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 ) 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