Nevergreen Pools provides pool pump repair in Elk Grove, covering shaft seal leaks, worn or noisy bearings, motors that won't start, lost prime, cracked pump housings, clogged impellers, and air leaks at the lid o-ring, along with motor swaps and full variable-speed pump replacement. A pump that's losing prime or running on a bad seal doesn't just sit there, it burns electricity every hour it runs dry or restarts itself, and a seeping housing or shaft seal can waste water and raise the bill every month it's ignored.

Call us if water is pooling or dripping from under the pump housing, if the pump is grinding, screeching, or humming without starting, if the pump loses prime and needs to be primed by hand every few days, if you see a hairline crack or weeping around the pump housing, if the impeller is clogged and flow has dropped off, if air bubbles are spitting out of the return jets even with the lid o-ring in place, or if the pump trips the breaker or cycles on and off on its own.

Nevergreen Pools is a licensed pool company based in Shingle Springs, serving the Sacramento region. Call to get a technician out this week, or book your first visit online.

How We Diagnose and Fix It

We start at the pad with the pump running, since most pump problems announce themselves in how the pump sounds and how it primes before we ever open anything up. A grinding or screeching noise usually means the bearings are failing, a motor that hums without turning over usually means a bad capacitor, and a pump that won't hold prime is almost always a suction-side air leak, whether that's a loose or cracked lid o-ring, a cracked strainer basket housing, or a loose union on the suction line. We pressure-test the suction side and check the lid seal first, because that's the cheapest fix and the most common cause of lost prime.

If the housing itself is cracked or weeping, or the shaft seal has worn out, we pull the wet end apart to look at the impeller and the seal face. On pumps in this area that are into their second decade, the seal face often shows scale from the harder water blend, which wears it unevenly and starts a slow leak that looks like normal splash-out until the puddle under the pad gets hard to ignore. We clean or replace the impeller if it's clogged with leaf debris or cottonwood seed fluff that gets pulled in during the spring bloom, and we replace the seal, gasket, and any cracked housing parts as a set rather than one at a time, since a pump pulled apart twice in one season costs more than doing it right the first time.

• Test pump noise and flow to isolate bearing, motor, or suction-side problems
• Check the lid o-ring, strainer basket, and suction unions for air leaks before opening the pump
• Inspect and clean or replace the impeller when debris or scale has restricted flow
• Test the capacitor and motor windings when the pump hums or won't start
• Replace the shaft seal, gasket, and any cracked housing parts together, not piecemeal
• Decide between a motor swap and a full pump replacement based on the pump's age and what else is already worn

On older single-speed pumps, a motor swap makes sense if the housing, seal, and impeller are still in good shape and the only failure is the motor itself. Once the pump is past 10 to 12 years old or has already needed a seal or housing repair, we usually recommend replacing the whole pump with a variable-speed unit instead of putting a new motor on an old wet end, since the old wet end tends to fail again within a year or two anyway. Any variable-speed pump we install gets programmed to the pool's actual turnover needs, with a lower speed for normal filtration and a higher speed for the cleaner or spa, because running it on one fixed speed either wastes electricity or undersizes flow for part of the system.