Twenty-Year-Old Pools, Lake Water, Sloped Pads
What a Steiner Ranch Pool Is Actually Up Against
Steiner Ranch fills from Travis County WCID 17: treated Lake Travis surface water at roughly 70 to 130 ppm total hardness. That is the easy part. Central Texas evaporates well over 50 inches a year off a pool and leaves every bit of calcium behind. A salt cell nudges pH up every hour it runs; a spa spillover aerates the water and pushes it higher. Three summers in, a pool that started near 100 ppm calcium sits at 300 to 500 with a pH that wants to live above 7.8: the recipe for scale on cell plates, heater exchangers, and tile.
So the program here is built around the saturation index, not a chlorine reading. We hold pH at 7.4 to 7.6 and alkalinity at 80 to 120 ppm, and we track calcium month over month so a partial drain gets scheduled for a cool week instead of discovered as a crust on the cell. Cyanuric acid sits at 60 to 80 ppm on salt pools because lake-facing lots take full afternoon sun and unstabilized chlorine is gone in hours. Salt stays between 2,700 and 3,400 ppm, because a cell running low throws an error and quietly stops making chlorine.
Then, the terrain. Steiner Ranch is roughly 4,500 acres of canyon and hillside between Lake Austin and Lake Travis, so pools sit on terraces with the equipment pad a level below or above, on plumbing runs long enough to make a pump slow to prime. Live oaks and Ashe juniper hang over most backyards: cedar pollen from December into February, catkins in March and April, and lake wind pushing all of it toward the water. Deer treat the deck as a trail. All of it is manageable with hands on the pool every week. None of it is manageable from an app.
