Bob Lowry’s Start-Up Science for Every Pool Surface

Fresh plaster only gets one chance to cure right, and most problems start before the first cannonball. We dive straight into the real-world startup decisions that determine whether your pool finishes smooth and stain‑free or inherits permanent issues. With veteran insights from chemical expert Bob Lowry, we compare the big methods—barrel, traditional, and acid—and map clear rules of thumb for when each one makes sense based on source water and surface type.

We get practical fast: test the fill water before you open the hose, set calcium to at least 150 ppm on day one, and decide how to handle metals the smart way. You’ll hear why hose‑end pre‑filters beat sequestering agents, how to use skimmer removal media effectively, and why sequestering alone fails as it breaks down under sunlight and chlorine. We also unpack the plaster dust problem, showing how a slightly low pH keeps dust soluble without risking surface burn, and why cartridges outperform sand when you need to capture fines.

New plaster is fragile, so we outline the non‑negotiables: never stop the initial fill, protect the surface from hose damage, keep wheels and robots off for weeks, and keep pets and people out until balance stabilizes. 

Whether you’re a service pro scaling up or a homeowner protecting a six‑figure investment, this guide gives you the steps, targets, and tools to start clean and stay clean. If this helped you sharpen your startup playbook, follow the show, share it with a colleague, and leave a quick review so more pool owners and pros can find it.

• why startups shape the life of the surface
• barrel vs traditional vs acid methods and where each fits
• testing fill water for calcium, alkalinity, copper and iron
• hitting 150 ppm calcium on day one for balance
• removing metals with pre‑filters and skimmer media
• limits of sequestering agents and why they degrade
• managing plaster dust with controlled pH and filtration
• new plaster cautions: continuous fill, no wheels, no pets
• recovery steps when builders skip startup
• r

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Chapters

• 2:49 Why Startups Matter Now
• 3:58 Startup Methods Compared
• 6:08 Barrel Startup Variations Explained
• 9:45 The “Boring” Traditional Method
• 11:22 Testing Fill Water First
• 13:14 Metals: Remove Or Sequester
• 18:16 Tools, Tests, And Costs
• 21:03 Pre‑Filters And Passing Costs On
• 23:39 Managing Plaster Dust Without Damage
• 26:49 New Plaster Do’s And Don’ts

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 2:01

Startup method and ways to make sure that the full surface startup is going to not have any problems or defects. And of course, Bob Lowry voice a premier chemical expert in the full industry and gets a lot of insights about startups and full startups. Are you a full service pro looking to take your business to the next level? Join the full guy coaching program. Get expert advice, business tips, exclusive content, and get direct support from me. I'm a 35-year veteran in the industry. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, I've got the tool. And that brings us to today's subject on pool startup issues. A lot of pool techs will be doing startups or be asked to do startups by the builder. Builders are pretty busy right now. You probably know this, but since COVID-19, the pool building industry has just skyrocketed or exploded, however you want to say. Like for instance, here in California, one of the biggest builders is Blue Haven pools. And there are about 300 pools out right now as far as build. So I think if you get a bid today, you're like nine or ten months away from them breaking ground. And with that said, startups are extremely important in for the pool to turn out right. And currently there are three methods right now. There's a barrel startup, there's a traditional startup, and there's a hot startup or acid startup. So in your opinion, which is the best method to start a pool?

SPEAKER_00: 3:22

Well, uh, first of all, I think there's a couple of more startups uh in there that you could that you could add to that. There might be five startups, but or maybe one or two are a sub of of the traditional ones. But um I think there's um the barrel startup um I think is probably for pools that have a probably a low calcium, low alkalinity source water. Hot startups are pretty much for exposed aggregate type of finishes. And so that leaves us with traditional startup, and there's a few versions of traditional startup, but the barrel startup um is a little bit difficult for uh people to get a hold of. There's actually two versions of the barrel startup. There is one that's been around for quite a while from on balance, and they recommend actually putting calcium chloride in the barrel. I'm sorry, they recommend putting sodium bicarb in the barrel and running the water through uh the barrel to get alkalinity. And then the startup from Orenda also uses a barrel and they put in calcium chloride. So they build the calcium level up in one case, they build the alkalinity up in the other case. The goal, of course, is to uh create enough calcium and enough alkalinity in the pool that you don't get plaster dust. Those are the two methods to that are barrel startup, and pretty much, in my opinion, there are four people with it have very low calcium and very low alkalinity water. If your water is quote normal, then you probably should stick with one of the traditional startups. And there are a couple of versions of it. Leslie's has a startup method. There is another startup method that is from the National Plasters Council, NPC startup. And then believe it or not, yours truly has a startup method that we call the Boring startup method.

SPEAKER_01: 5:51

I would have never guessed you had a startup method, Bob. You do everything, so yeah, you of course you have a startup. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00: 5:57

Of course I have a startup method. And believe it or not, the startup method is available to you for free at pctli.online. And then click on tech bulletins. And there is this a nine-page startup that takes you through step by step what to do. Advantage is that it requires that you make a test every day on the water, and then based on those tests, it gives you a calculation to add each of the ingredients into each step so that you know exactly what to do. And when you're done, it gives you a written record of how the pool was started up. I developed that with the guy that at the time was the education chairman for the National Plasters Council. His name was Greg Garrett, and unfortunately about a year and a half ago, he passed away. Um he and I worked on this startup method, and we uh we put borate in on day one. There's a couple of advantages to doing it, uh to adding the borate on day one. You can do the same startup without putting the borate in, um, and just skip that and go on with the rest of the startup, and it gives you a written record. Greg had asked me just before, not too long before he passed away, if I can make it into an app. And of course, yours truly uh has made five apps now. And so I made an app called the Bory Pool Startup. It's available for uh Apple and Android phones. It's$9.95,$9.99, and it's a one-time purchase. And it goes through the exact same steps that are in the printed version, except it stores everything on your phone. And then you can download it to your computer if you want, so that you have a digital record of exactly what you did day by day, what the test results were and everything. It's a great way to have a permanent record. In any case, a traditional startup, the biggest thing to think there are two things to me that are super important. And the first one is to make a test on the incoming water. And you need to know what's in the incoming water, whether or not you've got low calcium, low alkalinity, if it's normal, if you've got high copper or iron. And these are really important to know about because if you have a high copper and high iron, you need to make a decision about what to do about the metals. Because the amount of metal that is allowed in potable drinking water is in excess of what can cause a stain in a pool. So, and particularly with new plaster, new plaster is very subject to being stained. Um, we don't want to stain it. So if you have metals that together, copper and iron, total more than 0.4 parts per million total between the two of them. If it's more than that, then you need to add a sequestering agent, or you need to use a metal removing product. And there are two types of metal removing products. One is a pre-filter that you hook up to the hose and it removes all the metals. It doesn't remove everything, it just removes metals. In my opinion, the best way to deal with metal in the water is to get rid of it. You can use a pre-filter, and then the metal never gets in the pool. If, on the other hand, you get metal in the pool, you can use one of these devices that's either a bag or a little cage type thing that you put into the skimmer. These things take quite a while to remove the metal. And by quite a while, we're talking about maybe a week. And in in the meantime, those there's enough metal in the pool that it could cause some stains. You can use a sequestering agent, but please understand that a sequestering agent only surrounds the metal with a chemical that prevents the metal from attaching to anything that might cause a stain. The molecule, the chemical, is organic. And because it's organic, it it degrades, it biodegrades and breaks down. And sunlight and chlorine make it break down. So if you put a sequestering agent in the water, the metal is still in the pool. And this is really important that you understand that, because eventually the sequestering agent will decompose. And when it does, the metal is free to cause a stain. So it's better to get the metal out of the pool. And you can use a sequestering agent along with the removal device that fits in the skimmer. So it does work in conjunction with that. So you can use it. But many startup guys, they're in a hurry. They the the last guy that's there fills the pool up, it gets filled, they dump a pot a couple of bottles of sequestering agent in and think they're done. And that's just not not the way to do it. You need to measure what's in the water and treat it on the way on the way in, or at least know what's going to happen so that when the water gets full in the pool, you can start to deal with it. What we want to do in every startup method, day one, we want to get calcium to 150 parts per million. And this is really an important step because to balance the pool, to get a saturation index that is favorable or near zero, in order to calculate the saturation index, is based on calcium saturation. And water is not saturated until we get 150 parts per million of calcium. So we need to get that in there on day one. So when you test your incoming water, if the water is less than 150 parts per million of calcium, when the pool is full, as one of the first things you put in the pool is some calcium to get it up to 150.

SPEAKER_01: 13:11

Yeah, in California, we don't have that problem because our tap water is pretty high in calcium. But backing up a little bit, the the bag you were mentioning in the little container is the sea later product. And that's one of the things I was going to mention. And the next the next thing I had for you was the sequestering agents. That's one of the things that people are doing nowadays when they start at a pool, throwing in, you know, Jack's Magic or the Culator sequestering agent. And then, like you said, part two of that is knowing if there's metal, number one, knowing if there's metal ions in the pool water to test for that, and then using the simulator to pull it out of the water. And I've talked to them um in length about their product, and it could be anywhere from 30 days to 60 days, actually, to pull that metal out of the water. Um, it takes a long time, sometimes in some cases, depending on the flow. A lot of variable speed pumps don't move the water as much. So um that is a highly effective product. So you're saying just putting a sequestering agent in the pool when you start it up is not enough?

SPEAKER_00: 14:07

It's definitely not enough. It's definitely not enough. The EPA allows uh up to 1.1 parts per million of copper in drinking water. And I just finished telling you that anything above 0.4 parts per million causes a stain.

SPEAKER_01: 14:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 14:25

So it's not that all water has one part per million of copper in it, but it's allowed to have up to 1.1. And so you could be getting almost three times the amount of copper that can cause a stain in your pull right out of the hose.

SPEAKER_01: 14:41

That's exactly right. And you know, um, Lamotte has a new test kit also, the Color Q2X Pro 9, which has the copper and iron um test, the photometer test on there. And I recommend if you're doing a startup, at the minimum you should have that test kit, and maybe at the maximum you should have the spin touch because that gives you just about everything so quickly.

SPEAKER_00: 15:03

Yeah, it's a time-saving thing, but again, the spin touch is uh seven to eight hundred dollars, and then each of those disks is probably about two fifty or three bucks.

SPEAKER_01: 15:14

Yeah, so pretty expensive. But uh for a startup, I think it's worth it because you're charging for that anyway. So you're charging anywhere from$500 to$600 or$700 to start up. So it pays for your app, of course, for$10. And it'll definitely pay for the spin touch disk. So it's not a big issue if you do a lot of them.

SPEAKER_00: 15:32

If it were me, I think what I would do. There are three companies that I'm aware of that make a pre-filter. And the the company that makes the see you later, um, they make a single and a double filter that you can just connect up a hose to, and and the water on its way into the pool uh goes through that filter and it removes all of the metals, not just copper and iron, but but everything else, aluminum and manganese and all the way down the line, even lead. Um so it takes everything out of the water, and then you don't have to deal with it. And if I were doing a startup, if there was any metal at all coming in, I'd just be running the water through that filter period. And if I were a startup guy, I would just include the cost of that in my startup. And you know, you have to you don't have to buy the housing every time, you have to buy the filters that go in it. I would include the cost of a couple of those filters, uh filter cartridges, in every startup and just use them on every startup, and everything's going into the pool is perfect.

SPEAKER_01: 16:59

Yeah, it's a it's that's a great idea. And if you do a lot of startups, I highly recommend investing in that pre-filter by see you later. And again, you're gonna pass the trick the cost of it on to the customer anyway, so it shouldn't be a big deal using that. And one of the big issues with a startup with a plaster or quartz pool is the plaster desk. And that's why the hot startup is kind of popular in California because we have a lot of quartz surfaces that are built. And you can actually see the plaster desk just evaporating when when you you know four gallons of acid in there. And so it's the hot startup is popular, but you know, again, it may not be if you're a rookie, you should be doing the hot startup. It's kind of complicated. Yeah, um, but it does get rid of the dust. So the plaster dust is an issue, especially with a traditional startup. What are some of the ways that you can, besides a hot startup, that you can do to kind of minimize that plaster dust?

SPEAKER_00: 17:50

Well, of course, you know, hot startup refers to the fact that you're going to put a lot of acid in the pool. And some of the methods actually pull the pH down to about uh probably four or four point five in the pool. And the purpose of it, of course, is to dissolve part of the part of the surface that they left on top of the aggregate. So they want to get they want to get rid of that by dissolving it. But plaster dust also dissolves uh when the pH is a little bit low. So if we can if we can make the water a little corrosive, it will dissolve the plaster dust. And that's the idea, is that first of all, if there's a lot of calcium already in the water, we don't get so much calcium dust. But lowering the pH or adding some acid also dissolves some of the calcium. So uh keeps it as an ion. So uh it's probably uh better to do that. Keeping the pH on the low side uh prevents scale from forming and therefore present prevents the precipitation of calcium.

SPEAKER_01: 19:09

What would be the lowest pH you would recommend in a startup? Um, you know, the reduced plaster dust.

SPEAKER_00: 19:15

Well, I probably wouldn't get below much below seven. Uh seven, two maybe. Seven probably is the outside I would go. I wouldn't go below.

SPEAKER_01: 19:25

And there's a lot of precautions when you have a new plaster surface. For instance, I've seen builders not put a towel around the hose before in the bottom of the pool. Um, people vacuuming the pool too early. What are some of the cautions with a new plaster surface? Because I think plaster is still the number one surface type that people have installed in their backyards.

SPEAKER_00: 19:45

Well, you know, we use plaster. I've been building pools for, you know, a hundred years or whatever. And if there was a perfect surface, we'd probably all be using it. And the fact of the matter is, um, plaster is probably the best surface that we've come in, that we've been able to figure out. You know, there is aggregate and quartz, and maybe quartz is is perhaps the best uh right now, but not everybody can afford a quartz pool. But at any rate, uh we keep trying to make it better, but plaster seems to be a pretty good thing. But one of the some of the things you want to be very careful about doing is as the pool is filling, you want to make sure that that hose does not have any metal or anything on the end of it, or even any rubber that's got any sharp edges or anything, because the hose can quite frankly move around. As the hose is whipping around in the pool, it's making a streak in the plaster. It's the plaster is real uh susceptible to practically anything, at least for a few days till it starts to hydrate and and and cure. We don't want to get any wheels on it. We really uh we have a lot of people. The homeowner goes, Oh, I didn't want to leave the water on overnight. I was afraid it might overfill the pool. Well, yeah, it's practically it's gonna take you 24 to 48 hours to fill the pool. And even if it did overfill, it's not gonna overfill by that much. You know, you're not wasting water. So uh it's important because if you stop the fill and then turn it back on in eight hours or whatever, you're gonna have a line in the pool where you're stopped and it's permanent. It's not something that can be removed, it's there forever. So you cannot stop a pool once it starts to be filled up. You cannot do that. You can't use anything with wheels on it for at least I don't know, at least two weeks, maybe a month. Kind of depends, but um you can't use anything with wheels on it, so you can't put a robotic cleaner in there, you can't use a vacuum with wheels on it, you can't do any of that stuff for about a month. Anything that you do like that is gonna mess up the surface.

SPEAKER_01: 22:12

Yeah, and I've seen like dogs step into like a little beach entry and they leave their footprints there forever, and people too.

SPEAKER_00: 22:19

Yeah, and you know, they're anxious to get into it, and that's that's the worst part. When somebody spends$100,000 on a pool, it gets filled up, then somebody starts clearing the water and it looks so good they want to dive in and it's not ready yet. They gotta wait a few days and they don't want to do it.

SPEAKER_01: 22:39

So last thing is one one thing I get a lot of is customers, the builder will build the pool, and this is very common here in California and all across the country too. They'll build the pool, they'll just basically start the hose, fill it up, and then they'll walk away, and the customer just has the pool with filling with water. Yeah. And then a week later I get an email saying, hey, you know, the builder built the pool, they filled it, and now everything's all messed up because there was no startup. What can I do to correct it? And after the fact, is there anything you can do to fix plaster dust or problems with the surface, things like that, and without a proper startup?

SPEAKER_00: 23:13

You know, there's so many things that can go wrong if you don't do a startup and at least start paying attention to uh typical water conditions. But there's not too much you can do about reversing. And of course, you can, if you have still some plaster dust, you can add uh you can you can acidify the pool a little bit and and dissolve some of that stuff back in. Actually, plaster dust, if you can see it, it can be filtered. But many pools today are being built with a a sand filter, and a sand filter is not a very good filter for filtering out plaster dust. Cartridges are indeed for sure is, but um uh it may be that that you can use a um a clarifier, not the alum type that flocks, but the other type that's an organic polymer, uh, it can help to remove some of the plaster dust. You really want to get the pool balanced as quick as you can balance it and and get to the typical normal levels. I know that many stores use ranges for pH and alkalinity and so on. And some years ago I created a a method of targets that just has a single number. And it seems like people are using a single number helps them understand what's wrong with their water much easier because they're either on target or they're off, and it doesn't give them a broad range. And so I would rather use uh targets, but get the pool into the recommended ranges as quick as you can. And and if there's anything in there that's that's a potential stain causer, you have to do something with that. Even if it's after the fact, get a complete water test. Find out if you've got any metals in there, find out if you've got low calcium or high calcium and deal with that right away. So those are things you have to deal with right away. You can start, if it's been uh two weeks, you can probably start to do some vacuuming and uh maybe put a robotic cleaner in and start getting some of the stuff out of there. If there's any stains, you may want to use some Jack's Magic or some of the the uh the products from natural chemistry. Um they have some good stain removal products and get that those stains off of there as soon as you can. Also, the see you later, uh believe it or not, you get a stain because metals have reached their saturation point in the water. And if you remove some of the metal from the water, there's more room in the water to hold more metal. And so by removing some metal from the water, you can actually remove a stain from the wall because the stain can redissolve back into the water. There's there's now more room for that metal to redissolve into the water. But that only happens when you remove it with a thing like the CU later or filter, because using a sequestering agent doesn't remove it, so it doesn't change the saturation.

SPEAKER_01: 26:46

Yeah, well, one product that I like to use for plaster dust is the Easy Care Butec. I don't know if you've used that product or heard of it, but it it gets behind the scale and kind of lifts it off, and it seems to be really effective. I you know, in testing, they also make a product called ScaleTech, which is like the similar product to that. And I found that to be pretty effective in testing. So there are products out there you can probably find um aftermarket to kind of get the pool back, but definitely I mean the key is to have the startup done correctly in the beginning, right?

SPEAKER_00: 27:17

As a homeowner, if the builder walks away from the pool, I I would have to say, please go spend the money, call somebody that's a professional and get the pool started up correctly. You know, you spend$100,000 on it, it's like spending$100,000 on a car and then not putting any oil in it. You know, I mean, it just it's not not the right way to do it.

SPEAKER_01: 27:41

If you're looking for more episodes, you can go to my website, swinging for learning dot com, where I have over 1,800 podcast episodes. Just click on the podcast icon on the banner. That'll take you to a drop down menu of over 1800 podcasts. And if you're interested in the coaching program that I offer, you can learn more at PoolG Coaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have a good rest of your week. God bless.