Rule Your Pool is a podcast by Orenda Technologies. This show was created for pool owners, operators, and service pros who want the best water quality possible. If you want to know what's really going on with your swimming pool chemistry, this might be the podcast for you. Each week, we'll cover a new topic related to swimming pools, water chemistry, or indoor air quality. With our help, you'll be able to rule your pool without over-treating it with chemicals and wasting money. Connect with Orenda Technologies Website: https://www.orendatech.com Blog: https://blog.orendatech.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/OrendaTechnologies Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/orendatech/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/orendatechnologies/
02:30 - Bad Habit #3: Not taking care of your test kit.
11:23 - Bad Habit #2: Chasing pH
16:57 - Bad Habit #1: Acid Abuse
RYP_Ep9
Eric [00:00:00] Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Rule Your Pool podcast. I am your host, Eric Knight with Orenda. And today we have a new guest host. This is Joe Swaezey, also with Orenda. Jo, thank you for joining me.
Joe [00:00:10] Absolutely. Hey, guys.
Eric [00:00:12] This is episode nine of the podcast. And in the last series, we covered the LSI. In the first series, we covered P.H. and Alkalinity. We're going to get more into the practical information now. [00:00:23]One of our most popular topics in the last few years has been habit's, specifically the bad habits that are costing you money. And most people don't even know that it's wasting money to do these things. So we've got a two part series here. This episode, we're going to cover the first three of the six Bad Habits [18.4s] and next episode, Episode 10, where to cover the top three bad habits. And what's cool about these is these are habits that cost you pretty much nothing to change, but they're costing you a lot of money to continue. So without further ado, this is Episode nine of The Rule Your Pool podcast. Let's get into it with the six bad habits that are costing you money.
INTRO [00:01:09] Welcome to the podcast by Orenda. That explains naans simplifies pool chemistry so that anybody, regardless of experience, can understand it. I'm your host, Eric Knight, bringing clarity to these subjects so that you can bring clarity to your water. If you're ready to talk, let's go.
Eric [00:01:31] In the amount of time that you and I have been in this industry, we've been to a lot of distribution centers. We've been to a lot of backyard pools with problems, especially with Orenda. You know, nobody really invites Orenda to their good pools. So we've seen a lot of problems in a higher concentration than good things happening. Would you agree with that?
Joe [00:01:51] I would definitely agree. And that was the same. My background is obviously in water testing. I spent more than 20 years. And like you, a lot of the inquiries that I got were about problems. When you have issues with your swimming pool, that's when you try to find an expert and you look for somebody who knows about water testing. So a lot of a lot of experience with those problem pools.
Eric [00:02:11] Yeah. And what I've noticed is a lot of the problems are self-inflicted.
Joe [00:02:15] No doubt about it.
Eric [00:02:16] Yeah, it's not because people are bad at their jobs. It's honestly, it's. And I say the word ignorance with as positive connotations possible. People just don't know. These habits cost more money than you think. And they cost not just money. I mean, time is money, right? So it's time. It's effort. It's trips back to the pool. Trips to distribution. It's gas time. It's money. It's traffic. It's stress. All that stuff. And they cost almost nothing or nothing to fix to remedy that. It's not dollars. We're talking about changing something so slightly. You can do it in 10 seconds. And you probably already have all the equipment. The more pools that your company services. So if you're a homeowner listening to this, we're talking about one pool. But if you're a service company with 50 or more pools. Think about how fast this math adds up. I mean, it does make a huge difference in just following these habits can save a pool company with 100 pools, well over a thousand dollars in one summer just by not having to buy that much stuff at the store. So bad habit number six, not measuring chemicals. How many people have you seen, Joe, that eyeball chemicals? No. Yeah, it's about that much. Have you ever seen that in a backyard?
Joe [00:03:29] I've seen it plenty of times.
Eric [00:03:31] [00:03:31]How accurately do you think you can pour half a gallon without measuring it? [4.6s]
Joe [00:03:37] I would guess you would be off by 10 to 15 percent almost every time?
Eric [00:03:41] Yeah, probably. I mean, we don't even know because it depends. Maybe it's a heavy pour. Like when you go to the bar and you ask for one drink and you think, well, that bartender likes me because it's a heavy pour. That's fine sometimes if you're off by a little bit with liquid chlorine. Right. I mean, if you're off by 10 to 15 percent of liquid chlorine, that's not a huge deal. Number one, cause liquid chlorine has a high P-H. It's not going to etch your surface. But the other thing is it's going to get used up. I mean, it's going to do its job and is not going to stay in your pool forever now. Here's the kicker, though. What happens if you're off by 10 to 15 percent of muriatic acid? That's a big deal, isn't it?
Joe [00:04:20] It's pretty significant.
Eric [00:04:22] Right. And yeah, it's not significant dollars upfront, but the consequences and we'll get to that in the next episode. The consequences of not measuring chemicals are kind of twofold. It's not just that you're spending more money on chemicals because you're using too many or you're under treating and you have other issues. It's more like you're overcorrecting your chemistry if you use too much and then you have rebound consequences, especially with things like P.H. and Alkalinity. It's not so big of a deal with calcium hardness because it stays put. But what happens if you put too much CYA in your pool? Too much acid? Too much soda ash? There's a lot of consequences that you may think you're putting the right amount of chemical in based on. Well, I've been doing this for 15 years. I've always done it this way. That doesn't make it right. If you have to start your position by saying how long you've been doing this. Stop right there and think about what you're about to say. Because if it's based on how long you been doing it, that doesn't mean it's right. It just means I've been doing it this long. And you're comfortable with it. What if there is a better way? Let's let's not be closed minded on this thing. It's not beneath anybody to measure chemicals. I don't care if you've been doing this 30 years and you do only multi-million dollar properties. The best of the best are the best at the basics. I learned that in competitive swimming. Joe, you were in testing for many, many years, over 20 years. How important is it to measure your sample correctly?
Joe [00:05:49] That's very important. Depends on the test, too. Like you said, not everything is exact, but a lot of times if you don't get that measurement correct, you're going to have problems with the tests. It's just going to be off enough that the treatment is then difficult to pinpoint.
Eric [00:06:05] What I wanted to kind of close on habit number six is don't think that your habit or your experience is going to be smarter than the measuring cup. It's not. Circumstances change. Tap water changed 10 years ago. Tap water was very different than it is now. They're treating water differently. The goalposts have moved. We have to take that into account. Which brings us to habit number five. You need to know the volume of your pool. I've been in a lot of backyards. And Joe, I'm sure you have been to and I'll ask how big is the pool? And either the homeowner will tell me a number or the service guy will say, oh, it's about X. Oh, you know, it's about 20000 gallons or it's about 30000 gallons or whatever. And I look at it. No way. Have you ever been to those pools where they're so off on their calculation that you just know, like, there's no way that's accurate?
Joe [00:06:55] Oh, absolutely. And a lot of times the homeowner has a different number in their mind than the service guy has in their mind. And you hear two different numbers and you go, wait a minute, that's a pretty big gap. So, yeah, who's right here?
Eric [00:07:07] Homeowners almost always think their pool is bigger than it is. Homeowners tend to round up, but the people who really round up are the real estate agents. So if you're a second owner of that pool, like you didn't have it built, you just bought the house. Oh, you better believe that the size of that pool needs to be verified, because if you bought that house and you've been told, oh, yeah, you got a thirty thousand yard pool and you've been treating it as a thirty thousand gallon pool, you might wanna do some math and figure out just how accurate that number is. I was in a backyard and the homeowner came out, which was which was cool and and the service guy said, yeah, this pool's twenty six thousand gallons. The homeowner said, no, it's not. It's 30. That's a pretty big difference, as Joe said. That is a pretty big difference where we end up doing the math. It's actually 22. That's over 25 percent more chemical. If you're listening to the 30000 gallon number. So what good is measuring your acid and chlorine with a plastic measuring cup? If you don't know the volume of your pool. So in your experience, Joe, have you seen pools that are way bigger than people thought? Or is it usually the other way around, like what I've seen?
Joe [00:08:22] Oh, I've seen way bigger, too. Just because a lot of these bigger pools, you have so much water in the plumbing system, that isn't taken into consideration. And so you can have you can have, you know, a pretty big add just for the amount of water that's in especially a large, you know, a community sized pool or something like that, that you're not taking that into consideration. So I have seen it on that side. But you're right. Way more common to see it estimated bigger. And it's actually smaller than it is.
Eric [00:08:50] Yeah. So good point. OK, commercial pools, especially, you know, residential pools, two inch plumbing is is the standard. It might be a little smaller, maybe a little bigger, but it's not going to be anything like commercial a commercial pool is going to be pumping 500 to 1000, sometimes more than a thousand gallons per minute. Those are eight inch, 10 inch, 12 inch lines. They're huge. And when you do construction projects of that scale. Yeah, Joe's right. There's a lot of water in those pipes. Fortunately, pool builders and designers that build those kind of pools, they've got the software that takes that into account. So when they know the gallonage of that pool, it usually takes that stuff into account, or at least it should. And if it's a gutter pool, it's going to have a surge tank. Don't forget about that. That surge tank is a couple thousand gallons on a big commercial pool that matters. So keep that in mind. You need to know the volume of your pool. The most accurate way you're going to get that is probably through asking the builder, the original builder of the pool, ask for their software. What did the software say when we designed this crazy shaped pool? How big was it supposed to be?
Joe [00:09:57] You know, a great practice that I've seen lately and I've seen this in a number of builders situations, is that the builder leaves a plaque somewhere in the equipment room or near the equipment that says how big the pool is. How many gallons are there? So if you're a builder listening to this, do everyone a favor and just leave that somewhere around there so that you know all the time how big the pool is. So the second generation, third generation service guy, they can all walk, walk right over there and see how big it is.
Eric [00:10:23] I was actually just talking to a builder yesterday on the phone about putting a sticker or something on the inside of a control room or a control panel so it doesn't get rained on. And it's good branding. Hey, you're the builder. You're the original builder. Leave your phone number. Leave the job name. Leave the date it was constructed or the date it was started up. Put all that information in because you don't know who's going to own that pool. And if you have a service business and you - I don't know - eventually lose service for some reason. Maybe you had a bad tech, maybe it's a new homeowner. If you ever want to get that service back. They already have your name. It's on the equipment and there's the gallon edge on there. So that adds a lot of value to a homeowner and a service tech who may be new to that pool or just doesn't remember it every week. They got to type in that volume into the Orenda app. Shameless plug. And it's helpful to have that information there. So once you know the volume of your pool. Write it down. Put it at the equipment so you can always find it. It makes a big difference, especially over time and on a route that has a lot. If you don't know it, we have a pool volume estimater in the Orenda app. It's not perfect. It's an estimate. But if you know the dimensions, you can get pretty darn close. And then I think finally I've heard that there's a titration method. You can take some amount of water and there's a dilution factor and you titrate using the alkalinity drop kit and eventually you can actually get pretty close within several hundred gallons of exactly how big that pool is. It just takes time. If you want to put on your lab coat. Feel free to do that. It's probably not practical for most people, but if you're a homeowner and you have a crazy shaped pool and you really want to know, it might be worth your time to do that. It's inexpensive. It just takes some time. So I strongly recommend, you know, the exact volume of your pool or as close as you can get anything you want to add to that before moving on?
Joe [00:12:06] You know, I think that's great. And I don't have any experience with that titration method, but I've heard that as well.
Eric [00:12:12] So those are the first two of our six bad habits. Measure your chemicals and measure the volume of your pool and document it. It's really that simple. I mean, if you if you have the volume in the pool written down and you use it in the app or whatever dosing software you use, your math is going to get that much better. And when you actually add the chemicals and you use measuring cups, your accuracy is going to get better. Your corrections are going to be better. Your risk of overcorrection is going to go down.
Eric [00:12:42] Let's move on to the third and final one for this episode. And this is more of a paradigm shift. Of course, we've been teaching it at Orenda, you know, for four years now. But it is still surprisingly not adopted very widely. Now it's becoming adopted. But homeowners are just hearing about it in 2020, which is crazy because we've been teaching this since twenty seventeen. But again, the trade has learned about it faster than the homeowners. So if you're a homeowner listening to this, this next one is very important. Do not ignore water temperature in the last several episodes of this podcast. We really went in depth on what the LSI is. If you don't know and you're just hearing this episode for the first time, go back and listen to the previous episodes. Do not ignore the LSI. In particular, do not ignore water temperature. Because water temperature, unless you're maybe in San Diego, is pretty much guaranteed to fluctuate quite a bit throughout a season. Like I said, the Orenda app... use the LSI calculator, drop the temperature down and you'll be alarmed at what that does to your water chemistry. Now, Joe, before you came to Orenda, were you aware of the impact the temperature made on water chemistry?
Joe [00:13:57] I really wasn't aware. I hadn't really done enough research to know that some of the problems that I had seen were caused simply by the shift in water temperature. And as soon as I started getting educated about that, a lot of things came into clarity because that water temperature is so important. And being in the Midwest myself, I'm in Indiana. I see it every winter. It's going to be freezing. The water temperature is going to be 30 to 35 degrees. And that's a huge difference right now in the backyard. You go out here and the water temperature is 88 degrees. So it's been a really hot summer. It's going to be even more drastic. So, you know that that range chemistry that you were talking about is kind of where I always paid the closest attention. And if everything looked good in the range and I had a problem, I just assumed that it was something other than me. It's not my fault. I had nothing to do with it. Just a fluke. Well, yeah. You measure the LSI. You probably figure that out pretty quickly.
Eric [00:14:52] And what that tells us is range chemistry is not the end all. Be all. We cannot ignore the LSI. We cannot ignore temperature because temperature is the moving baseline of your LSI strategy. We have to take it into account. And that's really what this habit is all about. So how do we correct it? It's very simple. Have a thermometer. Use it. They're less than 10 bucks. Keep it with your test kit. If you're a homeowner, tie it onto the ladder in your pool or put it in your skimmer until it's needed. I'm not talking about a fancy digital one. You could do that if you want. I prefer the analog ones that have no batteries, thermometers are proven technology. Just know the temperature. Put it in the Orenda app and boom, you've done your part. Now it's factored in. That's it. That's literally all you have to do is factor in temperature when you're calculating the LSI and you will defeat this habit. And like I said, it costs you almost nothing. If you need to buy the thermometer. Call it 10 bucks at the worst. So that is it for this episode. Joe, is there anything you want to add in?
Joe [00:15:56] No. I think, you know, getting back to the old temperature thing, once you know, the temperature of the water, it's it's pretty consistent from pool to pool if you're an outdoor service guy. So you can get a little closer that way. But do you know the temperature? It can it can be pretty significant differences, particularly if you're here in the Midwest like I am. You have a pretty cold evening and it can drop five, 10 degrees. No problem.
Eric [00:16:20] And that actually made me think of one other thing. A lot of pools are pool and spa combinations and they heat the spa. And then that hot water flows over from the spa and kind of overflows into the pool. Very common. And we get a lot of questions of, well, how do you account for that? The answer is balance. The LSI of the pool, disregard the heat because the heat is going to rise up and it may be a temporary scale forming condition there. And it may be and you may have to adjust slightly, but the volume of water that's being heated is so much less substantial than the pool itself that as it circulates through, it's going to get diluted down. You should be fine. And the thing is, if you're ever going to err on the LSI, err high, so plan for the worst because you can't put calcium back into your cement and you can't put pigment back into your vinyl liner, but you can always clean up scale.
Eric [00:17:17] So anyway, that's it for Episode nine. These are the first three of the six bad habits in the next episode, which will be Episode 10. We're gonna talk about the top three costly bad habits. I'm your host, Eric Knight with Orenda. Joe has been a great guest host and I will say for your first time ever doing the podcast with literally zero preparation, you really sounded like you knew what you're talking about. Thank you for joining me.
Joe [00:17:42] I love being on. Thanks, Eric.
Eric [00:17:44] Well, we're gong to be on the next one because we're about to film it next. So, anyway, this has been the rule. Your. Podcast, as always, if you have questions, comment and the YouTube links below or on social media, it's not hard to find us Orenda tech. We're all over social media. Or you can go to our Web site, Orenda tech dot com. Thanks for your time, everybody.
OUTRO [00:18:04] Thank you for listening to Rule Your Pool. A podcast by Orenda Technologies. For more information on what we discussed this week's episode. Check the links in the description or visit www.Orendatech.com. I hope you find this show valuable enough that you tap that subscribe button and share it with your friends. You can also like us on Facebook and social media. With our help, you'll be able to rule your pool without overtreating of the chemicals, and wasting money. I'll see you next episode.