Water Features Multiply the Chemistry
What a Spillway Does to Bee Cave Pool Water
Nearly every pool in Bee Cave fills from the West Travis County PUA: treated Lake Travis surface water, moderately hard, in Austin's 70 to 126 ppm range. Easy water, on paper. The pool design undoes it. A raised spa spilling for hours, a bubbler on the ledge, a sheer descent running for a party: each adds surface area and turbulence, and turbulence is evaporation. Central Texas pulls well over 50 inches a year off a flat pool surface. Add a spillway and the water leaves faster while the calcium stays behind, so a feature pool here routinely tests 300 to 500 ppm calcium after two or three summers, ahead of the plain rectangle next door.
Aeration does one more thing: it blows off carbon dioxide, which drives pH up every hour the feature runs. So we treat pH as a rate, not a number to correct once a week. On a spillway pool we hold alkalinity toward the low end of 80 to 120 ppm so pH has less to climb on, dose acid for the week ahead rather than for the reading in front of us, and calculate the saturation index every visit so rising calcium and rising pH can't team up into scale on the glass tile. Salt cells raise pH too, and many Bee Cave pools have one.
Then there is what falls in. Spanish Oaks, Falconhead, and Lake Pointe sit under mature live oak, which drops catkins in March and April and leaves through the fall, and everything near the Galleria at 71 and 620 gets a steady dusting from construction that never seems to pause. Both end up in the cartridge filter. Many pools we take on here are under five years old, and new does not mean right: filters sized for a smaller pool, plumbing that fights the pump, automation nobody finished programming. The first month on a new Bee Cave pool is usually a punch list.
