Rain Rules For Pool Pros

Storm clouds don’t just bring water—they rewrite your entire pool route. We dive into a practical, low-drama system for handling rain without wasting chemicals, damaging equipment, or risking your safety. From the first messy storms of the season to those frustrating back-to-back rainy Tuesdays, we share how to protect margins and maintain clean, clear water with decisions based on forecast patterns, yard conditions, and a simple service policy that sets the right expectations.

We walk through when pre-storm superchlorination makes sense and when it’s just expensive overkill. You’ll hear why adjusting pH during active rain backfires, how to keep free chlorine steady through debris spikes, and which pools benefit from targeted dosing. Overflow panic? We explain why pre-draining is rarely needed, then outline safe, technician-tested ways to lower water after the rain: equipment hose bib with the pump running, submersible pumps on the first step, multiport waste mode, and a Pentair air bleed workaround—plus why to avoid DE push-pull backwash for draining to protect grids.

• why first rains dump debris and stress chemistry
• targeted superchlorination for debris-heavy pools only
• skip pH adjustments during active rain
• why pre-draining is rarely needed
• safe ways to drain after storms without harming DE grids
• quick-stop rainy-day workflow focused on chemicals
• how to shuffle routes for back-to-back rain weeks
• mindset shift and simple rain policy customers accept
• essential rain gear and where to find it

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Coaching Invite
• 2:59 Why First Rains Make Pools Worse
• 4:45 Should You Superchlorinate Before Storms
• 6:04 Don’t Pre-Drain And How To Drain Safely
• 10:24 What To Do On Rainy Service Days
• 13:35 Back-to-Back Rain And Route Juggling
• 16:30 Customer Expectations And Mindset Shift
• 19:23 Gear, Policies, And Where To Learn More

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:03

Hey, welcome to the Fool Gay Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm going to cover different aspects of rain out there with your swimming pool. And if you do swimming pool service, the rain can really be a problem with your scheduling. I'll go over some things to be aware of in those rainy days in the rain season. 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. I find that usually the first rain or two of the season is the worst because of all the dirt, all the dead leaves in the trees, nothing really affects them in the summer. And when the rain season starts here, we usually start the rain in October, November. Most of that stuff comes out of the I don't know out and goes into the pool right away. The first rain or two. And you'll see this on the roads as well. Most accidents happen, or a lot more car accidents happen in the first rain or two during the season because of all the oil on the streets and they're getting wet for the first time in a long time. And so car accidents triple or quadruple here in California. Besides that, no one knows how to drive in the rain here. We just kind of go the same speed where the rain or shine. So it becomes very dangerous here. And you'll find that the pools will be pretty messy. The first couple rainstorms, all the dirt on the sidewalks get washed in, or around the deck get washed into the pool. And it's one of those things where you just have to deal with the extra mess from the rain. And it's just part of doing pool service. I've been doing this a long time, and the rainy season is probably the one I like second least. I think the least that I like is the wind season here, which in California is October through February. But I'm just not a big fan of rain here either. When we had these drought years where we had like one or two rainy days the whole year, those were really good parts of the season. But of course, the side effect was drought restrictions and all the stuff that comes with it. But we're back to a pretty normal rain pattern here where we get some heavy rain now, um, like we used to get all the time. So here are some things to consider with the rain in your pool. One thing I think that is notable is then I get this question asked a lot. You know, should I superchlorinate my pool before the rain gets here? And I would say in most cases, it's not really necessary unless you're getting storms predicted. And I like looking at the long-term forecast. If you're getting a lot of storms predicted for that month, and you may have rain on consecutive service days, then it might be logical to superchlorinate certain pools on your route. But in general, sometimes the rain will miss or it'll be lighter than they're predicting, and you've just wasted some product in the pool. So it's not something that I recommend all the time, but you kind of play it by ear, and those pools that you think are gonna need it, especially the pools that have a lot of heavy foliage around it, you're gonna get a lot of leaf debris and dirt in there. Then, yes, in that case, I would definitely put more chlorine in that pool before the rainstorm just to prevent organic staining and different problems that may arise from all the leaf debris falling in the pool. But a lot of pools don't really have a lot of debris that falls in during the rainstorm, so I wouldn't bother superchlorinating every pool. And again, the rainstorm may miss and you've just wasted a lot of chemicals in the pool. And I wouldn't adjust the pH either after the rainstorm or during the rainstorm if you're servicing pools in light rain, because the rain in my area at least is pretty acidic and it's gonna kind of mess up the readings a little bit, so I wouldn't worry about the pH at that point. Just basically the make sure that you have chlorine in in the pool before the rainstorm and the superchlorinate, kind of based on certain situations where it may be necessary. And I also get asked this question should I drain a little bit of water out of the pool before a rainstorm? Because you know they're predicting one or two inches of rain. I don't want the pool overflowing. And in most cases, I would say there's no need to drain water out of the pool if you have adequate drainage around the pool deck, and it's something that is not necessary in most cases either. And sometimes you'll drain one or two inches of water, and then the rainstorm misses. So if you need to drain water, you can drain water after the rainstorm, or maybe if it's an emergency and water is going to be flooding in your house, which is a pretty rare instance. Most pools the builder will build so that there's drains, or some way of protecting you know water intrusion into the house if the pool does get overflowed with water. There are those exceptions. I've had service accounts before where sandbags were necessary to protect the backsliding door from water intrusion when the pool overflows. But in most cases, it's just a lot of water in the pool, and it doesn't really damage the pool system to have the water all the way up to the coping. You know, the skimmer opening is completely uh below water, and it's not really a big deal. The only drawback is that it's not going, you're not gonna have leaf debris being skimmed off the pool surface with the water that high in the pool. And to me, it's really not anything detrimental to the pool to be filled above the skimmer opening. It's just the pool might be a little dirtier than normal, and then it'll eventually drop down naturally with some evaporation in the in the rainy season. And here in California, it may be raining one week and then 90 degrees the next. So it's not a big deal here. And you can always drain the pool down if necessary. Most of the builders, when they pressure test the line, leave the hose spigot on the plumbing, and you can easily drain the pool down by attaching a garden hose and turning on the pump, opening up the hose bib, and that will drain the pool as the pump is running. I wouldn't recommend draining the pool in backwash mode if you have a D filter. They're not it's not really designed to use the backwash mode as a drain. Now, if you have a multi-port valve, then you you can of course uh drain the pool in waste mode. That's different than the push-pull piston. If you're draining the pool with the push-pull piston, the problem is that the water is going inside the grids and inflating them, and that could shorten the lifespan of the D grids. So it's not recommended that you drain a pool with a push-pull piston in backwash mode. Now, of course, if you have a pentar filter with a large air bleeder on top, you can connect tubing to that. They do sell the tubing that connects to the pent air uh filter, the air bleed assembly on top. It's a 3/4 inch tubing, uh flex tubing, and you can put that on there and you can actually open that air relief valve and drain some water out of the pool that way. That's perfectly safe. And again, the best way is with the hose bib or spigot that's kind of built into the equipment. If all else fails, you don't have that. You can, of course, use a submersible pump on the first step. You can get one for under$100. You attach a garden hose to it, drop it in to the first step, plug it in, and that will drain the pool pretty rapidly as well. So there's different ways of draining the pool down if necessary. In most cases, you don't have to do that here in my area, but sometimes in emergencies, you will have to drain some water down, especially if water intrusion is a possibility. Sometimes customers will call you to come drain their pool down. Usually I try to explain to them over the phone or through a text message how to do it. You can send a picture. It's a good idea to have a picture in your phone, by the way, of a host bigot on the equipment area so that you could just send it to them. Probably could pull one off Google, but that way they kind of know what to look for and explain to them how to attach a garden hose to it, how to turn the pump on and drain the pool. Now, in situations where you have to get there because there's water intrusion possible, you can go out there. Uh sometimes you have to go out there in the rain, unfortunately, and do that. But there's a service charge for that, of course, because you're kind of risking your life to go out there to drain their pool down. My dedicated repair technician that I use a lot for a lot of my installs refuses to go out in the rain because he was in a pretty significant accident in the rain one time when he was doing some repairs out there in the rain, and so he just refuses to go out there because it's just way too dangerous. There's not a lot of repairs you can do anyway in the rain, so him being out there was kind of foolish anyway, and so he he just doesn't go out period in any kind of measurable rain. Now, measurable rain is another aspect we should talk about because how much rain is enough to call it a day, and I really recommend you having a service agreement that you can refer to for the customers. I have one, it's a one page that I've refined and kept very simple, and I can email that to you. Just send me an email at David at Swimmingpoollearning.com, David at Swimmingpoollearning.com, and I can get that over to you. But there's a a small section, actually just one sentence for rain, and it says rainy day policy, chemicals will be added and pool will be cleaned the following visit. So that leaves it pretty vague for them. You know, if I'm gonna go out there in the rain, I'll just add chemicals, but I won't clean the pool. So if you do need to go out and it's maybe medium rain, maybe like half an inch that day, and you're getting fairly wet. And by the way, I also recommend having the right gear, waterproof boots. If you go to my website, let me go over there real quick, and I'll show you. I have a list of kind of the gear that I wear, and I have some rainy day gear as well for you. If you go down to the bottom of my webpage, go to swimming poollearning.com. I have a pool guide gear section, and I have my rain gear, my frog togs, and my waterproof boots that I wear out there. You can also get rubber boots, you know. I think Walmart sells them. You can wear the full rubber boots if necessary. But a certain amount of rain is when you kind of pull the plug. You don't even go out there. The customer can't even see you if you're out there or not. And if your service agreement says you'll just chemicals will be added and pool will be clean the following visit, that leaves it vague enough so that you can basically skip the pool depending on how much rain you have. There's something to be said about too much rain, you can't even see the bottom of the pool, so you can't vacuum the pool, and you don't want to set a precedent that you're gonna go out there and skim the pool, brush it, and clean it. When it's raining, the thing you're gonna do is add chemicals and clean the pool the following visit, and just leave it at that so the customer knows that you're not really doing much out there on a rainy day. There's not much you can do anyway. It's pretty much like the landscaper, gardener, they can't really mow the lawn in the rain, they can damage it, you know, pull up the grass, and there's not much they can do in the wet weather, they can't use their leaf blowers, and so they're not doing much either in the rain. You know, everything pretty much comes to a standstill when you're getting one or two inches of rain, and it's up to you to decide when you want to pull the plug and not go out in the rain. And I get this question asked a lot. Well, if it's gonna be raining till like 11 a.m., would you still go out and finish the pools later in the day? And my answer is I wouldn't do that. I if you're gonna go out at all and do service, you're gonna just check the chemicals, make sure that there's nothing weird happening, and you'll be in and out of each stop within like three to five minutes, and you'll finish your whole route in I guess 45 minutes or an hour if you do go out during the rain, because all you're doing is checking to make sure that there's enough chlorine in the pool basically to hold from week to week, and there's not much pool cleaning happening. Now, situations will develop, and this has happened here, where you have rain on a Tuesday, and then the following week, rain's predicted again on that following Tuesday. And theoretically, you wouldn't want to skip a pool and not service it for three weeks. Bad things can happen, and the customer, of course, may complain that they're not getting what they pay for as far as service. And so, what I suggest doing is if necessary, move some pools around. You know which customers are the ones that are going to not be happy with you missing two weeks in a row, and those customers you want to service maybe on a Monday or a Wednesday, depending on if the rain's not gonna it's not gonna be raining on those days. So maybe moving pools around and not doing your Monday route that week if if you can, and moving pools from Tuesday there. It gets really messy and really hard to do sometimes when you have rain on your service day consecutively in a row. It doesn't happen very often, but it does happen, and it's one of those things where you have to make some adjustments to your pool route so that those pools are covered at least, and you can go there and clean them, check the chemicals. And again, no one really is looking at their pool too much in the winter time anyway, or the rainy season time. They're not focused on it, and as long as the pool is not turning green or not full of debris, most customers are not going to hassle you on the fact that you can't really clean the pool if it's raining two or three weeks in a row. A lot of it has to do with, of course, our own obligation or our own feeling of obligation to service, and we kind of project too much on the customer. You know, if it's raining, we're kind of feeling like, oh, we need to go out there and clean the pool because they're paying me for it. This is kind of like a service attitude that you develop. But in reality, like I just mentioned, the customer is not really looking at their pool, they're thinking about other things like, oh, is this gonna flood my planter? Is this gonna damage, is my roof okay? Is it gonna cause any water intrusion into my house? These are things they think about the most. They're not looking, they're not back there saying, Well, I hope my pool guy shows up and cleans the pool today, even though it's raining. That's usually not how the customer looks at their pool during the rainy day. They're thinking about their drive to work, they're thinking about other things that are a factor of the rain, and probably the last thing they think about is you coming there to clean the pool in the rain. So it's one of those things where you have to kind of shift your mindset and kind of get out of this kind of service attitude and providing excellent service no matter what, and realize that in the rain it is dangerous. You probably don't want to push yourself to go out there in an inch or two of water. It makes zero sense to me. Now, if it's raining like half an inch or a quarter of an inch, I usually go out and service the pools, check the chemicals, do the best I can. Don't clean the pools because my service agreement says I don't clean the pools in the rain. It's just kind of futile anyway, because the breeze is gonna fall down, you're not gonna be able to vacuum the bottom of the pool. All these things are factors that prevent you from even attempting to clean the pool because the water is hitting, the rain's hitting the water, and you can't even see the bottom, and it's not necessary to do that. Just check the chemicals, get out, and move on to the next pool. And the rainy days sometimes are really good because they're short days for you, and you can get through your route, like I said, in about an hour, hour and a half, and not really worry about anything. And again, if you need a copy of the service agreement and you can modify it as in word format, you can add things to it if you wanted to. I just don't like adding too much. I like keeping things kind of vague so that customers understand that I'm not going to clean the pool for sure. And I'll just check the chemicals that day. Uh, email me at David at swimmingpoollearning.com and I'll get that over to you. And if you're looking for other podcasts, you can of course find those by going to my website, swimmingpoollearning.com. On the website, don't forget to go down to the bottom and look at the pool guy gear, and you can get some rain gear there as well from Amazon. And if you're interested in the coaching program or more podcasts, you can find those on my website. Just click on the podcast icon on the banner, and there'll be 1800 podcasts for you to listen to 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 you rest of your week? God bless.