give you some things that you'll learn the hard way out there,
and I'll make it easy for you by giving you advice so you can
learn the easy way by not making these mistakes or not having the
knowledge of these certain things that you may not learn
while you're working until you run into one of these things
actually.
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The first one is when you have trichlor tablets at the pool
side or at a customer's house, and you're new to this account,
so this is like you just gotta you just got a bid and you took
over the account and there's a bucket of trichlor tablets
there.
I would urge you to open those with extreme caution.
And it's really easy to get careless when you're dealing
with chemicals because you kind of get into this autopilot mode
where you open up a bucket and it's like a natural thing to do.
But with an unknown bucket, you're not sure, number one, if
water has gotten into that bucket, and that's the biggest
danger with an existing trichlor bucket at a stop.
I did this and it was something that one of my members did this
as well that had even worse results.
But I was at a new pool and there was a bucket of trichlor
tablets there.
Wasn't really thinking at that moment, and I opened the bucket
to get some trichlor tablets out, and I just fell over
basically, started gagging and coughing.
You know, I couldn't catch my breath, my f I was just a total
mess.
Because there was water in there, and if you know anything
about the trichlor tablets, they have tyaneric acid, so they have
acid and they have chlorine in there, and this is very similar
to the chemical that they use in World War I, the mustard gas, to
gas the soldiers, and it's really overpowering and it's
very dangerous.
So the first rule of thumb is new account, bucket of tablets,
open with caution, you know, open the lid, step up as far
back as you can.
Having a mask, of course, is really important.
I carry a 3M mask with the filters, the pink filters on the
side.
Highly effective in minimizing this problem.
Now, even with an existing bucket of tablets, this can
happen to you as well.
You know, maybe it was compromised, you didn't know
about it, and you open it up and you can also get this.
So it's not just new clients, but maybe a client they have a
bucket of tablets that that you weren't careful and then put the
lid on correctly, or it could be a cheap bucket of tablets where
like the the Clorox tablets and this in the rectangular buckets,
they don't feel that well.
So I noticed that that's a problem as well.
So anything to be cautious around there.
The member I was talking about, he actually had lung damage,
went to the doctor, and it was a long process to recover because
he had gotten such a huge amount of it, uh such a strong
inhalation of it, that it really damaged his lungs, and it can be
very damaging.
So caution, caution when you're opening a bucket of tablets.
The same thing when you're opening up a new inline
chlorinator at a customer's house.
Took over a customer, opened up the chlorinator.
You don't know if that thing is working because it may not even
the tablets may not be dissolving in there properly.
Same kind of reaction in a smaller area, really
overpowering as well, just like the bucket of tablets, maybe not
quite as much, but very close to that.
So be very careful when you're opening up a new inline or
offline feeder at a new customer's home.
Also, yours could fail anytime on your route.
Like regular customers' feeder can fail anytime.
If that little check valve on the bottom gets clogged up, it
could be a problem as well.
So there's really no saying if an existing client that you
already have is going to have a failure at one point with the
trichlor tablets.
So be cautious when you open those.
And I think really caution is number one when you're dealing
with trichlor and any kind of isolated, self-contained area.
I've even had floaters where the customer closed off the pool
floater on me, and I don't know why they did that.
I think they had a party or something that I want chemicals
in there.
Didn't notice it that it was actually closed off, opened up
the top, and there was water and trichlor tablets in there.
And I did get a pretty good whiff of it as well, even in a
chlorine floater that they had closed off.
So again, it could be any of these things, and really it can
be really overpowering and very dangerous.
Transitioning a little bit here, and I'm gonna talk a little bit
about adding salt to a pool and some cautions here as well.
Now, when would you add salt to a pool?
Well, typically at the beginning of the season when the salt
water generator is firing up, I would consider adding some salt
to the pool April and May in my area.
It may be a little different in your area, but that's the main
time where the salt water generators start coming on and
you add salt.
Number one rule of thumb is to have a separate digital salinity
meter that you can actually get the reading of the pool with.
Now, you don't have to necessarily calibrate these
things exactly.
They pretty much stay calibrated in my opinion.
I've really not had to really calibrate the ones that I use
that much.
There's the Okatin one, which is a nice one.
I have a video on that.
It's white, it's called Okatin, I think that's the name of it.
You have the Lamotte one, which I currently use right now
because I like I have this long dingling thing on it.
It's really cool.
I just hold it at my level and drop it in the pool and it does
the reading.
So it's a nice feature of this one.
I've also used the Hawk products as well.
All really good salinity meters, in my opinion.
And the way I check to make sure they're working, I just simply
get some water out of the tap or hose, check it.
It should be near zero coming out of the hose.
There should be no salt in there.
And that's how I kind of know that it's calibrated enough to
get a reading within, you know, like 100 parts per million of
the salt.
Now, the reason why you want a separate digital meter is
because a lot of times you can't rely on the system giving you
the right salt reading.
It could be a dirty cell, could be the system is not reading the
salt correctly, any number of factors.
So you can't rely on you know what the easy touch says, the
salt level is or whatever, the salt system itself.
You can't rely on the salt cell either.
Now you can get salinity test strips, they're not that great.
I mean, they give you a reading, but you have to wait like five
minutes and a lot of user error with those.
I really don't like them, they're just not accurate.
Now, if you have the spin touch, it does do salinity on there for
you, so that's also a great bonus.
So I would say a digital salinity meter is something you
would want to have on your truck to start the salt pools off
correctly.
So I get a reading like April and May, and depending on the
reading, I'll get the salt and I'll add it to the pool.
In my area, adding maybe two bags or maybe three bags per
pool.
We don't we didn't get a huge amount of rain this year, and
some areas you're gonna add a lot more salt.
It doesn't really evaporate out of the pool, but it can be
diluted by rainwater and by refilling and backwashing the
pool, things like that.
Do dilute the salinity level slightly, not tremendously,
unless you get a ton of rain, but you're not gonna be adding a
ton of salt to these pools.
It's kind of a pain point for me.
Getting older, I don't like bringing these bags of salt back
there.
And you have having a dolly is definitely helpful to bring the
salt back, but you really can't order salt anymore and have it
delivered to your house.
Used to be you can go to Walmart.com and they would
actually drop off like five bags of salt, but they realize now
they're losing money delivering salt because it's pretty heavy.
If you're an old timer like me, you remember that the bags of
salt were actually 50 pounds, which made it even heavier.
So 40 pounds is decent, it's light.
You get the salt anywhere basically.
Your supplier would have the salt, of course.
They have the particular brand of whatever is gonna be your
supply house.
Lowe's Home Depot.
It's just that you have to add pool salt only to the pool.
The bag should say on there pool salt, it shouldn't say water
softener or anything else because the purity level of the
pool salt is important.
So if the customer buys some other salt, don't put it in the
pool because there's too much, too many impurities in there
which could actually stain the pool surface.
So just be aware of that.
That the pool salt is the purest salt that they manufacture for
pools.
You take out any metals, any kind of impurities in there that
could stain the pool.
And that's the main difference is the purity level of the salt
in the pool that you're gonna use.
So, you know, mortin, pool salt, aqua pool salt, whatever.
Just make sure you get that.
And then the biggest caution I can say is make sure you let the
customer know you added salt because you may tell the
customer, oh yeah, your pool needs salt.
I've done this before, my mistake.
I'll tell the customer your pool needs salt.
But I didn't finish my sentence or thought or instructions or
clarification.
I should have said, your pool needs salt, I'm gonna get three
bags and add it.
Didn't say that.
I said your pool needs salt, and I don't know why I didn't finish
that thought.
The customer actually went to Lowe's, bought some salt, put in
three bags of salt, two or three bags of salt, threw the bags
away in the trash.
Ironically, here's what happened.
I get there that next week, I add the salt to the pool.
I didn't check it, because why would I check it?
I didn't add any salt.
I go to throw the bags of salt away in his recycling bin, and
there are bags of salt.
And then of course, I'm not Sherlock Holmes, but I put two
and two together very rapidly and realize now the pool has too
much salt because the customer added salt and I added salt.
Here's another one you're gonna run into often is that the
customer's gonna think their pool has a leak.
Now, in the summertime during a heat wave, the pool will lose a
surprising amount of water.
Here, like when it's like a hundred all week long or for ten
days, you'll lose like an inch and a half, even up to two
inches of water because it does evaporate very rapidly in really
hot weather here.
So there is a natural amount of water that is lost in the
summertime.
The reason customers think they have a leak is because they're
adding water and they're like, hey, I just added water like
five days ago and I'm adding water again, and I didn't do
that last week.
Well, heat wave will definitely do that and cause you to add
more water to the pool.
Now, pools with autofills, they can't really tell if they have a
leak or not because it has water automatically.
And until something happens is the autofill a malfunction or
something or it doesn't work and you turn off the water line,
then you may notice a water leak.
But it just may be that the pool has evaporation, and since it
had an autofill, you just never the customer always will think
that they're adding too much water at that point.
So if you're adding if the customer is adding water and
then a few days later to add more water, that could be normal
in summertime.
The time when you have a leak is when you have an abnormal amount
of water being added to the pool.
You know, I would say that normally if an inch and a half
evaporates during that week, you have a pool in your route that's
losing four inches of water, there's a good potential that
that pool has a leak.
Another way to tell is if things that shouldn't drop start
dropping.
Like for instance, I mentioned the salt doesn't evaporate out
of the pool, but if you notice that you're adding more salt to
the pool because the salinity level is dropping, that could be
an indicator that the water is leaking out.
Cyaneric acid, if it's at 100 and you test it as at 50, good
chance there may be a leak.
If chlorine's not holding in the pool and you've done everything,
phosphate removers, tested everything, and it's like
zeroing out every week, you're getting algae in the pool, and
the water level seems lower than normal, that could potentially
be a water leak as well.
The way I kind of gauge it is if the customer is losing a lot
more water than other customers in the area.
So if I get to a pool like I mentioned, and normally it's an
inch and a half of water is lost that week.
If it's losing four inches of water, then there's a potential
leak in that pool for sure.
Now, how do you check for the leak?
Well, you can refer them to a leak detector, but before I do
that, I like doing the bucket test first before they spend a
boatload of money on a leak detector, which is what's going
to happen.
The initial visit is gonna be you know anywhere from$500 to
$800 for them to come out there and check for the leak.
So the first thing you want to do is make sure that you do an
inexpensive way to check for a leak.
And this is a bucket test.
So get an empty bucket, a five-gallon bucket, like a
tablet bucket is fine.
You can get a smaller one, like a 25-pound bucket that you have
that you had a calhypo in, that's fine as well.
Fill so what you want to do is fill the pool up to where it
needs to be on a regular basis.
So about halfway on the tile line was and halfway through the
skimmers where I would fill it.
On the first step of the pool, you want to that's where you
want to put the bucket.
So fill the bucket up to the level of the pool water.
So what you want to do is get some electrical tape, put one
piece of electrical tape on the outside of the bucket so that
the pool water is touching it that's in the pool.
On the inside of the bucket, put a rock, you know, a fairly sized
river rock in there, it's good.
Something that's gonna hold the bucket in place, maybe like a
you know, one pound rock or one and a half pound rock, something
like that, in there, or brick.
People have used bricks too, like a brick in there, like a
just not a huge brick, but one piece of brick, whatever is
gonna hold the bucket because it's gonna move if you don't
have something in there.
Then you want to fill the inside of the bucket up with water to
where you have the electrical tape with the pool water.
So the outside pool water and the inside bucket water are
gonna match perfectly.
Put some electrical tape on the inside of the bucket as well.
Now with normal evaporation during the week, and have the
customer not fill the pool by the way, that's gonna throw off
the whole test.
Turn the autofill off, no water added to the pool.
Wait about three or four days to come back and check it.
So do the test on a Tuesday, come back on a Friday.
So the water inside the bucket should evaporate at the same
rate as the water in the pool.
So when you look at the electrical tape on the inside of
the bucket, on the outside of the bucket, the water should
have dropped maybe a quarter of an inch on the outside and a
quarter of an inch on the inside.
That will indicate that there is no leak in the pool.
But if the bucket, the water in the bucket is higher than the
pool, let's say the pool dropped an inch, inside the bucket, only
dropped a quarter of an inch.
That's a really good indicator that the pool is losing water
because the water should evaporate at the same rate in
the bucket and in the pool, with slight variation, but nothing
dramatic like half an inch or an inch of water.
Once you verify this and you suspect there's a leak, then the
customer can call leak detector out, and initially it's gonna be
expensive.
There's many leak detection companies, big ones out there.
Here there's American leak detection.
I kind of like the smaller mom and pop leak detectors.
They seem to be less pricey, and they seem to know a lot more uh
techniques and troubleshooting tips, you know, to find a leak.
You really can't isolate the leak without a leak detector.
You know, you can't just assume that it's a skimmer if there's a
crack in there.
You can't assume that it's a return jet.
Leak detector will let you know where the water is coming from
or where it's leaking from.
They'll do a full test.
But the bucket test is the first test I do to make sure that
there's a possible leak.
And I've had this fail.
Like when I do a bucket test and they cannot do leak detection,
they're like, oh, there's no leak here.
But somehow the bucket test was not a good indicator.
But usually it is a really good indicator of a leak in the pool.
If the water in the bucket is higher than the pool water, that
means that the water is going somewhere and it's not actually
evaporating, it's it's being lost somewhere.
But there's other indicators like I mentioned besides the
bucket test prior to that, adding a lot more water, losing
a lot more water than the other pools in the area is a good
indicator of a leak.
And chances are there is an actual leak in that pool.
If you're adding much more water, then they're adding much
more water than they've previously added to the pool,
and it's not normal evaporation.
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Thanks for listening to this podcast.
Hope you're a week.
God bless.