Planning to re-coat a small salt-water concrete pool with poly or
epoxy resin and cloth but getting conflicting information from across the web. Please help figure out the best approach.
Here are some of the general assumptions going into this (not sure if they are accurate though):
- Polyester resin is not waterproof by itself and must be covered by gel-coat.
- Gel-coat will not directly adhere to concrete because the concrete always has moisture. (this is the reason for using poly or epoxy under the gel coat. otherwise, pool is structurally solid).
- there are two types of gel-coats: regular (softer but more flexible) and tooling (stronger but more brittle) and pools should have the latter.
- Also, there are poly and epoxy based gel-coats but not sure what is the difference.
- Epoxy may or may not take gel-coat and many argue that Epoxy should not be covered with gel-coat at all.
- Not sure if the epoxy resin with cloth is waterproof by itself or it needs some kind of top layer.
- The pool has a saltwater system.
So, what is my best approach to create a fully waterproof layer after applying waterproof primer to the concrete?
- Coat with poly resin/cloth and then apply gel-coat? or
- Coat with epoxy resin/cloth and then coat with something? or
- something else?
I plan to do this myself but
commercial ready-to-use solutions for pools costs tens of thousands.
thank you in advance