Just an idiot here.

[Justahomeowner]

Little bit of a back story here to help clear up questions that might come up.

I started digging a pond with my excavator. I was looking into ways to maintain the water inside the pond since I did not have a continuous creek or stream to feed it. I got a quote from a concrete pump buddy of mine to gunite or shot Crete the pool. I went with that option. I installed a 12x12 inch grid system of rebar at his recommendation. I found out that I had to also plaster the pond in order to maintain the water level (didn’t know concrete let water seep through). So I plastered the pool with some help from friends and one person that had done plastering before. We used a 50/50 white plaster, pool sand mixture, which is what I was told by some full time pool installers. This was at the end of last September. I filled the pond and left it all winter.

Start of this summer I drained the pond to clean and refill and noticed that the plaster was popping in spots and didn’t bond to the concrete. So I started chipping out the spots as far as I could tell where the bond had failed, and figured I would just patch it. After a day or so I went back to the same spot and noticed that the failed bonding area had spread, so I chipped it out some more. A day later went back and it had spread again.

I ended up using plaster weld (blue) and coated the area of the patches a little bit bigger that the spot itself. I then went back and filled in the spots with plaster. I thought spraying an epoxy pool paint after etching the surface of the pool would help eliminate these spots continuing or coming up but I found a new spot today where it had popped.

My question is, what would cause this issue? I did not use a bonder on the fist coat of plaster to the bare concrete should I have? Is there anything I can do to stop it from continuing?

Also, after spending this much money so far I am wondering if there is any chance that I could add pool equipment to this pond and make into a decent pool? I was told that it is about 50,000 gallons, and has a deep end of about 10’ deep. I don’t have any conduit returns or supply’s currently going into the pool but I could core drill some if needed, or just surface mount pipe if needed too.

How bad am I screwed here? Thanks.

Af