This is Eric with Stanton pools and Valley pool plaster and I’m at a pool in West Lake Village today just giving a customer an estimate. I wanted to show you what it looks like and how you can tell that your pool has copper plumbing because copper plumbing was installed in pools gosh 40 50 60 years ago and copper although it was the gold standard at the time now it’s not right.

Everyone uses PVC is what code is you know just like in your house people used to use copper. Now people are using pecs more and more often and what happens with copper is that years and years of water flowing through the lines causes the copper to wear thin thinner and thinner.

Eventually it starts to leak and when one section starts to leak you know the rest of the copper is the same age and it’s going to start to leak as well.

Unfortunately you can’t repair copper you can but no one’s really going to recommend that because it’s going to leak in the next spot and then five feet over another spot and you’re just going to end up chasing the copper leaks until you end up replacing all the plumbing.

So when we see a pool that has copper plumbing we always give a few options on replacing at least part of it so that if it does leak down the line it’s not going to damage the new surface.

Let me show you let me show what we got going on with this pool. One of the first things I can see is that the pool has a green stain, see that and green staining is caused by a lot of copper in the water. Now copper can enter the water for a couple of ways. It can have a copper algaecide being used in the pool which is really common by the pool service.

Also the heater a lot of them have copper heat exchangers and that enters the water but this much copper in the pool is almost always a sign uh that it’s going to be copper plumbing. I can see how much green there is here and if you look another sign is that the spawn drain isn’t split. We only have one spot right here it’s really uncommon.

Even in copper pools a lot of times it’s split and the pool drain is also not split here and look in the equipment area thank you to see how how I can know for sure that they they have copper plumbing underground. We can see how above ground they’ve got PVC they painted it gray.

But then we have a copper to PVC compression fitting and now we have copper coming up out of the ground on not only the suction side, but then after the heater goes back into the ground the return side. The return side being copper doesn’t always mean that the pool has copper throughout.

A lot of times that’s just a heat sink for the heater. Old heaters when they got so hot you couldn’t connect PVC to them because it would melt the PVC so they connected copper let it run underground for a few feet and then connected PVC to it after it cools down. But when you have a suction line that is copper coming out of the ground for certain we know that the whole pool is copper.

So I usually give the customer two options. One is a complete replumb of the pool right which isn’t cheap. It requires us to saw cut the deck and install new return lines. That is really the best way though.

The second option is if we come back over here I’ll show you is to just do a few things to where if the plumbing were going to leak. It won’t damage the new surface, it’s just going to require deck work.

If we look over here you see how they have a drain on the bottom of the pool. They have a skimmer here there’s actually a plumbing line that goes from the skimmer down underneath the pool to the main drain. If that line were to leak, that would be a bummer especially right after they did a brand new surface.

So we always recommend at a minimum when you have copper plumbing. Replace the skimmer, split the drain and do a new connecting line between the two of them. That way if anything leaked excluding the spawn that would be a different story.

But if anything leaked in the pool it would just be the return lines. We’d have to saw cut the deck, but it wouldn’t impact their brand new Surface. So hopefully you found that informative if you have any questions as always feel free to reach out to us again I’m Eric Stanton with Stanton pools and Valley Pool Plaster.