Soft Sand Under Pool

by Bobbie

My pool has only been installed for 5 weeks. The installers used sand under my pool but the bottom has never really seemed hard throughout the pool. There have been soft spots, especially along the outer edges of the pool.

The spots do seem to get harder as time goes by. However, today there was a bad storm with a lot of rain. When I got in the pool, I noticed the sand under the outer edges of the pool was softer than before.

Is this normal when it rains heavy? When the installers left, I immediately placed more sand around the pool, then used weed paper over that sand, then added a lot of rocks around the pool.

Hi Bobbie.

How soft the sand is will usually depend on how deep it is, the deeper the sand the softer it will be. Other factors are how wet it was and how well it was packed. I like to use just a couple inches of wet sand well packed and broom smoothed. When the liner is stretched into place from outside the pool the water has finished packing the sand before anyone gets into the pool.

It sounds to me like the sand was pretty thick and not packed, if which case it will appear pretty soft. The cove area has more sand than the rest of the pool and will always be the softest. It is also possible the rain water soaked into the pool causing the cove to be wet and softer than usual.

A hole in the liner will also cause the sand to be soft and mushy. This, however, is usually isolated to a small area, not over the entire pool. What you describe is probably nothing to worry about.