May 14, 2026 Pool Hydrostatic Valve Repair

    We noticed that we were having to fill the pool more and more often. Time to get someone out to take a look at it and figure out a fix. We called American Leak Detection.

As you can see, the gallons per day added was steadily increasing. The odd reading on 2/28/2026 was caused by the pool water meter battery going dead. There are more anomalies in late March, when we were bringing the pool up to a higher level so the skimmers wouldn’t cavitate.

American Leak Detection brought out an extremely precise water level measuring device last week and their guy went into the pool and found that the Hydrostatic valve was leaking. That valve is a safety feature found in a lot of inground pools. If the water table outside of the pool rises really high, the pool will try to float and it will crack. This valve lets the outside water flow into the pool to prevent that. The service guy didn’t think we needed one, since the inspection well, that lets you see the outside the pool water level, was completely dry and we’re on the side of a mountain and our well static level is 300 feet down, but Reardon Construction Enterprises, the pool builder, insisted on us putting a new valve in instead of just a plug.

Martin thinks this is because on the final pool blast, 3 or 4 of the shot holes in the northeast corner had water in them, so much that the blaster had to use underwater dynamite to shoot them. This meant that we might have a spring there that might cause problems, therefore the valve was put in.

Here’s how you repair the pool, without dumping 14,500 gallons of water down the hill and calling in 5 water trucks to refill it. The well can’t produce more than 500 - 600 gallons a day, so it would take about a month to refill it and you don’t really want the plaster dry for that long.

They really should call themselves American Leak Detection and Repair, as you can see.

Martin didn’t see any water outside. This guy is really fast and only had the valve out for about 20 seconds, so probably about 50-60 gallons was all that was let out, not nearly enough to see anything happening.