New plaster start-up in Los Angeles

It is less forgiving, and the difference shows in the first month. Coloured pool plaster carries pigment through the whole layer, so anything that etches or clouds the surface — low pH, a brush missed for two days, calcium falling out of solution — leaves a mark that reads as a patch rather than as general wear. The start-up is the same procedure done more carefully: brushed daily, tested daily, and nothing dropped into the water undissolved.

A plaster patch holds where the damage is local and structural — a spall by a return, a chipped step edge, a hole left by a removed fitting. It will not disappear. New plaster against cured plaster is always a visible repair, because the old surface has had years of sun and chemistry and the patch has had none. Worth doing to stop water reaching the shell and to get another few seasons; not worth doing to make the pool look new.

Fourteen days. The pool looks ready long before that, which is exactly why the rule gets broken. Swimming in the first two weeks stirs settled plaster dust across a soft surface and knocks the chemistry off at the point in the cure when it matters most.

After 28 days, once the cure is complete. Until then the pool runs as a chlorine pool and the salt system stays off. The cell is checked at the changeover; if it needs attention, that is salt system work rather than start-up work.

Because it sheds calcium every day of that first week. Brushing lifts the loose material so the filter removes it. Skip a day and it settles and bonds, and what was dust becomes texture that brushing will no longer lift.

In principle, yes: a reliable test kit, a daily hour for a week, the right brush and vacuum head, and the willingness to keep going through days eight to twenty-eight when the pool already looks finished. Most people manage week one and stop.

$595 up to 25,000 gallons, $695 from 25,000 to 40,000, and from $795 above that, with an attached spa adding $75. That is the whole twenty-eight day programme, not a price per visit. Weekly maintenance customers take 20% off.

Twenty-eight days, and the curve is steep at the front: most of the calcium the surface will ever shed comes off in the first week, which is why that week is brushed daily and tested daily. The pool looks finished around day ten and is still curing behind that. Fourteen days before anyone swims, twenty-eight before salt goes in or a wheeled cleaner goes back on the floor.

Start the fill the day the plasterer leaves and do not stop it. A hose run into the deep end with a cloth over the end keeps it from cutting the soft surface, and a fill paused halfway leaves a permanent ring at the waterline. After that the pump runs continuously until the plaster dust is out of the water, usually three to seven days, the surface is brushed daily and twice a day while the shedding is heaviest, and nobody gets in. The heater stays off until the water is clear.

Not in the first couple of days, and never with granular shock tipped in dry. Chlorine waits roughly 48 hours, goes in liquid and pre-diluted, and tablets do not sit in a floater parked against a wall. Anything undissolved that comes to rest on soft plaster burns a mark that stays for the life of the finish. The same rule covers acid: pre-diluted and poured into a running return, never straight down the wall.