Professional Pool Service
Green, mustard, or black algae in your pool? Nevergreen Pools clears blooms and stops regrowth in Stockton, CA, with treatment matched to your surface.
Algae does not show up all at once. It starts as a dull haze on the plaster, a slick spot on a step, or a patch of color in the corner the return jets never quite reach. By the time the water turns green, the bloom has already been feeding for days.
Stockton conditions push that timeline fast. Triple digit afternoons hold water temperatures in the mid eighties for weeks at a stretch, and chlorine burns off faster than most homeowners expect. Evening wind drops dust, cottonwood fluff, and other debris on the surface every night, and all of it is chlorine demand by morning.
Pools here fall into two groups that do not respond to the same treatment. Older tract pools have plaster that has been resurfaced once, maybe twice, and original galvanized plumbing that has narrowed with decades of scale. Newer pools are pebble finished, ten or fifteen years old, running variable speed equipment and automation. Same water, same weather, two completely different jobs.
Treating both the same way is how a bloom comes back two weeks later. The chemistry has to match the surface, the equipment, and the circulation you actually have, not the one on the label.
An older tract pool with tired plaster is a surface problem first. Plaster that has lost its finish is porous, and every pit and etched spot is somewhere algae can anchor while a brush head skips right over the top of it. Add narrowed galvanized lines and a single speed pump that was sized decades ago, and circulation falls off in the deep end corners and behind the steps. Those are the exact places a bloom starts. On these pools we spend real time brushing before a single chemical goes in the water, because shock that never reaches the algae cell wall does nothing but raise a chlorine reading.
A newer pebble pool has the opposite issue. The surface is hard and tight and algae has a harder time gripping it, but the variable speed pump is often programmed to run long hours at low speed to keep the power bill down. Low speed moves water gently, and gentle water does not scrub walls or push sanitizer into the shaded end of the pool. We get regular calls about a newer pool that looks well kept and still greens up in July. Nine times out of ten the schedule needs a higher speed block through the hottest part of the day, not a stronger chemical.
Water chemistry pulls on both of them. Much of Stockton runs on hard groundwater, sometimes blended with surface water, and high calcium paired with high pH is a familiar combination. Scale on plaster gives algae texture to hold onto. Scale inside a heater or a salt cell cuts flow, which cuts turnover. High pH also strips the killing power out of the chlorine already in the pool, which is why a shock treatment can look like it failed when the real problem was a pH number nobody checked first.
Before we treat anything we run a full test: free and combined chlorine, pH, total alkalinity, calcium hardness, cyanuric acid, and phosphates. Cyanuric acid matters more than most homeowners realize. Stabilizer builds up from tablet feeding and never leaves on its own, and once it climbs past roughly 80 ppm the chlorine you are paying for stops working at normal levels. On pools that high, the fix is draining and refilling part of the water, not adding more shock.
Green algae is the most common and the most forgiving. We correct pH and alkalinity first, brush the entire interior including steps, benches, and behind ladders, then shock hard enough to hold a heavy free chlorine residual overnight with the filter running continuously. Most green blooms clear in a day or two.
Mustard algae, the yellow brown dust that settles on shaded walls and wipes away only to return the next morning, is chlorine tolerant. It takes a higher shock level, an algaecide matched to the pool surface, and disinfection of everything that touched the water: brushes, poles, nets, floats, even swimsuits. Skip the equipment and you reintroduce it the same week.
Black algae is the one that takes patience. It roots into plaster under a protective layer that chemicals bounce off of, so each spot has to be physically broken open, a stainless brush on plaster or a stiff nylon brush on pebble, treated directly, and then brushed again on the next visit and the one after that. Any surviving root regrows from the same place. On an older Stockton pool with soft plaster, a black algae outbreak usually means the surface itself is due for attention, not just another treatment.
All three end the same way. Phosphates, the food source, get tested and knocked down, because heavy fall leaf drop and a winter of organics load a pool while nobody is watching it. Then the filter gets cleaned. A cartridge or grid packed with dead algae pushes debris right back into the pool and keeps chlorine demand high for weeks. On a sand filter that means a full backwash and a chemical rinse; on cartridges it means pulling and deep cleaning the elements, and replacing them if the pleats are matted or the ends are separating. We also check filter pressure against its clean starting point, because a filter running eight to ten psi high is not turning the pool over no matter how long the pump runs.
Clearing the water is the easy half. Holding it clear through a Stockton summer comes down to a handful of habits:
Nevergreen Pools handles algae removal in Stockton in partnership with Vintage Pool Service, a longtime Central Valley company working out of East Yosemite Avenue in Manteca. Crews already run routes through Stockton, Lodi, Manteca, and Tracy, so they know how these pools behave in August and what the same pools look like coming out of winter.
Related services in Stockton: Green Pool Clean-Up in Stockton and Chemical Treatment in Stockton.
