Questions you should ask your pool builder! Shopping for a new pool can be stressful and often leave you with more questions than answers. Here are the 7 questions most often asked and the answers. 

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1) How much do your pools cost? 

Advertised price vs site specific price: advertised price doesn't include taxes, permits or machines needed to get in your backyard. A normal dig would include a full size dump truck and a full size track hoe but sometimes it's tough to fit full size machines in smaller spaces. So, in some cases, we need to bring in small machines and the price will increase incrementally with the size of that machine just because it is going to take longer to dip the same size hole.

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2) What are your timelines? We average about 4.5 months from a signed contract to when you will be swimming. It varies because different cities take different lengths of time to approve a permit. Additionally, as the scope of your project increases, (add a grill, pergola, maybe some landscape) so will your timeline. 

 

3) Do you use sub contractors? Yes. We use experts when required and use outside help in order to help meet the customer's expectations for their time frame. This helps us both, keep the cost down for you and to maintain the schedule. 

 

4) What about your warranties? What are they, what do they cover and what's all that lingo in there? 

- Equipment Warranties: These are provided by the equipment manufacturer. Think Pentar, Hayward, Jandy...they are going to be providing a warranty to extend to our customers. Don't let a pool company charge you for a warranty they are getting for free.

- Labor Warranties: The actual physical work being done

- Material Warranties: You might have a material warranty but it doesn't include a labor warranty. Watch out for those things when you read proposals. You want to make sure it is both labor and materials.

- Limited Lifetime Warranties: Be sure to read the fine print. Find out what's limited and what's lifetime. At graves, we provide a lifetime warranty on the shell of the pool. That is against any leaking, cracking or rust migration. We can go into the details at your consultation.

Everything else covered in our 5 year warranty is both material and labor. It includes the equipment by the equipment manufacturer.

 

5) What are my sanitation options? We offer 2 popular sanitation options:

- Liquid Chlorine: Add it to the water in small doses and the sun will deplete it each day over time. You will also need to add cyanuric acid (stabilizer) to help the chlorine stay in the water longer.

- Salt water systems: They are not chlorine free. Salt water pools use a device called a Salt Water Chlorine Generator. It is taking the sodium in the water and breaking it out into pure sodium and hydrochloric acid.

 

6) What makes Graves different? 

In a lot of ways it's the things that we do that you can't see like the size of the steel we use in the bond beam. The bond beam is the rim of the pool. We also incorporate engineering specific to the soils here in Texas.  

The time we take with you in person at your initial consultation. Yes, you can get an idea of a backyard from a Google satellite view and draw something up and in a lot of ways that would be easier. Until we have actually been on your property, there are too many variables that you can't see in a 2D image and we want to make sure that when we give you a price, it's a final price and doesn't need to be adjusted later.

 

7) Why Graves? Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that we are never satisfied. We are never satisfied with who we were yesterday or who we are today. We always want to be better tomorrow. We want to be enhancing your life all the way from design to the beginning of construction and through the very last cannonball.