Europiscine and europiscine swimming pools in France

Today I am stressed thanks to Europiscine and their swimming pool liners. Funny thing to get stressed about? Let me explain.

Our swimming pool is five years old, and over the course of five years the previous liner had become slightly wrinkled and a little bit stained, due apparently to the very hot summer we had a few years ago – it seems that liners can’t deal with being very hot!

Anyway, at the end of 2006 we started to be concerned that it didn’t look very beautiful so we had it replaced in October 2006. We chose europiscine to do the work, although they are more expensive than most pool companies, for two reasons:

1) Euro piscine are a longstanding pool company (the company who installed the original liner had gone out of business so any guarantee was worthless)

2) The liner had a ten year guarantee against problems including staining – we paid extra so that if the liner had a problem during the first 10 years it would be replaced free of charge.

That all sounds good, don’t you agree.

By the time the liner was installed it was time to close the swimming pool up for the winter. So we discussed what steps to take with the Europiscine staff wo had installed the liner. Fill the pool back up, add the winter chemicals, and put the winter cover on, they said – which of course we did.

Come the spring we removed the winter cover, as you do, and found that the new liner was much more wrinkled and folded than the original ever was, and we had paid out several thousand euros. Not good, but happily we had paid all that money for the guarantee.

We called europiscine who immediately on the telephone denied all knowledge or resonsibility even before seeing it, which was not a good sign. Eventually, a few phone calls later, they agreed that someone would come and look at the liner – he duly arrived and said he didn’t know what had happened, but the solution was to empty the pool, refit the liner, and refill the pool.

Now this sounds unlikely to me – since we did that the first time and wouldn’t be doing anything different this time around. Also of course it costs a bit to refill a pool and takes a week or so to empty and refill it. Not surprisingly this causes problems when the weather is sunny and we have people in the gites.

I am reasonably sure the liner was the wrong fit to start with, but agreed to go along with the plan, as a necessary first step to resolving the problem.

There are also other reasons why you can’t refit a liner, to do with the holes that have been cut for skimmers and so on being in the wrong place. However we agreed they could try.

Which brings us to today. I rang europiscine pools to check that if I started emptying the pool (it takes 2-3 days to empty) they could come at the end of this week and try to remove the wrinkles. (Actually I rang them twice yesterday and again today because they are a bit slow in providing responses.) Yes the shop told me, they could come on Friday as long as they received payment in advance of the work.

After a long and heated discussion I am now waiting to hear from the manager/director to get his thoughts on the matter – apparently he is not available…suffice to say I am not keen on paying to have the problem rectified, especially when it almost certainly won’t work.

Now I am reasonably used to poor service levels in France but this is the best so far. Several thousand euros paid, and apparently because I didn’t report the problem within two weeks of it happening (I don’t know when it happened, as they knew the winter cover was on) it has nothing to do with them. Wild huh? Go Europiscine!!!

edit 1: I have sent details of this entry to both europiscine and mabaleine (their parent company) and await responses. I hope they will resolve the matter quickly and this story can have a happy ending – I’ll keep you informed!
edit 2: The devis for someone to visit on friday arrived – 198 euros!

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