In this new year's episode, Eric makes a plea to the homeowners listening to the Rule Your Pool podcast: please stop helicopter parenting your pool. Many of the problems customers call Orenda for would not exist if not for constant tinkering with the pool and its chemistry.
00:00 - Introduction
02:43 - What does "helicopter parenting" mean in regard to a swimming pool?
05:23 - Patience is a virtue in pool care
06:46 - Let physics do their thing
08:14 - Physical thresholds like pH ceiling take time
10:01 - One pool to focus on vs. many
11:27 - Make an informed plan to rule YOUR pool
12:23 - Closing. Thanks for listening!
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99. Stop Helicopter Parenting your Pool
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[00:00:00] Eric Knight: All right. Listen, everybody, I realize it's hard to believe, but the truth is, this is the 99th episode of The Rule Your Pool podcast. And if you think it's hard for you to believe, you should have been there before we ever started this podcast and oh yeah, you'd get past 99 episodes. We would've laughed.
[00:00:20] We never thought it would go this far. It was just, it's going to be another one of those things that we take on and then we lose sight of because the tyranny of the urgent, we're just so busy with travel and all this stuff. But because of you, the listeners. And I, I mean this sincerely. The feedback we get from you, the amount of emails, the requests through our help center, ask.orendatech.com. you are the ones fueling this.
[00:00:45] You are the ones giving us topics to cover on this podcast. Without you, we would've run out of ideas a long time ago, to be honest with you. So thank you. Thank you for continuing to participate. Thank you for continuing to listen. Our audience continues to grow. We joke that we're about to break a hundred listeners, but uh, think you could tell it's, it's a bit more than that.
[00:01:06] But don't tell Jarred! I can say these things because Jarred never listens to this podcast unless he's on the episode. So I know for a fact he's not going to hear this, which is great. But this is the 99th episode, and I want you to hear this for the last time. Listen....
[00:01:28] that is the abundant silence of this closet studio. And it's the last time you're going to hear it. Unfortunately. I'm moving. That's right. I'm in the process of moving right now. I am going to be in transit and I'm going to have to set up a new studio. So I don't know how soundproof that's going to be, but I'm going to make sure that it is as soundproof as I can make it.
[00:01:50] Because of this moving schedule and going into trade shows in the new year, I cannot promise a regular podcast release schedule in the first three months of the year. I'm going to try, I'm going to do everything I can to do it. Just understand that we are at shows pretty much every week for the first three months of the year.
[00:02:08] Plus me moving and all this other stuff. So, uh, if you don't get an episode every week, I apologize in advance. It is not because I'm neglecting you, it's because we're just overwhelmed. I appreciate your understanding in advance. In this 99th episode, I want to make a personal appeal to homeowners.
[00:02:27] This is not really for the trade, although the trade, you should probably hear it too. I'm going to be speaking to homeowners specifically about one thing that I tell people when they call our hotline, stop helicopter Parenting your Pool. Let's get into it.
What does Helicopter Parenting mean?
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[00:02:43] Eric Knight: When I use the term helicopter parent, I'm referring to stereotypical parent who does not let their kid grow up in a normal environment. It's abundantly safe.
[00:03:16] Not letting them fall off a swing set or ride a bike, and they have to keep them on training wheels too long, or not letting them be exposed to the real world. And as a result, the kid never actually grows up and learns things the hard way.
[00:03:28] So it actually is harmful for the kid in the long term. And you see this a lot in our society, to be honest with you, that people are growing up and they haven't failed. They haven't felt the true gravity of what the real world is like because they had a helicopter parent and things were too easy or whatever it is.
[00:03:46] And I'm not here to criticize parents themselves. I'm using this as a reference about a swimming pool. And you might be thinking, how on earth is that similar to parenting?
[00:03:56] It's exactly similar to parenting. Because the pool has a life too. The pool is kind of like an organism. It has a circulation system. It needs to respirate. It needs to be cleaned and It has to have hygiene. That pool is constantly being exposed to contamination just like a kid could be.
[00:04:15] When I get calls from homeowners on the hotline, I continue to hear a very common theme, and it sounds something like this.
[00:04:25] While I've been testing my pool twice a day. Or I have to add chlorine every single day, or I've been adding acid every other day. Or insert thing that they're doing to their pool very frequently. And whether it's every day, every other day, it's multiple times a week. And I want you to contrast that with what the professionals do for residential pools.
[00:04:47] Now, commercial pools are different because commercial pools have much higher bather loads, they have chemical automation, all that stuff. We're talking about backyard pools for a moment. professionals are there for about 30 minutes a week. One day out of seven. Now, is that the optimal way to maintain a pool?
[00:05:05] Maybe not, but it's certainly sufficient in most cases. And professionals are able to do this oftentimes better than the homeowners who are doing it seven days a week. Why is that? Well, I'm going to explain, there's two factors here. Well, there's probably more than two, but I'm going to talk about two.
Patience in pool care
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[00:05:23] Eric Knight: The reality is you're not giving time for physics to happen. Which seems to be a repetitive theme on the Rule Your Pool podcast. We talk about physics a lot because they're real. There's nothing you could do about them, right? And if you're constantly tweaking, you're not giving a chance for physical cycles to occur. I'll explain in a moment. So you're not giving time for physics to happen.
[00:05:46] And number two, you're not learning what that pool behaves like. You're not giving it time to actually do its thing so that you can actually predict what your chlorine usage should be, or what your acid usage should be. You're not letting it live. You're babysitting it constantly and as a result, I see more expensive pool care because you're using a lot more stuff and a lot more stress.
[00:06:10] I can safely say most of the homeowners who call us that are doing stuff multiple times a week, that the helicopter parents, so to speak, most of their problems would not exist if they were more patient with their water. I'm going to say that again. Most of the problems that people who tweak their pool multiple times a week call us about would not exist in the first place if not for constant tweaking or helicopter parenting, as I call it, of their swimming pool. You need to be more patient with your water.
Let physics do their thing
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[00:06:46] Eric Knight: So this is my appeal to you, our listeners. Let physics occur. Learn from it. Find out what does it do on a seven day cycle? And when you understand that, that's when you can architect your prescription on how you want to rule your pool. Every pool is a little bit different, I understand that. Generally speaking, it matters where you're located, how much rainfall, how much sunlight you get. Do you have trees around? All sorts of factors. I get it.
[00:07:14] There's not one prescription for everybody. But you are mechanically controlling water. You're filtering it. You're moving it around and circulating it. And you're chemically treating it.
[00:07:28] If you don't give that pool time to respond to what you're doing to it, how do you really know the results of what you're doing? It's kind of like if you put acid in your pool and then you test your pH 10 minutes later, you're going to get a different reading than if you test your pH two hours later. Or the next day, or two days later. You see what I'm saying? You haven't had a chance to actually observe the water. You don't know what it's doing.
[00:08:00] And this is why most of the people that have called us, not all, but most of the people that have called us who are helicopter parenting their pools had no idea that pH is supposed to rise naturally. Well, I have to add acid every other day, or whatever it is.
Physical thresholds like pH ceiling take time
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[00:08:14] Eric Knight: Yeah, because you never observed it long enough to realize that the pH is always going to the same point. The pH ceiling. If you had waited seven days, like a professional does, the professional knows the pH is always going to be 8.1 or so, 8.2 depending on what their alkalinity is.
[00:08:32] Now, they didn't know why, and a lot of them credit this podcast. Thank you, by the way, for listening. And our app for teaching them why they didn't know why the pH was going over eight, but they always knew it.
[00:08:43] And to be honest with you, just a little insight into the pro world, because we speak to our core audience, which is swimming pool professionals. A lot of them felt guilty about this because they're told by the textbooks, actually, we all are that, you know, we need to have 7.4 to 7.6 pH. And so when you can't do that over seven days, a lot of people feel really guilty about it, like maybe I'm doing something wrong.
[00:09:09] Well, the pH ceiling is a real thing and you're not doing anything wrong if it gets up to that number. Now, if it spikes over the pH ceiling, yeah, you did something wrong. You probably didn't dilute acid or you added too much of it. You abused acid in some way, or maybe somebody put soda ash in the pool, whatever.
[00:09:27] The point I'm trying to make is the professionals have observed this because they're coming once a week. Seven days is plenty of time to see what the water's going to do. Every pool is going to respond different. So a professional who has, let's say 50 pools a week, is going to be able to tell the difference between a salt pool and a trichlor pool. Or a salt pool and a liquid chlorine pool. Or a pool with an auto cover and not. They have enough data points to notice trends over time because those pools respond over seven days to what they did once, and they respond in different ways.
One pool to focus on vs. many
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[00:10:01] Eric Knight: But if you're a homeowner, you only have one pool you're focusing on. And if you're tweaking it every 24 to 48 hours, testing it constantly, all that stuff, you might think that you're getting more data points, but I'm not so sure they're valid. In fact, I would argue they're not valid yet. Because you're going to learn more from observing your water and letting it change, and treating it accordingly than constantly beating it into submission.
[00:10:30] So when I say helicopter parenting, I'm talking about just hovering over your pool, making sure that it stays within, you know, range chemistry, or even in the case of our app, LSI balance every single day. What I'm saying is, take a step back. If you want to rule your pool the way we would, the way we do, what am I saying?
[00:10:53] Observe and learn from your water. Keep it LSI balanced, but it doesn't have to be 0.0 all the time. You can adjust it into the yellow on our app. Let it naturally rise because of physics. Let the pH rise, bring you back into the green. And correct the pH , at most, twice a week.
[00:11:12] Now a lot of you have chemical automation. That's a little bit different, but understand that that's not controlling pH. An acid feeder does not control pH. It just suppresses it. And then you're going to have to add alkalinity, and that's a different conversation for another episode.
Make an informed plan to Rule Your Pool
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[00:11:27] Eric Knight: When you know what to expect after seven days, then you can come up with a much more accurate plan and say, you know what? I'm going to chlorinate twice a week, but I'm only going to correct pH once a week. Or something like that. I would not tweak your pool more than two days a week maximum. And you might think I'm crazy.
[00:11:48] I'm good with that. Just understand that we have a lot more experience in this than you might think. Our experience is extremely dense in problems and troubleshooting. A lot of those problems would go away if you were not helicopter parenting your pool.
[00:12:07] Learn your water. Respect your water. Come up with a plan that is catered to your pool within the context of the LSI that obeys physics, and then decide to take factors out of the equation. That's how you can rule your pool.
Closing
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[00:12:23] Eric Knight: If you have questions on this, email me podcast@orendatech.com. visit our help center, ask.orendatech.com. And we've got big plans for the Rule Your Pool podcast this year in 2023 coming up. The first three months are going to be messy with the trade shows. They're going to be delayed maybe every other week if we can do it.
[00:12:44] I get it. But come April, we're going to be full swing helping this industry the way that we know how to, and we've got some cool ideas of what we can do. I'm not going to tell you what those are. That'd be a spoiler. But I think you're going to like it. And I think it's going to help you out . As always, I hope you find value in our podcast.
[00:13:02] The fact that we've gotten to 99 episodes is just laughably crazy and humbling. We did not think that you would still be listening to this, so thank you for that. Have a wonderful new year, and we will see you in the next episode, which will be our hundredth episode. And that one's going to have Jarred on it, by the way, because we got a special plan for our hundredth episode.
[00:13:26] I'm Eric Knight with Orenda, thank you so much for listening. Take care.