Hi, welcome to TFP! No need to ask to be treated kindly here. You won't find a finer group of people to help you with your new pool.
I just completed new pebble start up. I second the motion to do what your PB tells you (for liability reasons). That said, if he leads you to, or leaves you with, something that looks like this:
http://mmgtx.com/docs/STARTUP-by-NPC.pdf
then you are on the right track. Further, once you're PB gives you the OK to take care of the water yourself, come to TFP. Trust them explicitly, and DO EXACTLY WHAT TFP TELLS YOU TO DO. Don't try to interpolate, or mix together their advice with your PB's advice with a pool store's advice. Uh, uh. Just follow TFP. These guys know their stuff and don't tire of providing you with the advice you're going to need.
For example, I found TFP because my pebble installer and since-fired-pool-maintenance guy dumped the start up into my lap on day two of my brand new pebble, with nothing but that NPC Startup card. They vanished over a three-day weekend. Poof. With no pool maintenance experience, I was left to find an online resource and/or to use my local pool store. I did a little of each, while trying to decipher on my own the NPC instructions. I didn't even have the test kit yet. So I was using my local pool store for testing. They sold me liquid CYA. And I had skimmed over the TFP method of adding CYA (using crystals with a sock), but decided to ignore it. At the time I was still reeling and relying on whatever advice I could find, and kludging that together with my own ideas of what made sense. Long story longer, I didn't add the liquid CYA correctly and ended up burning a stain into my brand new pebble! If I had followed TFP instructions, I'd have used the dry CYA in a sock and been fine. DO EXACTLY WHAT TFP TELLS YOU TO DO.
Learn how to take care of the water yourself. No one local to you will care as much about your pool as you will. No one will test the water as carefully. Or add the chem's as carefully. It's not hard at all, and will save you a ton of dough. More importantly, balancing your water yourself will ensure that it gets done right, and will greatly extend the life of your pool over letting someone else do it. It can be intimidating at first, but after just a few days you're going to have it down. I had to replace my plaster after
just six years because the pool maintenance company I had been using wasn't balancing the water correctly. If you think I'm exaggerating about the importance of maintaining correct water balance yourself, I'm not, at all. Ever since I replaced the plaster they destroyed, I've been taking care of the water myself, and I'll never go back to having anyone else touch it.
Lastly, and this is overkill for sure, but I did it and I'm glad I did: I happened to have a water meter laying around at the time I was filling my pool. The kind of meter you'd see in the street, that the water company uses to measure your house's water usage. This is what I used:
Master Meter Flexible Axis Water Meter available at Flows.com!
I had purchased it for another project. But as I had it in my possession when I was filling my pool, I ran down to Lowes and grabbed a couple of adaptors in order to connect it to my fill hose. This allowed me to determine, almost to the gallon,
exactly how much water was in my pool. As you learn and use TFP methods, you'll need to know your water volume in order to calculate how much chems to add. There are simpler, cheaper ways to determine this than with a meter (using the dimensions of your pool), but none as accurate (not even close). Calculating chems for my pool is super accurate, because I'm starting with knowing exactly how much water is in it.
So if you happen to want to pursue this idea, be aware of two important details:
1.
You'll want to fill your pool as fast as possible. This covers the pebble as fast as possible, but also minimizes the possibility of creating any rings around the pebble as the water level rises. Typically, you'll be asked to use as many hoses as possible. If I was doing it again, I'd still use the meter, but I'd grab a few more adaptors from Lowes and run two or even three hoses into the meter. Hose bibs are typically fed with 1/2" lines. The meter I recommend above is 3/4". You get about twice as much water through 3/4" pipe than you do with 1/2", so feeding the meter with two or three hoses will work well, and should fill your pool plenty fast enough.
2.
Be careful how the water exits the meter. You don't want it to splash onto or run down the side of the new pebble. That, too, can create a permanent stain. Run a large hose after the meter to under the water line, so no splashes and no stain trails. I used my vacuum's hose.
If you're on a budget, this'll seem like overkill, but knowing exactly how much water is in my pool would be worth $100 to me. (That's less than the cost of one month of pool maintenance guy!) You'll know exactly how much chlorine to add. How much CYA to add. Etc. Etc.
If I still had the meter, I'd have hooked it up to my auto fill supply line to keep track of how much water was being added to the pool each day, and over time (because of splash out and evaporation). Numbers I wish I had for calculating other things I'd like to keep track of for my pool.
Ooh, one more thing. No matter how you fill your pool, make sure the plasterers cap off the return and vacuum ports. They should know to do this, but some will skimp on this step, or allow them to leak a little. When I bought my house and inherited the pool, the least attractive thing about it was a nasty line that ran from the vacuum port down to the deep end. I always assumed it was a crack, or a patched crack. Turns out it was neither. No, it was a stain that developed during the original fill, because there was just enough of a drip of water leeching out of the vacuum port. It tracked down the side when they were filling, then turned down into the deep end, following the path of least resistance. That's all it took. The stain became permanent, and then later attracted a calcium deposit. So it was quite noticeable, and very ugly. Be sure the plumbing is dry/empty, and be sure they seal up those ports correctly.
Good luck. And don't hesitate to come back to TFP to ask your questions.
