Pool Service in Houston, TX

Which part of Houston this page covers

Several parts of the city have their own pages because their pools deal with different conditions. Memorial, Spring Branch and the Energy Corridor each get one, and so does Alief, out past the Beltway on the southwest side. North Houston has its own page as well.

Bellaire and West University Place look like part of Houston on a map, but they are separate cities, so they are covered separately. What is left here are the city neighborhoods in between: Meyerland, Braeswood Place, Westbury, Sharpstown and Tanglewood.

Ranch-era streets and the houses that replaced them

Most of the neighborhoods on this page took shape in the twenty years after World War II. Braes Heights, part of Braeswood Place, went up between 1947 and 1952 as ranch homes. Tanglewood opened in 1949 with one-story ranches on large lots. In 1955 George Meyer began turning 1,200 acres of rice fields into Meyerland, and Sharpstown was dedicated the same year as Houston's first master-planned, car-centered community. Westbury filled in through the 1950s and 1960s.

Many of those original ranches did not last. Since the 1980s Tanglewood has seen them replaced by two-story brick, stone and stucco houses, and a lot of Braes Heights ranches have given way to two-story Colonial, Tudor and stucco homes. The result is a block where one backyard pool may be decades old and the one next door built recently. We do not guess which one you have: we look at the surface, plumbing and equipment, explain what we see, and only then talk about repair or renovation.

Life along Brays Bayou

Brays Bayou starts at a detention basin south of Barker Reservoir and runs 31 miles east to Buffalo Bayou, cutting through Sharpstown, Meyerland and Braeswood Place along the way. Tropical Storm Allison flooded about 6,000 homes along it in 2001. In Meyerland, more than 400 homes took water in 2015, the neighborhood flooded again in April 2016, and Harvey in 2017 was worse still. Project Brays, a joint effort of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Harris County Flood Control District, covers 21 miles of channel work and four detention basins holding about 3.5 billion gallons. Willow Waterhole, roughly 290 acres of lakes, prairie and marsh in Westbury, also serves a flood-reduction purpose.

When a storm overwhelms the drainage, a pool takes on more than leaves. Muddy runoff can spill over the coping, a few inches of rain can thin the chemistry overnight, and a low equipment pad can end up under water. If the pad flooded, leave the breaker off until it is inspected, and resist draining the pool while the yard is saturated. Our storm clean-up visits begin with the equipment and work out from there.

What comes out of the tap, and what the ground does

Homes on the City of Houston Main System get mostly lake water, from Lake Conroe and Lake Houston on the San Jacinto and Lake Livingston on the Trinity, plus a little under 10 percent from wells deeper than 750 feet. Houston Public Works' 2025 report averaged 135.5 mg/L of hardness, but individual readings ran from 43.5 to 229, so we measure your pool's own calcium hardness instead of going by the citywide average. Chloramine is the disinfectant, which means a big top-off carries combined chlorine into the pool; reading free and total chlorine separately shows how much. A number of Houston-address homes are served by a MUD rather than the city, and those owners should check their own district's report.

Below most of this side of town lies the Beaumont Formation, clay with high shrink and swell potential: it expands when soaked and pulls back in drought. That cycle works on concrete decks, coping joints and buried return lines. A new crack at the coping, or a pool that loses water faster than the weather can account for, deserves a look.

Routes in from Sugar Land

From Sugar Land, the Southwest Freeway (I-69/US-59) heads northeast through Sharpstown on the 300-foot strip of land Frank Sharp donated for it. Meyerland, Westbury and Braeswood Place are reached from there or by US-90A (South Main) through Stafford. Tanglewood, up off San Felipe, is the farthest north of the five.

Southwest and west Houston neighborhoods