Hi guys,
We're in the process of building our pool, we poured the pad about two weeks ago which went fine, we then poured the walls a few days ago and it was very close to a disaster!
I know you guys like pics, so here's a few before I continue my yarn -
Before wall pour:
During wall pour:
And here's after the wall pour:
Anyway let's get back to the situation that looked to be a disaster, but ended up being downgraded to a "major fuckup".
Basically we were doing the pour and the form work began to fail on one side, it bowed out in the middle and looked like it was ready to give, we stopped the pour and got every available hand in the pool with hammers and nails to add more support. The wall was supposed to be 20cm thick in the part of the near failure it was nearly 40cm now after the near failure.
So panic one over we continue to pour, then panic two, both cement trucks say they're empty, the double thick wall at the failure point has sucked up an extra couple of cubic meters. We all know that a pool pour has to be done in one go, so we had to get another truck on site pronto. The cement company really cam through and redirected a truck from another site and had it there inside 30 minutes. The mix had Sika Plastocrete in it, so there was no danger of it setting in that time (I hope).
So there we were thinking we'd dodged a bullet until we removed the form work yesterday. It looks like during all the excitement the vibrator hadn't been used in one section and we now have exposed rebar at one point, you can actually reach in and touch the rubber water stop in the cold joint. Here's a close up pic:
Ignore the zig zag line above that's just run off from where two pieces of board were connected. But as you can see we are looking at exposed rebar, not good.
Here's another pic where you can see the wall (on the right) where the form work nearly failed. It's going to take some serious render to straighten that curve out! You can also see down the bottom the exposed rebar that was in the previous close up:
As you can imagine I'm not exactly feeling confident in the water retaining properties of this pour. So to stop this think leaking, here's the plan:
1) Plug that hole with Sika Water Plug 102 and smooth over any rough edges from the pour.
2) Add two coats of Sika Topseal
3) Render the whole surface ready for tiling with Sika Latex
I know we've got a few pool buffs on here so I would love to hear your feedback on that plan or any other ideas to prevent later leakage.