pool in soil that's prone to shifting. 

For more information about fiberglass pools, contact a local company like American Pool & Spa.



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Renovating Our Pool After years of living with a pool that looked less-than-perfect, we started going through and thinking about things we needed to do to improve our space. We decided that a new liner would be ideal for making the space a little more functional, so we started focusing on different ways to make things right. We talked with a few different pool contractors about making the changes we needed, and before we knew it, things were coming together. I wanted to start a website all about renovating our pool and making the changes you need to improve the entire space every day.

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