Bringing Green Sugar Land Pools Back to Blue

Etched plaster in Sugar Creek and early First Colony

Pools from Sugar Creek, begun in 1968, and from First Colony's early phases after 1976 may still carry an older finish if they have never been replastered. Plaster that has etched over decades is full of small pits, and that texture is where mustard algae keeps returning to the same shaded wall and where black algae roots in. Expect more brushing, a longer stretch at high chlorine, and follow-up treatment on those spots.

Newer finishes in Telfair and Imperial have had less time to roughen, so blooms there are more often the free-floating kind that dies quickly once chlorine reaches the right level. If an older pool clears but the same patches keep returning on the surface, the finish is the real problem, and pool renovations may be a better use of money than another round of treatment.

Salt pools that turn green on hard water

Some Sugar Land salt pools go green with the generator still switched on. When top-offs come from the Main System's hardest wells, scale builds on the cell plates, chlorine output falls, and the cell's salt reading drifts low. Seeing that low reading, owners often add salt, which does nothing for a scaled cell and can push the salt level above the chlorinator's range.

So a green salt pool cleanup includes pulling and inspecting the cell, cleaning it if it is scaled, and testing stabilizer and phosphates, which one major manufacturer lists among the things to check when chlorine will not rise. The bloom is knocked down with added chlorine, and the generator takes back over once the cell is clean and the water is balanced. Salt system service covers the cell itself.

Refilling from your own city water system

When stabilizer has built up so far that chlorine cannot keep up, some of the water needs replacing, and in Sugar Land the replacement water depends on your address. The 2025 city water quality report puts total hardness at about 104 ppm on both the Main System and River Park, and 53.8 ppm on New Territory. Greatwood averaged about 103 ppm in 2024.

All of those sit below the 200 to 400 ppm calcium range that salt chlorinator manuals commonly call for, and fresh water arrives with no stabilizer at all. A partial drain therefore lowers calcium, alkalinity and stabilizer along with the algae problem, and New Territory's softer supply lowers them most. Once the pool is clear and holding chlorine, we rebalance for the water you actually refilled with, not a citywide assumption.

When a Brazos storm, not a missed week, turned it

A pool that turned after a major storm is a different job from one that drifted green over a hot month. Sugar Land sits along the Brazos, and during Harvey in 2017 parts of the city were under mandatory evacuation while levee districts pumped rainfall out from behind their levees. A storm on that scale can leave silt, leaves and runoff in the pool and standing water on the equipment pad.

Power to a pad that sat in water stays off until someone has checked it. Storm cleanup clears the debris and the pad first, and our guide to a green pool after a storm covers what to do while you wait. Once the pool is clear, weekly pool service keeps it from sliding back during the weeks the filter is still catching fine dead algae.

Before a Sugar Land cleanup starts

• Which city water system serves the house, so any refill is planned for
• Stabilizer level, to decide whether a partial drain is needed at all
• Plaster condition, since etched older finishes hold mustard and black algae
• Salt cell condition on salt pools, before trusting its salt reading
• Any sign that storm water reached the equipment pad