A village Trust that supported and ran a community outdoor swimming pool asked a well-known local swimming pool company to repair cracks and leaks in the walls and floors.

They fitted a liner lock and would have installed a 0.75 pre-measured liner. However this pool is besides a river that overflows the swimming pool a number of times in a winter with heavy rain fall.

This could have pulled out and destroyed such a liner. With a specialist contractor working for the client, I devised a new specification. This gave a mixture of elastomeric flexible membranes for the cracks, long life waterproof renders and screeds and provided new water based epoxy coatings to offer an easy-clean finish.

Repairs were carried out to a leisure centre in Milton Keynes in January 2009. The pool was 29 years old and was suffering from a cracked and delaminated section of the floor and the marblite had developed a "rough" finish. The midpoint joint in the floor slab appeared not to have an installed water stop and was leaking.

Following leak sealing, a 200mm wide SIKA "Combiflex" waterproof flexible membrane was installed above the joint. Normally an expansion joint is fitted mid point above the "Combiflex" strip to allow for possible future movement. New mosaics and "Pacelite" were applied on top of old surfaces using ARDEX X7 for the mosaics and an SBR primer. The "Pacelite" was smoothed off on completion with flexible diamond discs, a process known as "wet polishing".

Provided the water is correctly balanced Pacelite provides a durable, attractive finish with a life of at least 25-35 years.