Pool-Finish Stains Tarnish the Entire Industry

An Interview by Lenny Giteck

When, in the 1980s, Jack Beane began formulating potions designed to prevent pool finishes from becoming stained and to remediate those that were already damaged, it was not with the intention of creating a company to manufacture and market such products. He simply wanted to help friends and relatives who were experiencing difficulties with their backyard pools. “I was taking it one pool at a time in those days,” he recalls.

Beane also wanted to help keep pool builders he knew from going broke. “Many of them were having to replaster pools that really only needed stain removal,” he says. “Acid washing had a bad name because if it wasn’t done correctly, it destroyed the finish. Plus, we went through several drought cycles when you simply couldn’t drain a pool and acid wash it. If there wasn’t a better answer, people were going to go bankrupt.”

The founder and president of Largo, Fla.-based Jack’s Magic Products started by tinkering in the back of a workshop. “I’d put together bottles of this and bottles of that, and give them to people I knew. They would come back in a few days and say, ‘I need some more of that magic stuff you gave me.’ That’s how our company got its name.”

Since Beane founded his company in 1989, it has grown into a national leader in the field of swimming-pool stain prevention and remediation. He has also turned the issue into a personal crusade, working tirelessly to educate the industry about the problem. A longtime activist on the topic with the National Plasterers Council, Beane helped the organization to formulate the pool start-up procedure it currently recommends.

WaterShapes spoke with Beane about his passionate interest in what many in the industry would consider a rather unglamorous issue: pool-plaster stains.

You’ve said that whenever a pool finish becomes stained, the entire industry is damaged. Is that because of the bad word-of-mouth the problem creates?

Absolutely. When I first started, a lot of these cases wound up in court. The plasterer would contend that he had done his job correctly, but that the person who started up the pool — maybe the service company or someone who worked for the builder — messed things up. And vice versa. The service company would say it was the plasterer who screwed up, or that the builder had used inferior materials. It would go round and round — and, of course, the poor homeowners, who just wanted to have the kind of pool they paid for, got caught in the middle.

I did a lot of expert-witness work back then. I would go into court and say, “No, it’s just a stain,” and then prove it. Not only that, we usually were able to remedy the problem without anyone having to spend a small fortune. That kept a lot of the industry guys in business and it resolved the situation for the homeowner, so it was a win-win proposition.

Have you seen a major change in the industry’s understanding of this issue over the past years?

If you look at some of the surveys that have been conducted with pool service guys, and compare how many now use sequestering agents versus how many did 15 years ago, the growth has been huge. In addition, more and more plasterers are being made an integral part of the pool industry instead of being segregated in their own world. Educating plasterers about how to keep pool finishes from becoming stained — making them part of the solution instead just pointing fingers at them — has elevated the whole industry. An increasing number of plasterers have picked up the reins and taken control of their own destiny, in large part by starting up pools correctly.

Has the change benefitted their bottom line?

In the past many plasterers didn’t want to hear about water chemistry because they thought it wasn’t their problem. They would just put on the mud, leave and collect their money. Unfortunately, they had to give back a lot of their profit when they were forced to redo many pools. As they’ve become increasingly educated about this issue, their warranty problems have dropped dramatically. Now we’re talking about very small numbers.

What is the major surface problem you’re seeing these days?

I’ll answer by asking a question: What has been the biggest growth area in swimming pool sanitation in the past five or six years?

Are you talking about saltwater chlorination?

Exactly. This goes back to the start-up issue. With quartz finishes, for example, if you just throw in the salt, let it settle on the bottom and assume it eventually will dissolve, you get an overexposure. The way the salt reflects light makes the finish look like there’s a stain or discoloration — but in reality, it’s just an overexposure of the scale laying on the finish.

Salt-chlorine generators produce a high-pH product. As the pH rises, you precipitate out scale — and that’s another problem we’re dealing with quite a bit. Depending on at what point a pool scaled up after it was first filled, you could be dealing with a hydration issue or an overexposure issue. It could be a number of things.

Also, by throwing the salt in too quickly — without waiting 28 days for the finish to get to a somewhat secure initial cure — you make the finish even more susceptible to degradation. That is one anomaly that’s not so easy to fix, because either you’ve got to rough it all up to look the same or you’ve got to polish it all to look the same. It won’t just go away on its own.

At our company, we employ a step-by-step process to identify what’s going on in order to know whether it can be remediated, and if so, how. The process saves throwing hundreds of dollars’ worth of chemicals at a problem, which may or may not fix it.

Have you run into any problems as a result of the increasing use of natural stone materials in swimming pools?

Anytime you’re dealing with natural stones you’re going to have natural contamination. As pretty as the stone can be, it’s sometimes like trying to jam a square peg into a round hole. The stones are not pure. They’re not something that was designed to be submersed and oxidized. It’s the oxidation that a lot of times causes a problem — and, of course, without oxidation we don’t have safe water to swim in.

Face it, you can take stones from, say, the Grand Canyon, and I’ll guarantee they’re going to wear away in the presence of water. Water is the universal solvent and is always going to try to balance itself. Water doesn’t want to be pure, and it’s going to find a way not to be pure by dissolving stuff and putting it in solution. In my opinion, they can do so much with synthetic stones these days that it’s sometimes a better way to go.

There still seems to be a lot of variability in water testing results. In you view, is this an area where more improvement is needed?

Without a doubt. Some companies’ test kits give you very accurate numbers under certain conditions, and terrible numbers under other conditions. People are still getting bizarre combinations of readings and reacting based on erroneous information. If your test kit is giving you numbers that don’t seem to make sense, maybe they truly don’t make sense. Maybe they seem impossible because they are.

Everyone who uses test kits needs to develop the knowledge to know the difference. That includes service guys, builders, start-up guys, employees of retail stores and operators of commercial pool facilities. One thing I’ve noticed is that the more automated a water testing system is — if, say, it’s got a computer hooked up to it — the less likely people are to use their common sense. They think if the computer says something is so, it must be so.

Are there other problematic issues related to water testing?

There’s the lack of testing. Testing for calcium hardness every six months really is not sufficient if you’re trying to protect a new finish. Despite that, some companies have protocols that require calcium testing only twice a year. When you take one of the key components of water balance out of play, what’s the point of testing the other ones? It’s completely meaningless without the big three: hardness, alkalinity and pH. And now TDS is also a big factor because we’re running much higher levels than we used to. So the right frequency of testing is extremely important.