Question about rough plaster

Hi All,

I've been waiting patiently for the forum to come back up so I could get some advice about this. I had a new 21K gallon gunite pool installed late last year. It was completed very late in the season and all I could really do was get everything basically under control and close the pool. I'm going to ask a question here and also try to give some advice to others who might find themselves in my position.

Having a gunite pool installed is a long and stressful experience to begin with. To make matters worse, after construction was complete the pool company (one of the largest and most well known) basically turned me over to the pool store they partner with so they could screw things up every way imaginable. They instructed me to use Tri-chlor (they had me dumping sticks in the skimmers :rolleyes: ) and my CYA jumped up to 100 in no time. Everything they asked me to do was so scripted and automatic and nobody seemed to actually understand my specific situation and advise me accordingly. After a while I caught on to their bad advice and started using this forum as my main source of info.

My main beef is this: I brushed my plaster 2 times a day for 2 weeks and did everything I was told but, as I now understand, the plaster takes much longer to cure than the few weeks that I had the pool open for. I had the PH in the mid to upper 7s before closing but nobody warned me that the new plaster would continue to make the PH shoot up after closing. IMO, a good strategy for someone in my situation would be to get the PH down to the lowest acceptable level (maybe even a little lower) with the expectation that the PH will rise again. I'm not sure how effective this would be in offsetting the PH rise over several months but it certainly wouldn't hurt. All I know is the PH was sky high when I checked a couple of weeks ago. Mid to upper 8s. Using a submersible pump for circulation I got the levels under control.

I have a hot tub and the levels were even worse in there than the pool. The hot tub bench feels rough in spots (like sandpaper). I think there are some rough spots on the pool steps as well but so far the hot tub seems like the biggest problem. I'm not sure that the PH is the cause of this because the hardness was also low. It was at 70 or less.

So my first question is, based on the high PH and low hardness, what most likely caused the roughness?

My second question is how I might best resolve this. I see that they have scale remover at the pool store and I read on the old forum that people used wire brushes, stones and sandpaper to smooth plaster.

Any advice would be great appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Lenny

Man, that's a bummer . . . well, the high pH wouldn't eat away at the plaster, so that's at least one good thing. If I had to guess, I'd say that the plaster dust has gotten stuck to the plaster . . . just a guess. The low hardness would leach calcium from the plaster, but I'm not sure what visual/tactile effect that has exactly. Is this an aggregate surface of any kind, quartz perhaps? Maybe post more info on your chemistry to help give everyone an idea of where your numbers are . . .

I think I've heard of people using a pumice stone to do small spots of roughness, but if this is wide spread, I'm not sure what you could realistically do to smooth out the entire surface. I'd tend toward a combination chemical/mechanical solution. I'll be interested to hear what the experts have to say on this one. Once again, sorry to hear about that happening on a new pool . . .

Hope that helps a little at least,

SJohnson

Hi All,

I can feel your pain. I have the same situation with my new pool. We got water in November and after a lot forward and backward with the pool builder and the service dealer (because the pool is leaking 1 inch water a day) I closed on the 22 of December. It was very cold here in VA and I brushed as much as I could for 4 weeks. We dropped the water level down to 6 inch under the tiles and I put the cover on. Over the winter the level dropped to 18 inch under the tile line. I took the cover off last week that the builder could start looking for the leak and I noticed that my step’s (the 3 which are under the water line) were looking very sandy. Well all around the pool is still dirt and it was a very windy winter here. I was able to clean the steps which were not under water very easy but the 3 under water are brown and they feel like sand paper. The builder says I can use a much harder brush or a stone to clean it but the pool store has the opinion that the plaster is to young to start with heavy duty stuff. I started to use a household brush which is a bit harder then the pool brush but it is not doing the trick to good. It looks very dirty and I don’t even want to know how the bottom of the pool feels.

I hope that somebody in the forum can give me some hope that I will be able to get it clean and less rough.

Guido

Thanks for the replies. I don't even know the extent of the roughness and won't know until I can get in. I'm hoping it's fairly limited and manageable. The plaster (just smooth white plaster) was very smooth when it was done last fall so finding these rough areas was pretty upsetting to say the least. I don't have the discoloration that Guido described.

It's hard to believe that this could happen in such a short time. I closed the pool in early December and prior to closing I lowered the water about 15". Some of the roughness I am feeling is on top of the step into the spa, which was easily out of the water when I put the cover on. We got a lot of rain over the river and the pool ended up a little above the normal fill level, but that top step would have been dry for a while. So the damage to that step would have happened is just 2 or 3 months! It seems hard to believe. Yeah, the PH and hardness were out of whack but it's hard to believe that could have an effect like this in such a short time.

Also, the roughness is mainly on the top of the steps and the top of the spa bench. The sides still feel fairly smooth. I'm really hoping that a good stiff brush might take care of this. I'll check back in a week or so after I've tried that.

I went in yesterday to check the surface and it was fairly good on the bottom of the pool. Some spots on the sides however are pretty rough. So I decided to start brushing on a regular bases again even without the pump running. (we will start up on Friday). I remembered that it was a bit of a pain to brush in the middle of the pool because it was hard to get pressure down to the brush as further it goes away from you so I got myself the Wall Whale brushing head. I have to say excellent the brush pushes him self down to the ground even if you are fare away. It makes brushing much more easily.