Pool Surface Problems I’ve Seen Over the Years

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In this episode, I'm going to go over some common surface issues that I see in plaster pools, pebble tech pools, fiberglass pools, and vinyl pools.
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And over the years I've seen just about everything out there that can happen to the pool service, and I'll share some of these with you here today.
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I've been asked before if it if it's a good idea to paint the plaster pool.
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You know, the plaster pool maybe has some discoloration and some defects, and maybe you're trying to sell your house, and you think if you paint the pool that it would look better.
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Now this was really popular back in 2008, 9, and 10 and 11 when there were a lot of REO homes and there was a lot of foreclosures and the pools just looked messy.
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I remember one pool that I was taking care of.
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The bank wouldn't turn on the power or the water to this pool.
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And so if the pool was half full of water, I would just go there and shock it, and it was like a milky white color.
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But I noticed that the where the water line was always dropping, it was discoloring the pool.
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And I always thought this pool's gonna be a mess after, you know, when they go to sell it and turn on the power and water.
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And you know, it's one of those things where painting the pool at that point was probably a viable solution, and a lot of people did it back then.
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I haven't seen too many of them now, but people still paint their pools, and there are some drawbacks with a painted pool.
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And I've actually painted a pool and painted a spa with the help of another pool pool before, so it can't be done, and it's not something that's rocket science, it's like painting anything, but there are some prep things that need to be done, of course.
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The pool needs to be completely cleaned.
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Usually we asked to wash the pool and then we power wash it, and then we make sure that it's completely dry, and then we paint the pool.
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Now, before there was like a separate primer and paint, but I think you can get both together, and a lot of people that paint walls and homes will use the primer and paint mix together.
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The brand I think that's pretty popular is called Ramuk, and this is like an epoxy paint that's used to paint pools, and the prep is the main thing.
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Like I've seen some painted pools where I know they didn't prep it properly, they just kind of drained it, posed it down, and then they painted the pool.
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So there is a lot of prep work involved in painting the pool, and the lifespan of the paint is maybe five to eight years at the most, I think.
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Five years probably the maximum I you would get out of it, and then to redo it is a little more complicated because you have to take off the previous epoxy and paint and repaint it.
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So it's kind of a one-time deal, and once you do it, it's just maybe to sell the house or to make the pool look better, and it's hard to replicate it the second time.
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So I'm not saying that I'm totally opposed to someone painting a pool, I just think that it's kind of like a band-aid, and it's not really something that's gonna go a long way.
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I mean, replastering the pool is probably the more permanent solution for sure.
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So a lot of the things you're gonna see with painted pools is that it starts to have blistering and peeling.
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I noticed this is like around the step areas or maybe an area that wasn't prepped properly.
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I've seen this happen as well.
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It looks great, by the way, when you first paint it and fill it with water.
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So if you're selling the house, I mean it's practically a good solution for a lot of sellers.
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But for the buyer, it's not the greatest thing because when you start brushing it, after it starts degrading, the pool starts to get really cloudy and there's chalky, powdy residue everywhere it gets into the filter.
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And I'll talk about fiberglass pools that have a similar problem as well a little later.
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Also, it's one of those things where it's something that you you think that's gonna not get stained, but the paint can get stained as well.
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So it may look uniform for a while, but it can also have some staining from chemistry as well, so it's not something that's gonna be a uniform color permanently.
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The last thing I I painted was a standalone spa, and time really flies because I think it was about 10 years ago.
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Now, this was something that had to be done because the spa had it just it just wasn't looking good, and the house is being sold by a flipper, and basically he won this was a million dollar, you know, I think$1.6 million home.
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So it was like a really expensive flip, and so it had to look really good, new equipment.
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So the Santa Law spa, so we drained it, we primed it really well with the primer, and then we painted it with the pool paint, and it it turned out great.
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And I would say that this one's gonna hold up for a very long time because we really spent a lot of effort to make sure that this was gonna stick and it wasn't gonna start peeling off like you know during the the showings a month later.
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And it to me it felt like it was gonna stay on there forever.
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So it was a job well done.
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But to do this for a full 15,000-gallon pool, 20,000-gallon pool is much more difficult.
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There's a lot of variables, there's parts of the plaster that may not the paint may not stick well.
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There may be some dirt left on there, it may not be totally clean.
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So for a pool for it to come out as well as this small little you know, 300-gallon spa, I would say it's not going to come out as well.
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So don't have your hopes too high for a painted pool.
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And if you inherit a painted pool, there are drawbacks that happen.
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Again, peeling paint, blistering, and then it become really dust, it becomes really dusty over time as the paint starts to deteriorate.
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So I would say painting a pool would be something that I wouldn't I'm not opposed to, but I wouldn't recommend if that makes sense for those reasons.
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Or a standard plaster pool.
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Of course, I've seen just about everything on the surface of the pool itself, from rust stains to cracks to, of course, chips in the plaster.
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So you're gonna see this pretty obviously.
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I find that chipping starts usually around the step area.
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So there's a curvature of the step, and the chipping usually starts there.
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I think it's because that area is hard to trowel properly and put on, and so you're gonna see the chips forming in those areas.
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The deep end also is another area that I see a lot of chips.
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I'm not sure why, but the deep end of the pool seems to chip more than the shallow end.
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And it could be again the fact that they're when they're plastering the pool, the deep end needs more work and maybe cures faster, I don't know.
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But the deep end, like around the main drain or and areas, but the step area is the main culprit that I've seen for chipping plaster, and sometimes it can be pretty severe where there's like gaping gaps in the plaster, you know, five or six inches round, and the chips come off.
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And there's one pool that I remember particularly where plaster was just coming off like crazy, the chips were coming off, and it was an automatic cleaner.
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I think it was the Zodiac G2.
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I'm dating myself here with this cleaner, and it would pick up the the canister, it was always full of these chips, and it just was to the point where it just the pool could not be vacuumed, basically.
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It got so bad, and it can't get to that state.
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Of course, the rear plaster is due at that point, but fortunately, chips and pools or chips at the step area, small little cracks in the pool, don't really cause any integrity problems with the pool.
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It's just a cosmetic thing.
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As far as rust stains go, I've seen anything from a battery exploding in the bottom, causing a major stain that you know can't be removed from you know just little toys falling in there.
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But sometimes they'll play with like super soaker guns.
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Those have screws on them, they'll let them sink to the bottom, and those screws will cause staining.
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I had someone who I don't know how this happened, but there was a 10-pound weight that fell in the pool, one of those dumbar weights.
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This was hard to get out, by the way.
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I couldn't net it out because I couldn't I couldn't get into my skimmer net.
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There's no way I can create enough force to do that.
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So what I did to get it out is I actually used my pool brush and I pushed it over to the step area, and then I took the pool brush and I I jammed it against it and flipped it onto the first step, and then I was able to get into the pool and get it out from the step area.
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I guess I could have dove into the pool and got it out myself that way, but I'm not gonna do that.
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So I was able to get over there, but it left a pretty bad stain on the bottom of the pool, a half moon stain that was pretty massive.
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Trichlor tablets also can fall into plaster pools and leave little moon-shaped stains, like half moon-shaped stains there, because they have a pH of like three, and the acid in them will burn the plaster.
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Really hard to remove those stains as well.
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So a lot of stains that you're gonna see in pools are permanent.
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When you do a bid on a pool, I highly recommend going around with like a check sheet.
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Like when you turn in a rental car or when you rent a rental car, they'll walk around, make sure everything is checked off.
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When we return it, they'll walk around with that same sheet that they had and they'll see if everything nothing new has appeared.
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Same thing when you're doing a bid, check the step area for cracks or chips, check the pool plaster for stains that are not removable, and make sure you note all of that so you're not being blamed for a stain that was pre-existing.
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And don't give the customer too much hope.
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Even in an acid wash, I've seen these rust stains being problematic, even with completely full pure acid poured on there and brushed vigorously.
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Sometimes these rust stains just don't come out.
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Sometimes it's actually the rebar coming through the plaster.
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And here's another thing that I've seen too.
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What I think is a rust stain is actually the rebar.
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It wasn't done properly, and it's actually coming through the plaster.
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Usually it looks like two little points, and then these points get bigger, so they they're like two pennies basically that are joined together, or one penny sometime, one penny size stain, and it's actually the same color as a penny, basically.
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I guess I don't make pennies anymore, but for those, you know, maybe in 10 years, no one's I don't know what a penny looks like, but you know what a penny looks like.
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So the rebar stain looks kind of like that, with some red around it, or maybe a light orange color around it, and usually it's elevated a little bit in the pool, and that's when I know that as a rebar.
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The way to fix that, drain the pool, have a plaster company come over and you know, cut out that section and kind of patch it.
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There's really nothing you can do beyond that because this it's just gonna get worse over time, and there's nothing you can do topically to fix the rebar coming out of the plaster, causing a rust stain.
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For pebble tech pools, the thing that I've seen the most in pebble tech pools is calcium buildup on the pebbles, especially the tan color or light blue color pebble.
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You're gonna see like a discoloration, or it's gonna look foggy to you, or kind of like it's there's like a layer of something on there, and that usually is calcium.
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So you're dealing with river rock, and so river rock is going to get calcium buildup on it over time, even with the most balanced LSI, you're still gonna get some calcium buildup on the on the pebble tech pools over time, you know, five or six years down the road, you're gonna see some of this light discoloration all over the pebble tech pool, and that's just calcium buildup.
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I've had some success with the Easy Care Butec, using that to kind of lighten it and using maintenance dose every week as preventative maintenance, and it does work fairly well.
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It has some elements in there that help remove the calcium and the bottom of the pool.
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It does require rigorous brushing with a steel brush with a pebble tech pool, but mainly that's what I'll see in a pebble tech pool is some calcium.
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I hardly see cracks in pebble tech pools, but I have seen with older ones.
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Usually there's cracks in the spa, and again the cracks form in certain areas of the pool.
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I'm not sure why they do that, but I have seen cracks in pebble tech pools as well.
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Not super common, but you can see that.
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The biggest thing I see with pebble tech pools is the pebbles may have some metal in them.
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They they put the pebbles through, you know, a rigorous kind of I don't know how they do it actually, but I know they check for metals and they make sure there's no metals in the pebbles, and sometimes that gets through their check, and when they do the pebble tech, some pebbles have metal, and what you're gonna see are rust stains forming that could be the size of a pencil eraser to the size of even a quarter.
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I see them get that big, and so what happens is that you can't treat that either.
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You just have to call your builder, they'll contact Pebble Tech, they'll send a technician down, and they'll actually chip out the bad pebbles.
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And once they chip out the bad pebble, that rust stain disappears immediately.
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So I've seen it, it's like magic.
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I've seen this happen.
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The word pebble tech pool had several of these in it, and the warranty was called, and then I was there the week later, and the pool looked brand new again.
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So they have a method of getting those out, and you can't do it yourself, just call your builder and they can do it.
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Usually these will appear, by the way, about one to two years after the pebble tech pool was installed.
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It's not something that you can see right away.
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The earliest I've ever seen this was like nine months into a new build where some of these rust things that are forming.
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Usually it's a little bit later, you'll start to see them.
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I suppose you may see them right away, but I haven't seen them here.
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Usually about nine months to a year, I'll start to see these rusts, these pockets of rust forming in it, and that I know it's a pebble tech pool that had some rocks with metal in it.
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Switching over at the fiberglass pools, one thing that I've noticed with these is that depending on the fiberglass pool type, if it has coping and it's like a regular pool, there's a gel coat that they spray onto it.
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And I've had fiberglass pools where when I brush them or vacuuming it, there's white powder everywhere, kind of like the painted pool problem.
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And this is a gel coat coming off, and nothing you can do to reverse this.
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In fact, as this goes on for a longer period of time, the fiberglass pool actually start getting cracks in it.
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The gel coat gets so thin that it starts to crack.
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And I've seen pools at this level, but this is uncommon because usually when you start to get to a point where the pool gets cloudy by brushing the walls or the bottom, the customer will re-jail coat the pool, and it's a pretty big process where they cover everything in the yard, put covers all over the fences, and so that nothing is in a neighbors, and then they re-spray the fiberglass.
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But if you do have a fiberglass pool and you're brushing it, you'll notice a gel coat coming off.
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That's a sign that you have to get it redone.
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Doesn't happen too often with the drop-in fiberglass pools.
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The shell pools, I noticed those are pretty durable.
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It's mainly for the built-in fiberglass pools.
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As far as fiberglass pools, yes, they can stain easily.
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So if you drop a nail in there or toys, they'll they'll pretty much ruin the fiberglass surface.
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There's no way to fix that.
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You can't drain it and acid wash it.
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So any kind of metal that gets in there, be cautious because that fiberglass surface is pretty much stained and there's nothing you can do to fix that.
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That's why a lot of builders will ban trichlor tablets for fiberglass pools.
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They'll warrant they'll avoid the warranty in a fiberglass pool if you're using trichlor tablets because they know that if a trichlor tablet falls in there, it's going to stain the pool.
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And this goes with vinyl pools as well.
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Trichl trichlor tablets can stain a vinyl pool very easily.
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Any metals that fall into a vinyl pool will stain it.
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Any kind of cal hypo or any kind of dry chlorine that you put in there.
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Cyaneric acid granulars, those will also stain the vinyl pool.
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So the vinyl pool surface is even worse than fiberglass because usually it's like a colored blue, and anything that you think can stain it probably will stain it from chlorine, not liquid chlorine, but trichlor tablets, granular trichlor, cal hypo.
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I've seen all of these stain the vinyl pool.
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So that surface is probably the least stain resistant out of all the ones I covered here.
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If you're looking for more podcasts, you can find those by going to my website, swingprolearning.com, on the podcast, on the banner is the podcast icon.
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Click on that.
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Thanks for listening to this podcast.
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Have a rest of your week.
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God bless.