Pool Replastering in Kyle, Texas

Very hard water, by the city's own measure

Kyle's 2025 water report gives a total hardness of 275 to 295 mg/L, measured as calcium carbonate. On the city's own scale, anything over 180 mg/L is very hard; 121 to 180 is hard, 61 to 120 moderately hard, and 60 or less soft. The city adds that hardness varies with how much groundwater is in the system, including by time of year.

The city's water comes from Edwards Aquifer wells and a Barton Springs Aquifer well. It also buys surface water from the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority and the City of San Marcos, and groundwater from the Alliance Regional Water Authority. The report covers only customers who buy their water from the City of Kyle, and other providers serve parts of the city.

What scale does to plaster

Plaster is among the softer pool finishes. The National Plasterers Council warns that it reacts more to water chemistry than newer products do. Too much calcium hardness, alkalinity or pH brings scaling and staining, and the council counts mineral scale among the three common reasons a finish loses its color. The other two are calcium salts working out of the new cement and the cement compounds themselves dissolving.

The council's worry runs both ways. It recommends fill water above 200 ppm calcium hardness, because soft water damages a new cement finish. Kyle's figure is total hardness, which counts magnesium as well as calcium, so it isn't the same number. A test of your own tap water shows where it actually sits.

Houston Black clay and the Balcones line

Kyle sits where the Balcones Escarpment meets the blackland prairie, with farming to the east and ranching to the west. The ground changes with it.

Across Kyle, the most widely mapped soil in U.S. Department of Agriculture data is Houston Black clay. Real gravelly loam comes next, then the Austin-Castephen complex, a rubbly Rumple-Comfort association and Heiden clay. No bedrock is recorded in Houston Black's profile. Its layer from 15 to 178 cm is 54 percent clay. Between dry and moist, a clod of it changes length by 12 percent, a shrink-swell measure called linear extensibility. Real gravelly loam, by contrast, sits on weakly coherent bedrock at a typical 36 cm.

In the 1984 Comal and Hays county soil survey, shrink-swell above 6 percent counts as high and above 9 percent as very high. Where it runs moderate to very high, the survey says, shrinking and swelling can damage buildings, roads and other structures. Wet clay matters to plaster as well. When rain, sprinklers or a leaking pipe keep the outside of a shell wet, water presses back against it. The plastering council warns that this back pressure can pull a bond coat, or the finish itself, away from the shell.

Mary Kyle Hartson's town

Kyle was established on July 24, 1880, when David E. Moore and Fergus Kyle deeded 200 acres for a townsite to the International-Great Northern Railroad. It incorporated in 1928. In 1937 Fergus Kyle's daughter, Mary Kyle Hartson, was elected mayor by a write-in vote. In the early 1940s Kyle was noted as the only Texas town with an all-woman government.

A park carries her name today. The city counts 10 developed and 16 undeveloped parks, 749 acres in all, plus 11 miles of trails, from Bunton Creek and Gregg-Clarke parks to Steeplechase and Waterleaf. The planned Plum Creek Trail is meant to run from Uhland on the east to the Blanco River on the west.