Figured I'd share my story here in case it is useful to others.
We purchased a home back in 2012 with an in old in ground pool. It was built in the early 1950s with a concrete bottom and painted steel walls and coping. The equipment was nearly as old but still operational and thanks to TFP I figured out how to maintain the water chemistry.
Unfortunately, the steel walls and coping were starting to rust through the many layers of paint. I posted about this originally over here: Looking for options
At first we tried adding more paint and this lasted about half a season. We considered a liner but half the people we talked to said it won't work well with our pool. So, we looked for another option and landed on AquaBright. Supposedly with the right application it would not allow rust to come through and would last ~10 years. I thought that sounded good for the price.
We found a pool company who agreed it was a good idea and had some experience with AquaBright (But really only on new construction). They came out, blasted the whole pool down to its original material, grinded away the sharp rusty bits of the coping and applied rust inhibitor everywhere. Then they applied AquaBright, fixed our light, poured a new concrete deck and put everything back together. It looked great at first but by next season we were already seeing cracks in the finish and signs of rust again.
The company came out and tried to fix up just the areas with issues and re-apply AquaBright. Long story short this didn't work and they ended up blasting the entire AquaBright finish off and re-applying, thinking something went wrong with the application.
This failed in the same way as the first time around. We lived with it for a bit while we decided what to do next, which ended up being demoing the existing pool down to the concrete floor, pouring new concrete walls, stone coping and plaster / wet edge primera finish. Moved and replaced all the equipment along the way since the old stuff was in our basement which was mostly inconvenient and also stressful thinking about the possibility of the pool emptying into our basement. So basically we built a new pool in the exact same shape as the old one but with nearly new everything.
The good news is that in the end we really like our new old pool and there's absolutely no way it can rust again because all the metal stuff went to the dump. Our family loves it and for better or worse it retains some of its old "charm" because due to other limitations I won't go into here we had to stick with the existing footprint. We selected a dark colored finish and are dealing with some whitening / scale but it's not too bad.
The bad news is we wasted a lot of time and quite frankly got mixed messages from the AquaBright manufacturer. I don't recommend this product if you are trying to rehab an old pool with rust issues and it seems like it might suffer other issues with anything less than a 100% perfect application process and conditions.
We purchased a home back in 2012 with an in old in ground pool. It was built in the early 1950s with a concrete bottom and painted steel walls and coping. The equipment was nearly as old but still operational and thanks to TFP I figured out how to maintain the water chemistry.
Unfortunately, the steel walls and coping were starting to rust through the many layers of paint. I posted about this originally over here: Looking for options
At first we tried adding more paint and this lasted about half a season. We considered a liner but half the people we talked to said it won't work well with our pool. So, we looked for another option and landed on AquaBright. Supposedly with the right application it would not allow rust to come through and would last ~10 years. I thought that sounded good for the price.
We found a pool company who agreed it was a good idea and had some experience with AquaBright (But really only on new construction). They came out, blasted the whole pool down to its original material, grinded away the sharp rusty bits of the coping and applied rust inhibitor everywhere. Then they applied AquaBright, fixed our light, poured a new concrete deck and put everything back together. It looked great at first but by next season we were already seeing cracks in the finish and signs of rust again.
The company came out and tried to fix up just the areas with issues and re-apply AquaBright. Long story short this didn't work and they ended up blasting the entire AquaBright finish off and re-applying, thinking something went wrong with the application.
This failed in the same way as the first time around. We lived with it for a bit while we decided what to do next, which ended up being demoing the existing pool down to the concrete floor, pouring new concrete walls, stone coping and plaster / wet edge primera finish. Moved and replaced all the equipment along the way since the old stuff was in our basement which was mostly inconvenient and also stressful thinking about the possibility of the pool emptying into our basement. So basically we built a new pool in the exact same shape as the old one but with nearly new everything.
The good news is that in the end we really like our new old pool and there's absolutely no way it can rust again because all the metal stuff went to the dump. Our family loves it and for better or worse it retains some of its old "charm" because due to other limitations I won't go into here we had to stick with the existing footprint. We selected a dark colored finish and are dealing with some whitening / scale but it's not too bad.
The bad news is we wasted a lot of time and quite frankly got mixed messages from the AquaBright manufacturer. I don't recommend this product if you are trying to rehab an old pool with rust issues and it seems like it might suffer other issues with anything less than a 100% perfect application process and conditions.
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