It’s in the news all the time. Another city pool won’t be reopening because of the cost of water loss and repair to stop that water loss. City pools are a joy to residents due to the health benefits of simply being able to swim. If it’s aqua-athletics, summer camp or just a leisurely cathartic dip to release the stress of a work week, these pools provide benefits to city residents; that is, when they’re open. Municipal pool closures due to improper concrete repair are a hassle.
We talked to Arnold Graham, a city maintenance professional in Florida who had this to say.
“A couple of years ago someone brought up the need to fix some concrete cracks in the pool. They looked at the costs to drain it, cut it out and repair it with rebar. They had an engineer in who said if the pool was drained, they could inject epoxy and the cracks wouldn’t be an issue again. The job was done and the pool was refilled. They got almost 3 months out of it before closing it for the season because the epoxy didn’t work. This past year, before opening the pool, they brought the same engineer back in claiming he did a poor job and he redid the exact same job again. It lasted 6 weeks before it leaked again, now the pool is closed indefinitely.”
This is another story of how epoxy doesn’t stop structural cracking. Improper repairs are costly, more so that just doing it right the first time and using Torque Lock Structural Staples. When Torque Lock is used, the crack is fixed, permanently. Like Arnold shared with his story, the cost was the initial repair, the year long closure, the re-repair and another closure. This will be ongoing until they either remove, replace or simply demolish the pool and take away a pool the community could truly enjoy. We don’t blame it on the inefficient engineers who don’t understand pools, we don’t blame it on budget restraints or the fact that 17 uneducated board members can’t decide on what’s best for a pool they honestly couldn’t care less about. They could have gone online and done research and called about Torque Lock. They didn’t.
As structural engineers, the quick and easy answer to get paid is to recommend simply demolishing and rebuilding. As repair technicians, some want the quick buck and will slather up cracks with epoxy and in the moment, they stopped a leak, but it didn’t repair the crack. The difference between filling a hole and actually repairing a concrete wall is worlds apart. Without controlled compression, the crack will continue to widen and the problems will do more than continue to exist, the will get worse. Expensively worse.
Your city pool is important to the community. It costs nothing to call Torque Lock and get insight on what permanent repair is about. Any contractor can install the staples with tools they have, or can easily acquire for just a few hundred dollars at any Home Depot. The Torque Lock Structural Staple is a patented solution for concrete repair, so discussing it with someone who relies on billing for other methods doesn’t get you the facts. There is only one Torque Lock; rebar, epoxy, fiber straps – these aren’t Torque Lock and subsequently, they aren’t an actual solution to concrete repair, they are temporary band-aids. One more time, there is only one product in the world that makes permanent repair on structural cracks, it’s the patented Torque Lock Structural Staple. If it doesn’t say Torque Lock, it won’t work. There’s only one and it’s only available through Torque Lock.
As repair technicians, visit https://torque-lock.com and learn about the ease of installation and the way you can guarantee customers a permanent solution, residential, commercial, municipal – pools, foundations, fountains, sea walls – solid concrete structures. Call Torque Lock at 818-436-2953 or order online and have your staples shipped direct to the job. If you’re going to get paid, get paid to do the job right.
As for Arnold, after we spoke he ordered a TL-30 kit. He told us that the initial repair was for 7 feet of crack, and over the past two seasons, that crack has grown to 27 feet. The TL-30 gives him the staples needed to repair 30 feet of crack.
Arnold shared, “It wasn’t a big deal to them in the beginning. The pool looks huge, so 7 feet didn’t seem like an issue. It’s been drained twice and epoxied twice and the crack kept going. From 7 feet to 27 feet right across the floor of the pool. I brought up Torque Lock before they called that engineer again. Me and Raffie got the pool drained and installed the staples over a weekend. The pool was filled by Thursday and it hasn’t leaked since. They’ve been swimming in it all summer. Torque Lock actually fixed the crack, so the leak stopped. It’s amazing how something that looks so simple can do that. Thanks Torque Lock!”
