Eric and Jarred revisit the most frequently asked questions of 2023, and look forward into 2024.
00:00 - Introduction
03:19 - Can't hold chlorine for a week?
09:05 - Can I maintain a pool at a higher pH?
12:38 - Where can I buy Orenda products?
15:34 - Calcium flakes in salt pools
18:53 - Why does pH keep climbing on a new plaster pool?
22:25 - Fiberglass chalking vs. scale
24:08 - Know your actual water chemistry before calling us
29:37 - Moving forward into 2024
32:04 - Grant's macho interruption
33:04 - Price increases. Are you accounting for them?
38:14 - Closing
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129. Top Questions of 2023
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[00:00:00] Eric Knight: Jarred, it is good to have you back on the Rule Your Pool podcast. It's been, what, half a year? I don't even remember what you look like.
[00:00:06] Jarred Morgan: Where are we? What, what, what is this?
[00:00:09] Eric Knight: This is a podcast that we do. I know you don't listen to it, but...
[00:00:12] Jarred Morgan: I think I just blacked out for the last six months.
[00:00:15] Eric Knight: Yeah, that's right. Well, the listeners have been begging to have Jarred back. Because, uh, I honestly don't know why. I don't know the value you bring to the show, but they want you back. So it's good to have you back.
[00:00:25] Jarred Morgan: Well, I'm glad somebody wants me back because you sure didn't. And I can relate to our pool pros over the past four or five months. It's been the heat of our season. There's been a lot of stuff going on. We've been extremely busy, and I feel like I'm kind of getting a chance to breathe right now?
[00:00:42] But quite honestly, people have this perception whenever the pool industry is being talked about, right? Oh, you must be real slow right now. My house, it's 40 degrees outside. It's cold and nobody's really thinking about their pool as much. It's like oh you must be slow and the answer is
[00:01:00] Eric Knight: No, it's the opposite.
[00:01:01] Jarred Morgan: No, we are actually really, really busy. We have trade shows, early buys, budgeting, planning, looking back at things that we could do better, how we can help people.
[00:01:12] And so these are all things that are going on continuously. But right now, we're getting into the time of year where it's critical to kind of reflect, right? And that's kind of the point of this episode a little bit, isn't it? Like, I don't know, I didn't read the notes, so I'm just spitballing here, but I feel like it's pretty, uh, pretty imperative.
[00:01:28] Eric Knight: There are no notes. I've given up on writing show notes for you, Jarred.
[00:01:32] Jarred Morgan: Yes!
[00:01:33] Eric Knight: Well, the point is, uh, you're right. You know, people think the summertime would be our busy season. It is the opposite. Everyone's too busy to call us, so that's actually when we can kind of hunker down and get the admin work done.
[00:01:45] Jarred Morgan: Hold on, let me make a note of that. Eric is not busy in the summer time. Okay, go ahead.
[00:01:51] Eric Knight: Yeah, good, very good. Thanks for writing that down. This is episode 129 of the Rule Your Pool podcast, and all of our listeners, all 192 of them or so. Maybe I'm just dyslexic. Maybe I picked that number randomly. I don't know.
[00:02:05] Jarred Morgan: We have 192 now?
[00:02:07] Eric Knight: Well, we're trying to get to 200 by the end of this year.
[00:02:09] Jarred Morgan: I felt like when I left off, we were at like 140 or something. So we've really,
[00:02:14] Eric Knight: No, no. It was, we were in the one eighties. It's just been a really tough last few episodes. I played some music, lost a lot of listeners. We're just trying to climb right back up.
[00:02:23] Jarred Morgan: That's cause I wasn't here. Wasn't it? I got it. I got it.
[00:02:25] Eric Knight: You're the hit. You're the draw. Okay. Anyway, uh, in this episode, what I would like to do is I would like to review the most common questions that we got in 2023 and we take the hotline calls. We take a lot of the inbound requests and questions that are submitted through our help center, ask.orendatech.com. And a lot of the same questions continue to come in.
[00:02:45] Oddly enough, they're answered in the help center. You just have to know how to search for them. If you don't know how to search for them, try different variations of your question in the search bar, and it might be in there. But in this episode, we want to talk about maybe the top six or seven that we hear, and then talk about onward going into 2024.
[00:03:03] This is really for the pool pros, but homeowners listening to this, you probably had some of these questions too. Jarred, you ready to get into it?
[00:03:11] Jarred Morgan: Do I have a choice?
[00:03:13] Eric Knight: Nope.
[00:03:14] Jarred Morgan: Let's do it.
Can't hold free chlorine for a week?
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[00:03:19] Eric Knight: Of all the questions that I got this year, personally, the main question was some variation of how do I get chlorine to hold for a week? It came from pool pros usually, and even homeowners would say, I just cannot hold a free chlorine reading. Some variation of that.
[00:03:55] Now I touched on this in the last episode. One of the reasons that alkalinity is relevant to this is because it can drive the pH higher, and when the pH gets high enough, chlorine actually starts to leave CYA.
[00:04:07] One of the big mistakes that pool pros make very often, they don't think it's a mistake, and I'm here to tell you it actually is, we rely so heavily on trichlor to get chlorine through the week. And I understand the practice.
[00:04:19] Jarred Morgan: And we say trichlor, we're talking about tabs, everybody.
[00:04:22] Eric Knight: Yeah, three inch tabs. I understand why that is. They slowly dissolve, they are a chlorine product. But a better way to look at trichlor is trichlor should be thought of as a cyanuric acid product. And in that sense, it's a great product. If you are trying to keep a consistent CYA level in your pool, trichlor is the way to go. It's awesome.
[00:04:41] I didn't use any in my pool because I was trying different things. I probably will in the future. But if we think about it as a CYA delivery system instead of a chlorine, we're going to avoid overstabilization. Overstabilization is one of those big problems because it gives us this false sense of Chlorination.
[00:04:59] Oh, well, I, I can hold chlorine for a week, Jarred. What they're not saying is we're actually slowing down the chlorine to get through those seven days. Slowing it down so much that we're likely to have bigger problems. Living contaminants like algae and germs can reproduce if we cannot get chlorine to kill fast enough.
[00:05:16] And if you have too much CYA, that's the number one cause of that. So when people call Orenda, they say, well, I've got an algae problem. What's the first question we ask them, Jarred?
[00:05:24] Jarred Morgan: What are your chemical readings?
[00:05:26] Eric Knight: Yeah. But which chemical in particular?
[00:05:28] Jarred Morgan: Well, when it comes to algae, it's cyanuric acid. And obviously there's facets that go into how we break down a customer's problem, right? I just want to touch on the fact that we are a chemical manufacturer. We make chlorine now. So they're going to say, Oh, they're just bashing on trichlor.
[00:05:45] Well, at the end of the day, we, as a chemical manufacturer who makes liquid chlorine and acid now, we don't dislike cyanuric acid. That's not our position at all. And I think if you asked anybody in our company, they would say the same thing. No, we don't dislike cyanuric acid because there is a value to having it in the water. It does provide residual benefits that can keep chlorine protected from UV and all the things.
[00:06:10] It's the abuse of cyanuric acid that is going to be problematic. And I think we can all agree on that for the most part. Uh, there might be some arguments to be made on the other side.
[00:06:18] Eric Knight: Well, you, we'll say this, you and I can agree on that because we're not, you're right. We're not anti trichlor, we're anti overstabilization.
[00:06:25] Jarred Morgan: Correct.
[00:06:25] Eric Knight: That's the issue. I think trichlor is a great product when it's used correctly.
[00:06:29] Jarred Morgan: Absolutely. It's always been the plight of the pool guy or the homeowner to make it as convenient as possible. Not helicopter their pool. How can they make this an enjoyable experience? Right. And we talk about this all the time.
[00:06:44] And the easiest way is, well, I'm going to go fill up my chlorine feeder with six tabs and just turn it on five and do that once a week and add some acid and brush my pool and call it good.
[00:06:56] Eric Knight: Yeah that's about the worst thing you can do.
[00:06:58] Jarred Morgan: Trust me. We get it. There's a lot of stuff going on. You're busy. The pool guys, you're busy. You have sometimes 50, 60, 70 pools or more in some cases that you have to get to throughout the week. You just got to have these convenient things in place. All we're saying is, Hey, there's a way to do this without doing that. Don't go crazy. Don't add six tabs, add one or two. Turn the dial back to two or three. Have a slower dissolve period, don't just abuse it, and you don't need it. You feel like you do, but you really don't need it.
[00:07:37] Eric Knight: That's, you don't, that's the truth. You don't actually need more CYA because it doesn't matter how much, if you have five parts per million of cyanuric acid or 500, The pH is still going to dissociate chlorine away from CYA if it gets over, I mean technically if it gets over like 7.6, but you don't really notice until it gets over about 8.3.
[00:07:57] So 8.3 and up, hypochlorite ion is leaving CYA whether you have 500 ppm or not. It's going to happen regardless. I don't care how much CYA you have. So you don't get any benefit of having the additional CYA. It's actually all detriment because you don't actually get any more sunlight protection either past 70 parts per million or so.
[00:08:14] What you do is you get this false sense of security because CYA is exponentially slowing down your chlorine killing speed. So it's still in there because at warmer temperatures chlorine is performing better. But if you put the brakes on it by overstabilizing with CYA, it's really going to slow down that chlorine.
[00:08:33] Jarred Morgan: But it shows up on the test kit, so it's a safety blanket.
[00:08:37] Eric Knight: That's exactly right, so it's a false sense of security. Um, If we're trying to get chlorine to last for the week, we need to make sure that we don't overstabilize the pool. And, if you're looking at it from that perspective, you don't want too much alkalinity so that your pH doesn't get over that 8.3 threshold or so.
[00:08:53] Yeah, you'll still lose some under there, but just not a lot. You get over 8.3, not only are you going to get scale issues, But chlorine is going to leave CYA, and it will get burned out by the sun. And that's a big part of this.
Can I maintain a pool at a higher pH?
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[00:09:05] Jarred Morgan: The next question is, can I maintain my pool with a higher pH? Cause we get that question a lot.
[00:09:11] Eric Knight: Well, it's largely my fault, and I'll explain some clarity of what I said in the last few episodes. I talked about my pool, and I talked about deliberately letting my pH stay at 8. That's not necessarily a bad thing for me in my situation, because I was trying...
[00:09:27] Jarred Morgan: ya'll, I need you to understand something. We just got a new puppy at my house.
[00:09:30] Eric Knight: Oh my gosh.
[00:09:31] Jarred Morgan: And her name is Scarlet. So if you hear Scarlet, she's being a guard dog right now.
[00:09:36] Eric Knight: You better put Scarlet on this screen.
[00:09:38] Jarred Morgan: Scarlet!
[00:09:38] Eric Knight: We all need to see. Come on, Scarlet.
[00:09:45] Jarred Morgan: She identifies as a puppy, but to us, she's just a baby.
[00:09:50] Eric Knight: Oh my word, look at that.
[00:09:52] Jarred Morgan: She's just a baby. She's good.
[00:09:56] Eric Knight: You ever want to see a grown man melt, look at Jarred right now. Puppy. Oh my word. How, what was that, six pounds? Seven pounds?
[00:10:05] Jarred Morgan: I feel like she weighs fifty, but that's just me. This could be our number one viewed episode on our YouTube channel.
[00:10:11] Eric Knight: Probably ever since Blue, the cat walked across the keyboard all those years ago.
[00:10:14] Jarred Morgan: I will say Blue is not thrilled we have a dog, for those that keep tabs on Blue. But go ahead Scarlet, go do your thing. Go back napping.
[00:10:24] Eric Knight: Yeah. Go back. I do want to clarify what I've done with my pool.
[00:10:27] I do advocate for capping your pH ceiling in the low eights. And the reason for that is it buys you a lot of time. Do you want to maintain it at 8.0? Not necessarily. I did it on my pool intentionally to see if it could be done. To see if I would have any adverse effects. I didn't. Doesn't mean you won't.
[00:10:45] And especially if you're using a chlorine like Calhypo, if you've ever tried to add Calhypo to 8.0 pH water, it's going to cloud up. It's going to cloud up a lot because you're creating an LSI violation. So you're going to need to use acid before putting Calhypo in your pool anyway, just so it dissolves. You may not have that issue on trichlor pools, but trichlor is not meant to be a primary chlorine.
[00:11:05] So there are a lot of caveats to this. I was able to do it because I put myself in the most extreme of circumstances on purpose. Because I didn't care if I ruined my pool. I really didn't. Because I'm going to renovate it in the future anyway. It happened to work well for me.
[00:11:18] Jarred Morgan: Topic for a new podcast we could talk about which is Ruin Your Pool. Welcome to Ruin Your Pool.
[00:11:23] Eric Knight: The Ruin Your Pool podcast. It will be probably this next season. So, uh, anyway, I want to clarify that. I did it on purpose to see if it could be done. Because a lot of people said it couldn't be done. What I am saying is, you don't want a pH ceiling that's high enough so that a noticeable amount of chlorine is going to leave CYA and get burned out by the sun. And then I also supplemented my chlorine to make sure I could hold it for a week. The other thing that I did, because I'm the homeowner, I was chlorinating twice a week.
[00:11:50] Pool pros don't have that luxury. They get to chlorinate once a week. So how do you get through seven days? Well, you're probably going to need to supplement your chlorine. And you're going to make sure that you don't overstabilize the pool. And you want to make sure that you don't have so much alkalinity in your water that your pH ceiling is high enough that you lose a noticeable amount of chlorine to sunlight.
[00:12:09] And then you start looking at the oxygen demand. Maybe you have ammonia compounds, maybe there's cleaning agents that are involved. Maybe there's an algaecide that's conflicting with chlorine.
[00:12:18] Those kinds of things are a secondary thing because that's really the oxidant demand of what chlorine is being used on, as opposed to what chlorine is being lost on. So anyway, enough about that. If you have questions, reach out: podcast@orendatech.com. If you have specifics, but that's generally what we're trying to get across.
Where can I buy Orenda products?
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[00:12:38] Eric Knight: Let's move on to the next question in the interest of time.
[00:12:40] Jarred Morgan: Next.
[00:12:41] Eric Knight: The next question I have, or that I got a lot of, is where's the best place to buy Orenda products?
[00:12:47] Jarred Morgan: That's a tricky question.
[00:12:49] Eric Knight: Well, for the pool pros listening to this, ask your wholesale distributor. It should be stocked. If it's not stocked, let us know. We will get our local rep on that and work with them to try to get it into the local store where you are. We should be in every distributor. It's certainly available. Maybe not in the exact sizes, but you are the customer. If you're asking for something, a participating distributor should bring it in for you. But for homeowners, Jarred, what are your thoughts?
[00:13:15] Jarred Morgan: This is a very delicate question because we have retail stores that stock our products in various parts of the country, and we have a dealer locator on our website. But at the same time, it's very hard for us to manage that and make sure that it's accurate.
[00:13:32] And so we've had homeowners call us all the time, hey, I called x and x pool shop and they're on your dealer locator, but they didn't have anything. They said they don't stock it anymore. And
[00:13:43] Eric Knight: All the time.
[00:13:43] Jarred Morgan: Yeah. And it's, it's really difficult for us, everybody. Understand we don't do this on purpose. But we just don't have time to manage the dealer locator, quite honestly. So we could do a better job. We're not perfect. Sorry. Most of the time, here's kind of the way it goes. Look on our dealer locator, make sure you call the retail store before you just drive over there to make sure they have it in stock. If for some reason they don't have it in stock or there's not a dealer near you that has it in stock, just go look online.
[00:14:12] We have dealers that sell our stuff online and that's just the way of the world these days. It seems very convenient, easy, and we don't pick anybody to talk about. It's just a general broad statement that says. Look online. Wherever you find it, go for it, buy it. That's going to be your easiest, convenient way to get it.
[00:14:31] Eric Knight: Yeah. And one note on that. Um, there have been some suspicious sales of products online that uh, there have been people that have suspected that there might be some counterfeit product on there. It's hard to say. So make sure that when you are buying on Amazon, it is an authorized Orenda dealer that is buying it through wholesale distribution. If they're not buying it directly from wholesale distribution, it could be from somewhere else.
[00:14:58] Jarred Morgan: Cause that is another question that we get. Can I buy this directly from you? No, no, you cannot. We do not sell direct. We do not sell any. That's only through distribution channels and our dealers are getting it that way. So, uh,
[00:15:11] Eric Knight: Yeah, and we may make it easier to purchase things, but it's still going to go through our partners. It can't come directly from us. So you maybe in the future you will be able to buy it online, but it's going to go through our distribution partners because that's the way we operate our business.
[00:15:24] Uh, it would be nice, but we don't have the bandwidth to sell to anybody and everybody. We're not direct to consumer company. We do go through our industry partners. Okay.
Calcium flakes in salt pools
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[00:15:34] Jarred Morgan: Moving on.
[00:15:35] Eric Knight: What was, well, you tell me, what was your popular question, Jarred?
[00:15:39] Jarred Morgan: I still got a lot of emails and a lot of calls about flakes in my saltwater pool. Which I got really good at just going on our website or our app and just typing in flakes. And I'll have two or three different articles, blogs, videos that'll pop up and I'll just post them in an email and say, Hey, happy to help you out. Read this article first, and I think it'll answer a lot of your questions.
[00:16:05] It's reverting back to what we said earlier of, if we're going to recommend a lower alkalinity and trying to maintain the pH. And then everybody's saying, well, I have a saltwater pool, my pH is continually high and I have all these flakes and yada, yada, yada. We all know the lingo by now. It's, hey, there's a total picture here you have to look at. It is what is your alkalinity? What is your pH? Is it a salt pool? Not salt pool? These are the questions we go through on a routine basis when the customer calls. And usually it's we're kind of setting them up, so it's not really fair. We know what we're doing. And as soon as they say well, my alkalinity is 100, or 110, We're going to say ah, that's likely your problem.
[00:16:50] And then we go down the whole path Oh, well, if you're going to run a lower alkalinity, let's say 70 parts per million to make sure that your carbonate alkalinity is lower, so that your pH ceiling doesn't rise as high, that's going to help. But if you're going to do that, you're going to have to maintain a little higher calcium and all of a sudden they go, what are you talking about?
[00:17:09] Eric Knight: Yeah, I just cut to the chase. You're a lot more delicate than I am. I ask, um, when I hear about the flakes, I say, okay, let me guess your alkalinity is over 90. They're like, yeah. Like, okay, start there. You're going to need to reduce your alkalinity, and when you do that, you're going to need to proportionally make sure that your calcium is high enough to offset that lower alkalinity. It's a much shorter conversation, Jarred.
[00:17:32] Jarred Morgan: I'm just a nicer guy. What do you want me to say?
[00:17:34] Eric Knight: No, there's no doubt.
[00:17:35] Jarred Morgan: Guys don't call Eric.
[00:17:36] Eric Knight: That's probably why people want you back on here. . Yeah, don't call me.
[00:17:39] Jarred Morgan: That's right. Yes. Don't call me. No, I'm just kidding. We do like our customers. I promise you we do. We kid about it, but. You guys are awesome.
[00:17:47] Eric Knight: We, we take pride in most of our customers. True. I'm just kidding. Uh, but in all seriousness, it is a very common question because people think it's an equipment failure or they're doing something wrong. And it's really just the LSI.
[00:18:00] It's the LSI and Uncle Henry. Henry's Law is pulling that pH up and it creates a condition where you're going to get a lot more scale in your salt cell. It's going to fracture off and blow into the pool. You want that problem to go away? Don't have too much alkalinity. Have a pH ceiling that is favorable.
[00:18:14] Read the articles on there. Just search the word flake in the help center, ask.orendatech.com or blog.orendatech.com. Search the word flake. You'll find it. Listen to that podcast. I forget the episode number. It's a very common issue. Totally preventable.
[00:18:28] Jarred Morgan: And don't get mad at your salt cell for doing this job. It's doing what it's supposed to do. So
[00:18:33] Eric Knight: Yeah, it's producing chlorine.
[00:18:34] Jarred Morgan: Homeowners. If you're listening, this is normal. And just understand how to manage it appropriately. That's it.
[00:18:40] Eric Knight: There are other things too. You can slow down the flow on a variable speed pump, you can flush it out, you can use SC-1000, you can do all these other things to help mitigate it. But at the end of the day, look at your alkalinity first. Look at your pH ceiling. That is the leading cause.
Why does pH keep climbing on a new plaster pool?
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[00:18:53] Eric Knight: How about on a similar way? I get a question a lot about I got this pool refinished or resurfaced or it's a brand new pool And I just cannot get the pH down, Jarred.
[00:19:02] It just keeps going up up up up up up every single week. I keep adding acid, I keep adding acid and the pH keeps going up. What is going on?
[00:19:10] Jarred Morgan: I don't know Well, what is going on?
[00:19:12] Eric Knight: I'm asking you.
[00:19:14] Jarred Morgan: Well, my general response to that is number one, this is a normal part of the curing process. You have freshly plastered surface, generally speaking. Uh, we're going to talk about plastered surface here. It's not fiberglass or vinyl liners. But plaster surfaces, it's curing, and plaster has a high pH. You got this chemistry process going on throughout, you know, however long, usually curing happens over a year.
[00:19:37] So everybody thinks that they put a water hose in it, filter pool up. And after a month, because that's generally what the standards are. If you want to call them that
[00:19:46] Eric Knight: Yeah, 28 day, 30 day...
[00:19:48] Jarred Morgan: they say wait a month. And then they think it's just free game after that. Well, no. It is not. Your plaster is still curing well after that first 30 days. So that's going to push your pH up. You just have to manage it accordingly and understand that don't go crazy. Don't overcorrect. Um, don't add too much acid is what that means. And you will be okay.
[00:20:12] Eric Knight: That's the traditional way of looking at it. And what you're saying is not wrong, but that is assuming that water is interacting both directions with that cement.
[00:20:20] If you do our startup properly, it will not. What will happen is the carbonates in the water will go into the cement and carbonate calcium hydroxide into calcium carbonate, which is supposed to happen, and it will happen from the outside in. Meaning it will push into the cement. Where the pH of the cement, which is high, where the pH of the cement can change the water, is if the water is undersaturated with calcium and actually interacts by pulling calcium out of the cement.
[00:20:46] So you shouldn't have that pH rise if you are slightly positive on the LSI in those first 30 days. Now, I'm not saying purple on the Orenda calculator, I'm saying high green, 0.2 something. So if you follow our startup procedure, you'll look at the desired LSI target for those first five days, especially which are the most important five days. They're positive on the LSI on purpose.
[00:21:08] And one note on that before moving on, the Langelier Saturation Index is the only thing water cares about. That's its only motivation, that's the equilibrium that water craves. But that's about calcium carbonate. See, calcium hydroxide is not calcium carbonate yet.
[00:21:24] Calcium hydroxide is a different equilibrium. And water will use that calcium in that form because it's more soluble. But you could have 0.00 LSI water and still dissolve calcium hydroxide. You can't dissolve calcium carbonate, but you can dissolve calcium hydroxide, which is still there. So for those first few days when you're carbonating that stuff, you need to be slightly positive to make sure that you're not dissolving that.
[00:21:49] For more information on this Go to Orenda Academy and look at Startup Academy. We talk about it in depth. I think it's academy.orendatech.com. It's like 12 videos. Watch that, you'll learn everything you need to know.
[00:22:02] Jarred Morgan: And with the help of our 192 listeners, we can convert everybody to do the Orenda startup so that we can carbonate that calcium hydroxide in the surface and minimize this pH fluctuation.
[00:22:13] Eric Knight: That's exactly right, you should not have a pH spiking. pH will naturally rise due to aeration, thanks to Henry's Law, but it should not be spiking. If it goes over the pH ceiling, you know it's coming from the cement.
Fiberglass chalking vs. scale
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[00:22:25] Eric Knight: Next question. Scale in a fiberglass pool. We talked about this in a previous episode. We call it chalking, because it's not scale. Scale would land on everything. What really is going on is a low LSI is degrading the gel coat on the fiberglass finish. And when that gets degraded, chlorine can interact inside that gel coat, and it starts to oxidize the polymers inside, and they turn white.
[00:22:51] That's why if you put acid on it, it doesn't do anything. If it was scale, it would clean it right off. But it's not scale. It is what we, like I said, we call it chalking. If you go to our website or our help center, type in fiberglass, you will find it.
[00:23:05] Jarred Morgan: Not just that, I had a homeowner email me the other day and said they took some 40 grit sandpaper to it and it cleaned it right off. Everyone, be very careful using any sandpaper or anything like that, especially on a fiberglass pool, because there is that gel coat on there. Yeah. And It might look good....
[00:23:24] Eric Knight: yeah, you're not going to be able to put that back.
[00:23:26] Jarred Morgan: It looks good where you sanded it down, thinking it's scale, but you just took your gel coat off. So, consult a pool pro before you do anything radical. Get somebody to look at it. Have a good plan in place. And like I said, if it is scale, scale is easy to clean up, relatively speaking. Okay?
[00:23:45] Eric Knight: It's the most harmless of the possibilities.
[00:23:48] Jarred Morgan: Don't go to harsh acid and sandpaper to do these things when just let's get a full picture here before we go down this road. AKA, don't use sandpaper.
[00:23:59] Eric Knight: What you really need to do is stop the chemical conditions that are causing that chalking. You may need to get re gel coated. I wish I had better news for you, but I don't.
Know your actual water chemistry before calling us
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[00:24:08] Eric Knight: Uh, let's do one more and then let's talk about looking forward into 2024. Cause those, those are the biggest questions I've got. Uh, I think you had one more, you said?
[00:24:15] Jarred Morgan: Uh, I don't know if it's necessarily a question. It's more of a PSA for people that reach out for help, regardless if you're calling us. To help you.
[00:24:22] Uh, but if you're calling any chemical manufacturer or whatever you, it is, be prepared. So when you call us and say, I need your help, I have this problem. My pool water chemistry is perfect.
[00:24:38] Eric Knight: Yeah, you're right. We do get those calls a lot.
[00:24:40] Jarred Morgan: Perfect is a very relative statement, regardless of who you're talking to, because everybody's different.
[00:24:46] And generally, we have to start asking questions, pulling information out of people. This takes time. And then we ultimately get to the conclusion of, oh, you're quote unquote perfect water chemistry is not really that perfect given the certain scenarios we're talking about here.
[00:25:04] And then we have to go down this rabbit hole of LSI balancing, so forth. Which is obviously it's our job and we're not debating any of that, but just because you think you have perfect water chemistry does not necessarily mean you have perfect water chemistry.
[00:25:20] I know convenience is key, like we were discussing before. People think that, you know, if I put a bunch of tabs in there, a little bit of acid and brush the pool down, I'm good to go. I shouldn't have any issues. Well then, once these issues start presenting themselves, this is why. You can't just test chlorine, pH, and call yourself good. No. Take a full panel, be regular about it. I know we don't check cyanuric acid and calcium levels on a regular basis, but they should be relatively regular so that you have a good idea of what you're managing.
[00:25:52] Eric Knight: I'd like to expand on that because you're right, we do get a lot of that. And boy, it's always fun to hear, Oh, my water's perfect. It's, it's, everything's great. My water's great. What does that mean? What we often hear is that it comes either back to the conventional, traditional ways of the range chemistry, but it's usually a pool store printout. You go to get your water tested at a pool store, which is fine.
[00:26:14] Jarred Morgan: I recommend it, honestly, because if you use a test kit at home, it's not a bad idea to go get a comp
[00:26:22] Eric Knight: Yeah, get a secondary opinion. All about it. But there's one factor that the pool store cannot possibly accurately measure. And what would that factor be on the LSI?
[00:26:30] Jarred Morgan: Way to put me on the spot, dude.
[00:26:34] Eric Knight: There's only six of them. You got this. I know you can't count.
[00:26:36] Jarred Morgan: It's the temperature. It's the temperature.
[00:26:38] Eric Knight: Okay, you've been playing us. Yes, it's the water temperature. If that's not factored in, you have no idea what the water chemistry actually is. Because they can't test that at the store. By the time you get there, the sample is a completely different temperature than the pool.
[00:26:50] So you still need a thermometer. You still need to factor in the, are you moving your lap? Oh my word. For those of you listening, Jarred has lifted his laptop to look at this puppy named Scarlett. And she is what I call sky pawing. She is on her back, all four paws straight up in the sky. Her head is dangling out of the, oh my gosh.
[00:27:10] Jarred Morgan: I wish I could go lay down right now just like that and just Hmm. How do I get any work done in this office with that cuteness over there? I don't know.
[00:27:21] Eric Knight: I don't, I don't know how I'm supposed to finish my thought. Thank you for that, Jarred.
[00:27:25] Jarred Morgan: I didn't say I was getting work done either, so.
[00:27:27] Eric Knight: Valid. So if we're looking at a printout that's based on traditional range chemistry, it may tell you, depending on what the software says, it may tell you you have multiple things wrong. But are they?
[00:27:41] It's very common for the people who reach out to us that they show us these printouts. They'll take a picture of it, email it to us. I said, whoa! They're alarming you to do things that you should not be doing. For one thing, your water temperature is 50 degrees right now. And it's saying you have too much calcium because you have 340. Well, we want you to have about 250. I've seen that before.
[00:28:02] The range in most cases is 200 to 400 ppm calcium, but not everywhere. Some softwares are calibrated differently. Who's right? And is it right for you? That's the question. We look at the LSI first, and we look at all these individual factors in the context of the LSI, and that LSI requires temperature.
[00:28:22] So perfect water chemistry at 50 degrees is different than it is at 85. Completely different. But the LSI always reigns supreme. I mean, depending on the software, like I said, it could say... Oh, your alkalinity is at 60. You need to get that between 80 and 120. You need to buy this sodium bicarb or alkalinity up.
[00:28:41] Meanwhile, you have a saltwater pool and we're advising you to have about a 60 alkalinity with excess calcium to offset that alkalinity so that you don't get flakes. Well, you could be out of alignment on the calcium and on the alkalinity according to the Pool Store, because they don't know the bigger picture of what you're actually trying to accomplish with the LSI and Henry's Law.
[00:29:00] So don't be alarmed, necessarily. Look at the holistic picture, add all those numbers up in the calculator, and see where your LSI is. If your LSI is off, okay, now we got an issue. If it's not, you might not.
[00:29:12] Jarred Morgan: Have a plan.
[00:29:13] Eric Knight: If you have any questions, like I said, email podcast@orendatech.com, happy to look at it. Read our help center, read our blog. You'll see, if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably already aware that we know the LSI is very important because that's what water cares about. So when you call us and say your water's perfect, be prepared with your actual numbers of every little factor. So we can see if it's perfect for you.
Moving forward into 2024
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[00:29:37] Eric Knight: Great point, Jarred. Now let's move on. Let's talk about moving forward for the next season. This is the off season now. It was a very busy season, especially for us with the acquisition. A lot of things have changed for us.
[00:29:49] As a side note, everything HASA has said to me and to you, they're doing. They have lived up to their word. They have done everything, they are letting us do what we need to do. They are not trying to stamp out our culture at all.
[00:30:01] Jarred Morgan: They're not, they're not trying to change anything on our side. They're actually giving us the keys to say here, let's do this. Let's go have some fun. Let's improve where we can improve and do it.
[00:30:12] Eric Knight: Yeah, if it's right for the pool owners and it's right for the pool pros, do it.
[00:30:15] Jarred Morgan: Yeah, so all in all, been a good transition. It's been obviously a big learning curve. There's a new processes and new things that happen during, uh, acquisitions. But all in all, it's been pretty great.
[00:30:28] The people we work with are great. I mean, it's mind blowing to just think about the scale in which we're talking about here. And we were a relatively small chemical company, everybody. Let's not go crazy here.
[00:30:39] Eric Knight: People think we're huge.
[00:30:40] Jarred Morgan: Yeah, we're not a massive company. So when we were acquired, HASA is a lot bigger than us. And so we're talking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of employees. That's a scale that we had no comprehension for. And when you go to these plants and you see the production lines and you see everything that's going on, it's that it's a lot of work y'all. It's a lot of manual labor, more manual labor than you would think. There's a lot of people involved. There's a lot of coordination involved. It is. It's tough.
[00:31:09] Eric Knight: The logistics are unbelievable. I mean, you're talking moving tens of thousands of gallons of liquids a day out of these plants. It's unbelievable. And there's a lot of places where things can go wrong, but they are investing heavily in making sure that those get better. And that's awesome. We'll talk about that in the future, but everything they've told us they're going to do. They've done.
[00:31:27] Jarred Morgan: And they're listening. Trust me. We're planning for things. We're trying to head things off. We're trying to get better, but at the end of the day, we're human. There's a lot of humans that work in our organization. Like I said, there's a lot of manual things going on that are still happening and we are trying to get better. And hopefully you are too.
[00:31:47] And on that note, that brings us to this point of planning. Right now is the time to reflect on where can you improve and how do we translate that into the following year?
[00:32:00] Eric Knight: Give me some examples of this.
Grant's macho interruption
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[00:32:04] Jarred Morgan: Hold on. I got Grant coming in the front door.
[00:32:07] Eric Knight: Okay, well, we'll edit this out because Grant, when he listens to this podcast, is going to realize that he has ruined episode 129. Way to go Grant.
[00:32:14] Jarred Morgan: I'm going to go ahead and mute it and tell Grant to shut up.. Grant, shut up! I'm on a podcast! Can you go ahead and stop looking at me, man? I'm trying to work here. I know it's...
[00:32:25] Grant Evans: I just want to come give you a hug, man.
[00:32:26] Eric Knight: We're live. We're recording a podcast.
[00:32:27] Jarred Morgan: We're recording a podcast.
[00:32:28] Grant Evans: I just want you to give me a hug.
[00:32:29] Jarred Morgan: I don't give out hugs freely. Sorry.
[00:32:35] Eric Knight: Oh, there's Grant. Hey, buddy.
[00:32:38] Jarred Morgan: Getting hugged here, everybody.
[00:32:39] Eric Knight: I like those glasses. You look like you're getting hugged by the macho man, Randy Savage.
[00:32:43] Jarred Morgan: That's right.
[00:32:45] Eric Knight: Hey, Jarred, we got to hug you, yeah. Cause we like talking about pools.
[00:32:52] Jarred Morgan: Well, back to this more important thing that we're trying to do here. Some of us are trying to work.
[00:32:57] Eric Knight: Trying to interrupt the Rule Your Pool podcast, yeah.
[00:33:00] Jarred Morgan: That's a good one.
Price increases. Are you accounting for them?
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[00:33:04] Jarred Morgan: So back to the whole reflecting on what you did and how do we take what we learned over the past season and take it into the following year. And over the past few years, this is a common theme. There have been price increases. Price increases are just the nature of our business. They're going to happen, um, regardless of what we sell, what anybody sells. Whether it's equipment, pumps, filters, heaters, chemicals, chlorine, you name it, price increases are just a reality we all have to be aware of.
[00:33:34] Please be aware of them. Pay attention. Ask your distributing partner and build that into your price model. If you're a pool pro in your servicing pools, you have to know what you're paying and what your costs went up so that you can make adjustments accordingly.
[00:33:51] So many times the trap happens where prices will change, people are busy, they don't pay attention, they go two, three, four months sometimes. Even sometimes over a year without realizing it. And then they get past that year and they're like, well, I didn't make as much money as I thought I made. What happened? And then they see that their pricing went up 7, 8, 10%, 15% on some cases.
[00:34:16] That is going to have an impact on you. You have to be aware of what's going on in your business. And now is the time to do that. To look back, see if anything's changed. Is something changing for next year that you need to get ahead of? And build these things into your pricing structure.
[00:34:33] Eric Knight: So give me an example of that. If you're a pool pro listening to this, And you may not be aware of a price increase, how could you find out about them?
[00:34:40] Jarred Morgan: Uh, honestly ask your distributor. Say, hey, I want to look at the top 15 or 20 things that I bought this year, or just pick out 15 or 20 things that you know you bought this year. Go in there and say, what is my price?
[00:34:54] And look at it. Do you know what you're paying for these items? And then do a model where you say, okay, well, I know on average, you got to get an average pool here. Like, so let's say you treat 50 pools a week. And you know the average size of your pool with all of them combined, I know some are going to be 10,000, some are going to be 30,000.
[00:35:12] Well, let's say the average comes out to a 20,000 gallon pool. We'll take 50 times 20,000 gallons. You know how many gallons you're treating. You know roughly how many tabs, how many ounces of acid and yada, yada, yada. You go through the list and say, what does this cost me? On a monthly basis per pool? Am I charging enough?
[00:35:30] And then, you take that and say, okay, I also have operating costs for insurance, gas, just miscellaneous things that are required for operating a business. Are you accounting for those? Are you making money?
[00:35:43] Eric Knight: This is giving me a really good idea here, Jarred. I think what we ought to do is offer an off season coaching plan. Virtual meetings, maybe we'll do a webinar or two. Because it would be really helpful, certainly for chemical forecasting at a minimum. But even just a business crash course would be really helpful that we could do a webinar or something.
[00:36:01] Jarred Morgan: Yeah. What is your overhead? What are your hard costs that don't, they're not going to change. They're overhead. You have to account for them.
[00:36:08] Eric Knight: They're out of your control.
[00:36:08] Jarred Morgan: Yeah, you have to account for them. And I told Grant, my brother in law, who's a macho man, who came in here. One day I sat down with him and I said, Hey, you know, we have this other business over here.
[00:36:17] Are you accounting for all these things in our pricing? Understand that our overhead, which is insurance, just normal operating costs, gasoline. I mean, depending on where you're located, gas is expensive. And then if you track all these items, you can just run a quick P and L and see what it is month over month.
[00:36:35] And then you can build that into an overhead cost that you need to make sure you're building into your price structure. And ours, for example, I told him, Hey, 15 percent is just a flat. we don't do anything. We're still paying 15 percent of our cost. We've got to account for that. On top of the normal cost. So just look for it. Pay attention to it. Right now when things are a little slower, work on your business, work in your business.
[00:37:02] Eric Knight: I think that ties into a previous episode we did towards business owners about standardizing your pool service business.
[00:37:08] The importance of standardizing your chemistry is, is just a piece of that, but standardizing everything so that you can better forecast how many times a week do you need to go to distribution and restock. If you have a standard operating procedure for every single pool in your business, you're going to be able to predict a lot more accurately.
[00:37:25] Now this is more your wheelhouse, Jarred, than mine. I never did any of the business operations at Orenda. I was just marketing and education and all that, whatever you want to call it. I don't really have a title, but you actually had to do those things with the numbers and adjusting for prices and all that stuff.
[00:37:40] Maybe we should do a webinar where we just talk about what that is for a pool service pro. For the homeowners listening, sorry for the last nine minutes. We've completely wasted your time.
[00:37:49] Jarred Morgan: This is our industry, though. and it is important. There are real costs that go into maintaining a pool and running a pool business specifically. With insurance and overhead and all these things. And so racing to the bottom for price is not a winning strategy because at the end of the day, something is going to give. If you're racing on price, you're going to create shortcuts. You're going to do something, and ultimately your pool is going to pay the price. One way or another.
Closing
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[00:38:14] Eric Knight: And we don't want that. We want you to Rule Your Pool. And for the pool pros out there, we want you to Rule Your Pools, plural.
[00:38:19] Jarred Morgan: Bingo.
[00:38:20] Eric Knight: Anyway, this has been episode 129. Is there anything else you want to add to this, Jarred?
[00:38:24] Jarred Morgan: Uh, I don't think so. I'm, I'm glad to be back. Am I allowed to come back? Are you going to invite me back? Cause I know I've, I've had a good stiff arm.
[00:38:32] Eric Knight: Yeah, we'll see. I don't know. It depends on my mood that day.
[00:38:36] Jarred Morgan: I agree. Well.
[00:38:37] Eric Knight: No, I'm just kidding. The fans want you back, Jarred. I would have had you back on the last several episodes, but you're all like, no, I have a job. So, you know, what do you want me to do?
[00:38:46] Jarred Morgan: Just do what you can when you can.
[00:38:48] Eric Knight: That's exactly right. I'm Eric Knight with Orenda. This is Jarred. And, uh, we don't know what we're talking about in the next episode, but we are so grateful for you for still listening to this.
[00:38:57] Jarred Morgan: Thank you, everybody, seriously. We do genuinely appreciate it. I know people say it. I hope you can tell that we actually mean it. Keep in contact. We like hearing from y'all. Shoot us an email. Let us know your wins or if you're having problems with the pool and you want us to help, shoot us an email. Um, we will get the right person to the right place to help you.
[00:39:16] Eric Knight: We'll try anyway. All right. Thank you so much for listening until next time. Take care