We DO NOT recommend Patten Pools or his new owner, Bill England. We hired them to replaster and fix…read moreour pool shortly after we bought our house in Grogan's Mill. I forwarded Bill the pool inspection report, and he emailed us a proposal stating what needed to be done, the job duration (7-10 days), and the cost ($6,348). We paid a 1/3 deposit. We told him we had never owned a pool before, and that we were not living in the house yet and would move to The Woodlands (from the East Coast) mid- to end-June.
Patten's work was not good. Besides, despite our repeated requests, Bill was not always good at communicating and did not always show up when he said he would (once we paid someone to be at our property to give Bill access to the property, but Bill did not show up or call; after one hour of waiting we called and emailed Bill and he said he had a last minute emergency - but did not have the courtesy to call!).
May and June rains delayed Bill's work. He called to ask if it was ok to start the work a couple of weeks later. We said ok (since we would move in mid-June). What he did not say was that the rains could ruin our pool and that we should get someone to take care of it until he could get to it.
On June 11, we found a deep-green pool, and a pump with a huge leak problem at our new home. I called and emailed Paten; they sent someone who told us we would have to sandblast the flagstone. We got stuck paying an extra $1,500 to clean the now green-gunky flagstone - the same flagstone that two and a half weeks before had looked just fine, and that the rains and Patten's inattention and carelessness had contributed to turn green. (Bill could deny any wrongdoing by pointing out that it was OUR pool and our responsibility, and that we had only hired him to replaster it and repair it, and not to clean it, right? I ask, as a business owner, is it not appropriate to alert your customers of the risk that the rains may pose to their pool and the surrounding flagstone? Particularly to customers who have told you they have never owned a pool before and who are still on the East Coast?)
A few days later, on June 24, his crew replastered our pool. They left a mess in our backyard. Two days later, I showed Bill the mess; he said someone would come clean it up. It took him a week and two reminders to clean it up - and not entirely. To this day, we have remains of plaster in our backyard.
"The pump needs to run continuously for 72 hours", Bill wrote in his email instructions to us after he started the pool. But the pump suddenly stopped working the day after. We called him to tell him the pool pump had shut off, even though we had not come near it. He showed up at our house a few hours later, turned the pump on again, and explained that he had left the timer on because he was not wearing his prescription glasses the day before, and could not see well. His unapologetic tone was insulting.
Patten's proposal included initial daily brushing of the pool, after replastering. Most pool experts recommend brushing once or twice a day for the first 14 days (we did not know this until a couple of weeks ago). We do not recall Patten's staff coming daily to brush our newly plastered pool; they may have come every other day or every three days, and only for a few days.
Patten's proposal also included changing the GFCI, pool light bulbs and gaskets. That, in response to a problem identified in the pool inspection report we had given Bill. To this date, water condensation around the lights cause the GFCI to trip shortly after we turn them on. Patten did not address this problem - or perhaps the gaskets were improperly placed, who knows. We will have to pay another contractor to solve this problem.
Bill's email instructions warned us "no swimming for one week". However, 3 weeks and $7,937.03 later, we still could not swim in our pool; and we were being charged extra for work that we understood was part of what we paid for. Also, Bill's email instructed us to "not put the cleaner in the pool for 2 weeks"; most pool experts (we later learned) warn against using wheeled devices within 28 days after replastering a pool because doing so sooner could cause wheel tracks to show on the pool finish. Someone from Patten put our Polaris cleaner in our pool on July 13, exactly 19 days from the date they started replastering our pool.
On July 14, I went to Bill's office and left him a $6,026.03 check and a note saying we were less than satisfied with how the work was handled and the lack of communication. The next day I emailed him asking to not put salt in our pool (he said he would do so by July 17th, contradicting his own email instructions that said "no salt for 4 weeks"!). All we got was an email from him asking if we were switching to chlorine. No words from him since.
One star b/c we texted him on 4 of July asking him what to do about the mosquito larvae and tadpoles breeding in our waterfall and he promptly replied (Clorox!).
