Hey guys this is Eric with Stanton Pool and Valley Pool Plaster.

Transform your oasis: Pool remodel solutions for a luxurious, modern escape. Dive into elegance and elevate your aquatic lifestyle. Today I’m here at a pool and I kind of wanted to walk you through what I look for when I come to a pool remodel. Kind of how my inspection works, where I get ideas from, what I’m looking for to point things out for the customer and maybe give them some good ideas.

So I’m here at a pool remodel in Northridge today and I just kind of wanted to show you. This is what we have going on in this backyard.

Usually, when I first walk into a backyard, I first look at the big picture. So first of all, you know how the pool remodel looks as a whole you know and I can see immediately that this this plaster is old.

I mean it’s it’s really heavily modeled We have a plaster chipping off and uh delaminating in some spots and even you know we’re exposing the gunite right here. So this plaster has got to be my guess at least 30 years old minimum.

Then what I’m also noticing is the color of the pool is extremely green. I mean you can see it’s it’s like a turquoise, the plaster.

I don’t know what color this was originally but probably white is my guess and it’s a bright green right now. So that tells me that most likely this pool remodel has copper plumbing throughout.

I’m also checking the water line to see if there are any tiles that are popping off would show me that maybe there’s a crack in the bond beam because I’m walking around and I’m also thinking about just from a design element how does the backyard look you know.

Do they have a lot of greenery a lot of trees? What color is the house? Do they get a lot of sun here you know? What color might work best for this pool remodel with pebbles just so I can give a little bit of a recommendation to the homeowner.  If they’re wondering what color I would recommend.

I’m checking  if everything’s up to code. So for example, this drain, there’s only one drain here and code now is to have two drains instead of one. So I’m going to recommend that the customer split the drain to Safety Code.

Same thing in the spa. There’s only one drain needs to have two for each pump so that needs to be split as well.

I’m also looking to see if the lights have to go. That’s by far the most important thing to do is to make sure that the junction box for the light is up to code and it is away from the pool and it is above the water line.

A lot of times in old pools you’ll see a junction box right here that is not the code it’s extremely dangerous and we have to legally change that out.

So we do that a couple of other things to notice. Looks like they had a diving board here at one point. You can see these markings here and that’s gone.

You know as I walk around the pool remodel you know I walk on the coping a lot of times to see if there’s any hollow spots just in case anything needs to be reset.

I’m also looking at the color of the coping and the style of the coping because with this style of coping I always recommend getting a grout color that blends in with this style of coping because the grout’s going to get on at the bottom of the coping and you don’t want it to be really obvious. ]

You know you want it to blend in the thing that I look for is cracks I don’t know if you can see here if I zoom in you can see a patch right there it’s um A and B putty that someone covered a leak you know so there’s a crack right there that’s leaking really small. That’s the only crack that I can see from the surface so the pool looks overall okay.

We can address that small crack that’s not a problem. Then I can tell that they’re going to need a new Deco seal. You can see the echo seals all coming out of the expansion joint now. It’s separated now.

Another sign by the way that they have copper plumbing is that the skimmer is a concrete skimmer.

You can see how it’s got a rectangular lid and if I open this up well now we’re going to see a concrete skimmer not a not a modern PVC skimmer. It’s got an upside-down basket in it.

And if you also look at the return lines instead of them having eyeballs they’re just holes in the wall that’s it. And I can even feel uh feel that it’s copper inside and it’s not smooth PVC.

Let’s see what else we have going on here. I can see over here that they have what looks like an autofill line or a dedicated fill line right here above the tile. So that if they were to turn on a valve somewhere, water would shoot into the pool.

Now if that were PVC I’d be able to give them a reasonable price on installing an autofill because we can just tap tie in the autofill to to new PVC or even old PVC. But old copper has just deteriorated too much to where we’re not going to connect an autofill to that.

What else now… when we get into the equipment area one of the things I’m looking at is immediately to see if they have copper plumbing which again they do. You can see on the return side they have copper plumbing right here.

If you watched one of my other videos the main telltale signs if someone has copper plumbing is the suction side and although it looks like PVC is coming up out of the ground. This is a compression fitting and if we unbury it we’re actually going to have copper plumbing right there. They’ve got copper plumbing throughout.

The other thing to look at is the electrical. You can see that there’s a rock between the pump and the electrical. This is loose, their conduit is corroded. I guarantee if we dug down that galvanized conduit is corroded all the way to the electrical box there.

So if we start opening up here and messing with this um you know for example if we’re going to do a re-plum we’re guarantee we’re going to expose corroded electrical and I’m going to recommend the customer that we replace that electrical line.

Another thing to look at is since they’re under the ladwp territory they have a single speed pump here which are highly inefficient. Ledwp is offering a thousand dollar rebate to upgrade to the variable speed pumps.

They’re amazing pumps they’re estimated to say 500 to a thousand dollars a year on electricity that. Combined with the fact that you get a thousand dollar rebate virtually makes it a free pump so I always include that in my my recommendation.

These filters this is an old 2000 series Pentair filter whenever you have a metal filter like this guaranteed it’s at least 15 years old. Probably closer to 20 to 25 years old and we already have it capped here which tells me that that’s leaking so this filter has seen better days. I’ll include in it.

I’ll include a price for a new Pentair filter in my estimate and the customer also wanted me to look at their gas line. So it’s about 110 feet from this gas line all the way to in the corner of the house where the gas meter is.

This really isn’t big enough to do a full-size gas heater, but their pool’s not that big so they have two options. We can install a smaller heater which will just take a little bit longer for the pool to heat up. Or quite a big expense, we can run a bigger gas line and give them a full-size heater. That’s really up to them and I’ll discuss with them the pros and cons of each.

I think if there’s anything else here I think that about covers it. If you want me to do a free inspection of your pool you know if you’re planning on remodeling it. We do not charge for estimates to re-plaster resurface new tile new coping fully equipment sets. Happy to help you out.

You can even do virtual estimates if you send me pictures of your pool and your equipment, I can actually get pretty close on the pricing for you just that way before I even come out. So feel free to reach out to me again as always, I’m Eric with Stanton pools and Valley Pool Plaster.