Vinyl pool liner replacement in Los Angeles

No. Vinyl is a flexible membrane and tile needs a rigid substrate. Anyone offering to tile over vinyl is offering you a floor of loose tile within a season.

In most cases, yes: an in-ground vinyl pool can be rebuilt as a concrete one in the same hole. If you are already facing a liner replacement, it is worth having the pool inspected for conversion first, because the two decisions are close enough in cost that most people want the numbers side by side.

A liner is manufactured to fit one specific pool and cannot be adjusted on site. Anything that is not a plain rectangle — a step in an odd place, a radius corner, a bench — needs a full set of measurements to the inch, diagonals included, taken with the old liner still in place. Measured wrong, it arrives five weeks later and does not fit, and there is no remedy but ordering another.

We do not publish a rate for liner work, because liners are uncommon enough in Los Angeles that every one is quoted from its own measurements rather than off a price list. For a sense of the market, local cost guides put a Los Angeles liner replacement at an average of about $1,842, with most jobs falling between $1,350 and $2,500 — those are other people's numbers, not ours, and they assume a pool with nothing awkward in it. Send the shape, the measurements and a photo of the steps and we will price your pool. Looking costs nothing.

Often. Converting is a similar process to building a new pool and considerably cheaper, because the excavation and the plumbing runs already exist. If the pool is due for its second or third liner, ask for both numbers side by side.

Eight to twelve years is the usual industry reference for an in-ground liner, and Los Angeles sits at the short end of it: sun is what kills vinyl, and the waterline gets it all day here. The warnings come before the leak — the pattern fading out, the material going brittle at the tile line, wrinkles that no longer pull flat, the bead slipping out of its track. Once a liner has stretched and hardened, patches stop holding, and that is usually the point at which people ask what a conversion costs instead.

Not by the nominal size, which is why a figure found online rarely matches the quote. The price follows the measured surface — walls plus floor — the depth profile, and every feature the liner has to be cut around: steps, a bench, a radius corner, skimmer and return openings. A 16 by 32 with a flat floor and a straight step wall is the cheap version of that pool; the same footprint with a deep end and a moulded step is not. What comes off the same drain is worth pricing at once: the bead track, the gaskets and any foam behind panels that have gone rough.

Three, in practice. The same thing again — a new liner made to your measurements, the cheapest option and the one that repeats every eight to twelve years. The liner plus what sits behind it: new bead track, new gaskets and foam over wall panels that have gone rough, which is worth doing when the wall is what wore the last liner through. Or ending the cycle by converting the shell to concrete in the same hole, on the same plumbing, with an interior that is resurfaced rather than replaced. On a second or third liner, ask for the first and the third side by side.