danospool - chalking paint

[danospool]

Just so you know, I should probably explain exactly what was done to this pool. The original owners(my wife's parents) put the pool in when they built their house back in the late 1970's. My father-in-law was more about entertaining & pool parties than maintenance, so the pool spent the next 30 years being green a lot, followed by lots of shock and other harsh chemicals. The plaster didn't hold up well under that kind of treatment, so he had it refinished with epoxy(might have been Zeron) 15 or 20 years ago. Of course the abuse continued until they decided to sell their home and move to a retirement community. At that time(about 2000) they refinished the pool again, this time putting acrylic over the epoxy.

We bought their house to keep the pool in the family for another generation(on reflection, possibly a mistake). To make a long story a little shorter, we strung the acrylic finish along until 2010, when I retired. At that time we drained the pool, and using some truly nasty paint remover hand scraped the whole pool - took about 2 1/2 months. We took it right down to the plaster in most places. There were a few areas where there was a little epoxy primer left, but nothing else. Then we washed and rinsed the pool per the application instructions for the single-component epoxy we used. One coat of etching primer, two coats of epoxy were applied, cured for 5 days, then pool was filled. The point of telling you this is to show that there's not really a hodge-podge of coatings under our refinish. Info you may not need, but there it is if you do.

Dan

[PoolDoc]

No, your info is relevant.

Based on what you just told me, the chalking is probably a result of the paint you applied. If it's chalking only a little -- enough to mark the bottom of your feet the FIRST time you walk on a particular area but not enough to cloud the pool, you might have used Zeron. In that case, there's nothing to fix: that's just how epoxy is.

If it's chalking more than that, you can RECOAT epoxy with better epoxy, if you prep the surface properly. That would allow you to go to a Zeron finish, which would still chalk as above.

Ben

[danospool]

Just thought I'd give an update on the paint situation. Looks like the mono-epoxy stuff we used is crap. As soon as we started using the pool this summer, the paint started coming loose in some areas of the pool, especially the benches and steps, and peeling off in big pieces. I can see blisters and cracks in the deeper parts of the pool also. Just so everyone knows, the paint we used was LifeGuard Mono-Epoxy over their etching primer. Both are sold by Top Secret Coatings, which sells many types of paint over the internet. Some people claim to have had success with their pool paint, but I'm not one of them. The vendor says the paint failed because of moisture corruption before the paint was fully cured. I say hogwash, but that's between me and them. Just be forewarned that this paint is apparently very, very difficult to apply properly. I followed all the instructions faithfully, but apparently that wasn't good enough. DIYers beware!

All that means that we will have to drain the pool again, remove the finish(sandblasting this time), and try something else. Ben, I gather that you are not a big fan of painting pools, so what do you think of replastering? If a replaster job is done right and maintained properly, will it last a good long time? I'm at the point where I'm a little gun-shy about painting again, so my wife and I are seriously thinking about replastering, even though it is quite expensive. Any thoughts or guidance you may have would be welcome.

Dan