The Spare Parts Episode: Be Ready for Anything

Ever finish a stop, glance at the truck, and realize you’re down to one gallon of chlorine with six pools to go? That pit-in-the-stomach moment is avoidable, and we walk through a field-tested system to keep your route moving without last-minute supplier runs or apologetic reschedules. Our goal is simple: turn your truck and garage into a lean, reliable inventory that protects your time and your bottom line.

We start with emergency essentials that punch above their weight. A 50-pound bucket of dichlor is the ultimate backup chlorine: stable on the shelf, easy to dose when pre-dissolved, and clutch when liquid stock runs low. Pair that with a spare pole and leaf rake so a broken net or a forgotten tool never derails your day. Then we get into power—a spare battery for Riptide or Bottom Feeder covers windy days, charging mishaps, and heavy debris, keeping you on schedule when it matters most.

The real difference-maker is habit. Use one, reorder one. Label buckets. Audit monthly. Avoid hoarding while making sure the must-haves never run out. Over time, this approach reduces supplier trips, cuts drive time, and boosts client trust because you finish jobs on the first visit. If you want a smoother route, fewer emergencies, and more profit per hour, this episode is your playbook.

• carrying dichlor to avoid chlorine shortages
• keeping a spare pole and leaf rake for breakages and losses
• adding backup batteries for Riptide and Bottom Feeder
• organizing parts in buckets and labeled zones
• stocking area-specific O-rings, lids and baskets
• keeping timer trippers and chlorinator wear parts on hand
• carrying a spare suction cleaner and hoses
• restocking immediately after use to avoid gaps
• balancing inventory without hoarding
• limiting supplier trips to planned reloads

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Chapters

• 1:51 Time Equals Money: Set The Stage
• 2:35 Three Must-Haves On Every Truck
• 7:29 Spare Batteries For Vac Systems
• 7:29 Why Extra Power Prevents Delays
• 10:35 Organizing Parts In Truck And Garage
• 14:44 Area-Specific O-Rings And Pump Parts

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:03

Hey, welcome to the Pooh Guy Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm going to talk to you about ways to save time out there, which translates to money. And this has a lot to do with inventory, supplies you want to have on hand, and things you may not think about is going to save you time out there so you don't have to stop in to your supplier and pick up something that you probably should have had in your truck or garage. Are you a pool service pro looking to take your business to the next level? Join the Pool Guy Coaching Program. Get expert advice, business tips, exclusive content, and get direct support. From me, I'm a 35-year veteran in the industry. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, I've got the tools to help you succeed. Learn more at swimmingpoollearning.com. And I'll start off by stating a few things that are basic that will stop you from having one of those red alert moments where you're kind of in a pinch now and you're struggling because this should have been in place to begin with. And I'll start with my top three here. Number one, you want to have a 50-pound bucket of dichlor on your truck. Dichlor is a stabilized chlorine, and it's a chlorine type that is not really purchased much out there because of the fact that it has cyaneric acid and it's kind of the cousin to trichlor, except dry dichlor is more pH neutral, and it's safe to use in all pool surface types. Although I probably wouldn't broadcast it directly on vinyl or fiberglass pools, I would just add it to a bucket and stir it in there, pour it in. And it's a great chemical to have because it's very long-lasting as far as shelf life. And it would be my number one emergency chlorine type to carry on a surface truck. Keep it on your truck at all times so that you have this emergency supply of chlorine. I can guarantee you it's gonna prevent you from that red alert moment where you have six stops left and you have one gallon of liquid chlorine left on your truck. So instead of diverting to your supplier or running into Home Depot to get some really cheap chlorine product, you definitely want to have this on your truck. Number two, a spare spare equipment, and I would specifically say a spare pole and a spare leaf rake. I can't tell you the times that I've actually broken my leaf rake or actually left it somewhere. And I've left my whole pole and leaf rake before at a pool stop. I was distracted, I don't know exactly what happened. Phone call or something, and I got to my truck. I didn't even have my pole or leaf rake. But the good news was I didn't have to really go back right away to get it because I always carry a spare pole and a spare leaf rake in my truck. So if anything were to happen to your pole or leaf rake, you have a spare one in your truck, and believe me, that comes in really handy because you may never need it, but that one time you're gonna need to use it, you have it on your truck. And a lot of pool pros carry various leaf rakes, and I'm in that category. You'll have a fine mesh leaf rake, you'll have something for the spa, you have a big one for windy situations. So just carry one extra is sometimes you know the minimum. You would want to have a few leaf rakes, and if you break one or lose one, you definitely would have a spare one on hand. And this last one is something you may not think about, but having a spare battery for the riptide or for the bottom feeder is something that you may want to invest in. Now, for the riptide, it's a little less expensive. You can get just a 20H battery. What I like about the little tiny H battery or 18H battery is you can actually put it on the riptide cart and you can just plug in the riptide to it and disconnect the connectors and plug it in, and it's easy to transport. We're not taking your primary battery out, just leave it where it's at, and then use this as a spare battery. It's also good to put it in the battery box to make the riptide more portable. And for the bottom feeder, I would suggest if you're using it a lot, to get a spare battery pack for the bottom feeder itself. If you go to their website, they do have a bottom feeder they sell with two batteries for$19.24 at this recording. You can save$100, of course, on that with promo code DVB100. Then they have actually a three-battery pack, that's three of their batteries for$15.67. Not sure if my discount code works for that, but you could buy a spare battery for about$589 as well. And this comes in handy, especially if you use it a lot and you do need that extra bit of gas in your vacuum system, and sometimes you forget to charge it, or there's a problem charging it one day, or you're just having a really bad day, and there's a huge amount of wind debris to clean up. Having the extra battery is definitely a time saver. You wouldn't want to revert to using your leafwake on the bottom of a pool, and the extra battery does save you from that problem. So, those are the three big ones that I see that I would definitely invest in and have on my truck so that I'm not kind of caught in the pinch where those items are necessary and I don't have them on my vehicle. Then I have to go to my supplier, and you can't just go to your supplier and buy a bottom feeder battery or an AH battery that's already fully charged. I don't think the suppliers carry those, but you get what I mean. You just order one, get one on Amazon, get a little 18H battery, that'll give you like an hour and a half, two hours of charge, maybe, and that's sufficient. And you can keep it in your truck and just make sure you keep it charged for those emergencies. So let me dig into some really vital inventory here. Now I have this old sheet that I created actually several years ago, where it has pool core part numbers on here, and this this I can actually send to you if you email me at David SmeepoLearning.com. If you shop at Superior Products or SCP, this should work for you there with these part numbers already on here. And I do have my preference for extra things that I carry and the way to carry them. So a lot of times you're gonna run out of room in your truck if you're like me and you're carrying a lot of extra parts and supplies. Fortunately, with a four-door truck, we can really stack the back seat pretty well. At my Honda Ridge Line, one side or both sides actually fold up, exposing the whole back of the back area for storage, but you probably wouldn't want to use the whole thing for storage. You would want to kind of modulate that with the back of your truck, and so you would have some buckets with parts in it. I just like reusing the trichlor buckets and I put parts in there, various parts in there. If you're fortunate to have a house with a garage, your garage is a great place for a lot of the spare parts. Although your spouse may disagree with this, I keep a lot of spare parts in the garage, and it's one of those things where I'm constantly going through my inventory and getting rid of a lot of stuff that I haven't used in a long time to clear it out. But it's a great place to keep a lot of spare parts so you don't have to go to the supplier to get them. But make sure you put them in your truck when you do need them. So let me start with some essentials here. And no matter how you transport or carry them, you're gonna want to have plenty of parts that are common. So find the pumps that you use commonly on your pool route. Here in my area of Southern California, we're Pentair heavy, 90% of the backyards are Pentair tan, and so it makes sense to have some Pentair O-rings parts like that on your truck. So, of course, you would want to carry the filter O-rings, and I have all the part numbers here again, and you would want the O-ring for the Penthair Clean and Clear Plus and the Penthair 4000 series and 2000 series on your truck. For sure, you would want to carry those, and again, each area is a little bit different. But if you have Penthair pumps, of course, I have a bunch of Whisperflow parts that I carry. I carry the V20200 Whisperflow basket, that's a thicker one, and then there's also a the Whisperflow pump lid O-ring, which is the PAC 101 3148. I also carry a see-through lid, believe it or not. I've had a couple of these crack over time on me, not very many, but having a lid just is good to have. Sometimes you'll get to a pool that's really old, also, and changing out that lid for the whisper flow or teleflow makes a big difference. And then you would want to carry those O-rings for those pumps, the thin O-ring, the uh PUR 101-3400, and I also carry a seal plate with me, just in case I need to replace it. That's kind of like the Achilles heel of the or Achilles tendon, I guess, of the Whisper Flow. The seal plate can get warped pretty easily. So those are the parts I carry for that. I do have some haywood pumps, so you definitely would want, like me, if you have haywood pumps to carry the super two O-rings. So basically, O-rings are important, and probably I would say I would always have at least two, probably three O-rings at all at all times. And rarely are you gonna change two O-rings in one day, but it does happen. And if you have three of them, you're fine. But if you just have one O-ring and you change it and need another one, then you're out of luck. And then you want to carry, of course, all the filter parts you're gonna need from the stem O-ring to the air bleeder valves on these filters. So I suggest making a list of all the filters on your pool route, all the pumps on your pool route, and then kind of inventory all of these together and find out you know how many O-rings you're gonna need to carry for Pentair filters, how many you're gonna carry for the haywood filters. And if you're not doing filter cleanings at that point and you're not tearing them apart, you probably don't need to carry the box of O-rings with you on your truck. But when you're when it comes time for filter cleaning time, put the box of O-rings in your truck and of course separate the pump lid O-rings from the filter O-rings, so you're gonna always want to carry those on your truck. So you kind of get an idea that for every pump that's pump type on your route or filter type on your route, you want to carry those spare parts, and just buy an inventory of them. And when you use one of those parts, make sure you replace that part. This is one of the most important things about inventorying things and something that could cause you much frustration if you're using these O-rings on your route, but you don't replace them in a timely manner, which I do immediately when I use when I write it down. I need to order another Whisperflow O-ring. You want to definitely restock the inventory because, like me, you may forget to order something that you should have, you're looking in your truck for it, and then you realize you never reordered it. Big problem. Very easily avoidable by placing an order for that right away once you use it. Again, you're gonna find this part list that I created pretty handy and helpful. Just email me at David Asumipo Learning.com and I'll get that over to you. Like, for instance, I carry intermatic mechanism timers also in case I have to change that out. I also carry the intermatic little on off trippers. You should have plenty of those as well because they do go bad, they get warped and bent, and you know, you wouldn't want to go to your supplier, get in line and get to the counter and say, Yeah, I need some intermatic on-off trippers, please. After waiting 30 minutes for it, it doesn't make a lot of sense. So have those on your truck. I carry a lot of rainbow chlorinator parts, and again, I have the part numbers here, it's easy to order. You have the oval check valve. You need definitely need a lot of those. The 8 in 8 inch, 8 feet tubing, black tubing is something you must have also. The tubing is one of the weak links of this uh offline chlorinator, should make it more robust. There's also check valve fittings. You can you can break parts of these pretty easily. Always carry, of course, an extra lid, and these lid o-rings are extremely important because the trichlor really ruins these O-rings in the lid very rapidly. So having the um R172009 O-ring is definitely important. These things get like really fat with the chemicals, and if you when you buy a new one, they're like super skinny, you'll be like, Whoa, what happened? What did they shrink the O-rings down? But no, in reality, they're really thin, and they just kind of get Bubba from all the chemicals that are interacting in the chlorinator there. I always carry an extra chlorine floater because I've broken these before and sometimes they just break, and it's good to have one on hand so you can float some chlorine tablets in there. Also good to have a spare floater in case you have a salt system that's not working, and you want to put trichlorine tablets in there, so carry a couple of these extra floaters. Now, again, just kind of go through all the parts that you get at your supplier on a regular basis, and then you want to inventory as much as you can on your truck if you can, and then inventory the rest of it in your garage. And over time and over the years, you're gonna build up probably too much inventory, in my opinion, because you're gonna get to kind of like this hoarding mentality. It's hard to avoid it when you start building inventory. I think it's human nature. I read this story one time about this person, I think he was at one point the longest person, lost at sea on his own, and he was in a lifeboat just by himself in the ocean. Can't remember how many days it was, but it was a super long time. But when they went into his house after he died, they went up into his attic, and this guy had like tons of canned food stacked up to the ceiling, you know, years worth of canned food because he was traumatized from being on that lifeboat all those all that time, and when he got back on dry land, he just always had inventory of food. Same thing here when you run out of something and you don't have the part, you kind of get paranoid like this, and you overbuy and you oversupply your inventory a lot of times. Like, for instance, I found the other day when I was going to my garage, I found three Pentair backwash pistons. It's like you don't really need three of them, but I think what happens, I bought one, I used it, then I bought another one. Then I'm like, well, I better have two on my truck, and then I ended up with three somehow. So don't you don't have to over-inventory, and again, it's one of those things that's hard not to do. Cleaner parts are extremely important to inventory as well. So go through all the cleaners on your route and make sure you have those parts on hand so that you can actually change them out while you're at the stop, get the cleaner working again. Now, if it's a more complicated cleaner repair, I always carry a spare cleaner on my truck. I carry a zodiac ranger, I just put it in the back of my bed. Try not to put it where it's gonna get damaged because I've actually broken my spare cleaners before by not being careful. If you want to be really careful, put it in the bed of your truck. But I do carry, I have like a spare navigator that just sits back there, and then the spare ranger is good. These are suction cleaners. I don't really carry spare pressure cleaners, they're not super popular on my route, but having a spare suction cleaner is great. Of course, spare hoses are really important. You know, I've gone to soft before where raccoons have chewed the cleaner hoses, and sometimes you can turn them, like twist them, so that the bite mark is underwater. Other times you can't, so you need to have these spare cleaner hoses to put them on the cleaner. So all these things will come to you as you're doing your pool route, what you're gonna need to have on your truck, and what you don't need to carry all the time, you just take them off your truck. But essentially, inventory enough stuff so that you really never have to go to your supplier unless it's a unless you're going to get supplies, I should say. So don't go to your supplier to get something that you should have on your truck or in your garage. Go to the supplier only when you're reloading your mentor inventory and chemicals on your truck. And this is gonna save you a huge amount of time and energy, and it does take time to build up this inventory. It's not gonna happen overnight, but after a year or two doing pool service, you should have enough inventory to get you through the week or that day without having to go pick up something in an emergency. Looking for other podcasts, you can find those on my website, swimmingpoollearning.com. On the banner, click on that podcast icon. There'll be a drop time in over 1800 podcasts for you there. And if you're interested in the coaching program that I offer, you can learn more at PoolGuyCoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have a great rest of your week and God bless.