Planned work at Saltdean Lido was halted last month after it was found an old substation had been removed.
Campaigners asked Brighton council to lend them £70,000 for a new one but the council said it would lend £10,000.
Saltdean Lido Community Interest Company (CIC) had wanted to avoid fundraising delays to the work, but is now selling bricks for a Wall of Fame.
People can pay to adopt bricks which will feature their message or name on the wall to be built early next year.
Spokeswoman Bridget Fishleigh said the old substation had mysteriously vanished and no-one could account for its disappearance.
She said campaigners could find no photographs to prove it was ever there but they did find cables.
They have said the lido will remain a building site until money is found.
The CIC has raised £2.8m in grants and is working on a £4.8m lottery bid but Ms Fishleigh said allocated funds could not be reallocated under grant procedures.
"We're reaching out to our supporters to help us with this because without power we wouldn't be able to test the pool and we certainly wouldn't be able to run it," she said.
The Wall of Fame will have 2,500 bricks and campaigners are urging people to buy them as Christmas presents.

Loch Glascarnoch near Garve supplies water to Mossford power station.
A road that used to link Inverness and Ullapool, two bridges and part of a telegraph pole have been visible and were photographed by Calum Maclean.
Glascarnoch and its dam form part of energy giant SSE's Conon hydro electric scheme, which involves six dams and seven power stations.
The dams and power plants were built in stages between the 1940s and 1960s.
A new road to Ullapool was built to replace the one lost under Loch Glascarnoch.
SSE said the water level of the loch had been lowered for operational reasons.
A spokesperson said: "As we head into the winter we've pulled the level down because the rain we usually get in October and November can raise the levels up by as much as one metre a day."

Muhammadu Buhari said that if a credible Boko Haram leadership could be identified then he was prepared to talk with them without preconditions.
But he said he had no intelligence on the girls' whereabouts or their health.
Boko Haram seized the girls from their dormitories in the north-eastern town of Chibok in April 2014.
"If a credible leader of Boko Haram can be established and they tell us where those girls are, we are prepared to negotiate with them, without any precondition," said Mr Buhari.
Attempts to negotiate with Boko Haram during the rule of ex-President Goodluck Jonathan failed because officials were talking to the wrong people in the fragmented militant group.
BBC Nigeria analyst Naziru Mikailu says Mr Buhari's offer to revive talks shows that Boko Haram remains a force, despite his claim last week that the group had been "technically" defeated.
There is little prospect of Boko Haram agreeing to negotiate the release of the girls, he adds.
The militants regard the girls as their most invaluable captives and their leader, Abubakar Shekau, said last year that most of them had converted to Islam and had been married off.
Some Nigerians on social media expressed anger at the president for saying the government had no idea where the girls were being held, saying it indicated a failure of the intelligence services.
Mr Buhari took office in May with a promise to defeat the group, and gave the military a deadline of the end of the year to end the six-year insurgency.
Although Boko Haram has been driven out from most of the areas it controlled in north-eastern Nigeria, it has continued to carry out suicide bombings and raids into neighbouring Cameroon, Chad and Niger.
The military has managed to free hundreds of Boko Haram captives in recent months.
However, they did not include any of the Chibok girls.
Using football to tackle Boko Haram
Why Boko Haram remains a threat
A fundraising campaign has begun to try to revive plans to restore a Grade II* listed lido.
[NEXT_CONCEPT]
Water levels at a loch created in the 1950s have dropped low enough to reveal structures usually hidden underwater.
[NEXT_CONCEPT]
Nigeria's president has said he is prepared to negotiate with Boko Haram militants to secure the release of about 200 schoolgirls.