One feature that sets a fiberglass composite pool apart from either a vinyl liner pool or a gunite/plaster pool is the degree of quality of control.
While some individual parts of those two types of pools are manufactured under quality controlled conditions, your final pool is only as good as the installation.
In other words, both of those pools are construction projects in your backyard whereas a fiberglass composite pool is a product built to be installed in your back yard.
When delivered to your home, your Trilogy Pool arrives complete and ready to install.
All that's left to been done is to excavate the hole, set the pool into place, plumb, and pour the deck.
The finish, structure, and shape of your pool was "cast in stone" (or should we say glass) before it arrived at your home.
In this way, you can be assured that every Trilogy Pool is built to the same stringent specification.
Are all fiberglass composite pools built this way?
Unfortunately, the answer is no, or better said, simply uncertain.
A look at the Trilogy Quality Control Program is all it takes to see why we stand in a class by ourselves.
The only way to ensure quality is to measure it.
That is exactly what we do.
In fact, each pool is subjected to over 60 individual quality measurements before it leaves manufacturing.
Not only do we measure it, we write it down.
This is key as our pools are made by people and people sometimes make mistakes.
Any company that states their processes are perfect and therefore bypass writing down data on each step is simply not being honest with their customer. Documenting each step of your pool’s
construction is the only way to be assured that it meets the Trilogy Standard.
Because we stand behind each and every Trilogy pool built, our company hasn't been divided into so many shell corporations that you can’t figure out what plant, or legal corporate entity, actually made your pool.
The quality report contains a lot of information that we can use to determine what caused any failure, should you have one.
We know the name of the staff members, the shop conditions, equipment calibrations, batch and lot numbers of raw material, and the amount of each material that was used to construct your pool.
It may be an overkill, but as an industry first, we even retain a piece of your pool in your quality report.
We send the warranty paperwork directly to your home along with a prepaid return envelope.
This warranty process is a small price to pay to have substantiated data in case of raw material failure.
We don't claim to have invented the fiberglass composite pool manufacturing process, or any of the techniques used in it.
In fact, no fiberglass composites company the pool industry did-most of it came from the millions in R&D funds spent by the marine industry.
Let's take a look at how we have adapted some of the lessons learned from the boat industry into our process.
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The Cosmetic Finish
We have two choices in surface finish for your pool: gelcoat and Ultra Granicoat®.
Both provide excellent weatherability in the pool environment.
The boating industry needed a gelcoat that would stand up to some of the harshish sun and UV rays imaginable.
After all, boats are generally sold in extremely sunny areas.
Can you imagine someone dropping several hundred thousand (or even millions) on a large (gelcoat covered) yacht and having to resurface it in 5-10 years?
You can imagine this would not go over too well, even with people with that kind of disposable cash.
As it turns out, the companies that manufacture those kinds of luxury yachts learned that with the use of the latest NPG-ISO gel coats and UV inhibitors these boats retained their beautiful showroom luster year after year - even when they were too large to be docked out of the weather.
You can bet if this was a serious problem, there would be a lot of unhappy yacht owners lined up and many gel coat staff researchers working overtime.
What every yacht owner knows...
Like those expensive yachts, a Trilogy Pool is made with the same NPG-ISO gel coats.
In fact, there are different levels of performance in the NPG-ISO gel coat category and we use one of the highest performers in the industry, CCP® gel coats.
We might be able to get by with a less expensive material, but we choose not to compromise.
Our comparison with yachts doesn't stop with the cosmetic surface, the similarities are much deeper.
In our second layer, we use vinyl ester resin.
Beauty is skin deep
The boating industry learned long ago that by using a thin layer (commonly referred to as "skin") of vinyl ester, osmotic blistering (small pimples that appear in the gel coat after a few years) can be eliminated.
The best skins use 100% vinyl ester resin, but in recent years there are several vinyl ester blends that have cropped onto the market.
These are blends of expensive vinyl ester with a less expensive resin.
They are used in less critical applications (areas above the water line, boats that are trailered, and certain tub and shower applications).
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Blended vinyl esters should NEVER be used in pools as a skin coat.
So be sure that whatever fiberglass composite pool you choose, the manufacturer doesn't use a vinyl ester blend as a skin.
Trilogy uses a bisphenol-A epoxy vinyl ester resin from AOC, Vipel® F010.
Again, not the cheapest material, but worth the extra cost.
The core of our construction
Finally we use a marine grade general purpose resin for the bulk lamination in our pools along with a sandwich core construction technique adapted from both the aerospace and marine industries. For the engineers
in the audience, you can check here for more details. The sandwich core construction allows the laminate (a fancy word for layers of glass) to be built thicker and stronger. Every time the thickness
of the laminate is doubled, the strength of the pool is increased by 8-fold..
You will see the vertical and horizontal cores in Trilogy Pools that our engineers determined the requirement of this extra strength.
The key is to use the woven roving cloth both over and under the core material.
If there is simply chopped glass over the core, you are not getting the strength.
We use Baltek® as the sandwich core material.
This material was developed for the marine industry and is treated to resist moisture.
As you can see, the quality built into every Trilogy Pool is not an accident.
We have adapted the best building techniques from the marine and composites industries.
Our staff is continuously researching new and innovative technologies. You can be assured that if there is a better way to build it, we will make it happen.
One thing is for certain: A Trilogy Pool will be the last swimming pool you will ever purchase...Unless you move, in which case, we will gladly welcome you as a return customer!
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