Full Service Pool Routine: What Pros Actually Do

Stop overdelivering for free and start running a cleaner, faster, more profitable route. We break down a practical pool service system that scales, from smart service tiers to a weekly workflow that keeps quality high and labor tight. You’ll learn how to set expectations with chemical-only, mid-tier, and full-service offerings, and when to upgrade a client based on debris load, pool size, and their appetite for DIY.

We share a simple order of operations that saves minutes at every stop: visual scan, equipment check, surface clearing with a light soap mix or a purpose-built surface cleaner, a thorough skim pass, tile cleaning with the right product for the surface, efficient vacuuming, and a final brush that prevents algae and polishes the finish. Along the way, we compare tile cleaners and how to handle acid safely, and we explain why pushing dirt to the main drain or brushing everything to the deep end leaves pools looking half-done.

Vacuuming strategy is where routes win or lose time. We cover when “vacuum when needed” belongs in your service agreement, how to spot vacuum using an existing cleaner hose, and why tools like Riptide, Bottom Feeder, VacDaddy, and Water Tech units help employees deliver consistent results without wrestling hoses. Then we get into the money: time caps by pool size, recovery plans after windstorms or trimming days, and pricing that reflects volume and debris realities in markets with larger pools.

If you’re ready to tighten your workflow, reduce callbacks, and protect margins without compromising on crystal-clear water, this guide is your playbook. Subscribe, share this with your team, and leave a review with your best time-saving tip—we’ll feature our favorites on a future show.

• building tiered services from chemical-only to full service
• visual inspection and equipment checks every visit
• surface clearing with soap or surface cleaner
• tile care options and safe acid handling
• vacuuming strategy and service agreements
• brushing technique to prevent algae
• tool choices for faster v

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting Up Smarter Service Tiers
• 3:25 Visual Checks And Equipment Basics
• 6:07 Clearing Surfaces And Tile Care
• 11:34 Vacuuming Strategy And Service Agreements
• 15:49 Brushing To Prevent Algae
• 19:19 Efficient Vacuum Tools And Methods
• 21:12 Coaching And Resources

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:51

Hey, welcome to the Pool Grey Podcast Show. I just did an episode talking about doing too much overall on your service accounts, you know, going back to the stop when it was in your service day, things like that. I'm going to touch a little bit on what you should be doing when you clean a pool and what's kind of overdoing it in some cases and what should be done every week as part of your full service kind of routine at your stops. 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. It's not a bad idea to have tiered services. What I mean by this is different levels of service you can offer the customers in your area. Like in my area of Southern California, not everyone needs full service. And if you offer tiered service, you can actually get more accounts. And this is a way to also kind of lighten your load out there as well. You can do chemical only where you just check the chemicals, add the chemicals, and then the customer takes care of their pool. There's actually a big need for this because a lot of customers can do their own pool and they just don't want to do the chemistry. They find that it's difficult or time consuming, and they rather leave it up to someone else to do the chemicals for their pool. And so chemical-only services can be a lucrative avenue for you out there. Then there's the chemical service plus skimming the pool and also checking the baskets. It's also a good service to offer because you're one level up, you're getting the debris off the surface for the customer while you're checking the chemicals and you're cleaning the baskets. And then you can also do one more level and do brushing, skimming, chemicals, and basket cleaning. And then, of course, the final level would be the full service where you brush the pool, you skim a net, you vacuum the pool, you clean the tiles. And that would be what I consider a full service stop, where those are kind of required of you in order for you to consider that a full service service. So I'll check the chemicals, then I'll go. Well, actually, the first thing I do, I'll back up is I'll you know assess the pool visually. I'll look at it, see if everything looks okay. Then I'll go to the equipment, turn the pool on if it's not on, and I'll also assess the equipment, check for leaks and things like that. This should be a basic routine where you do this week in and week out. So you're this is not something you charge extra for. Regardless of what service tier, you should always have an eye on the equipment. Even if you're doing chemical only, you have to turn the pool on anyway to add chemicals. So it's a good idea to visually inspect everything to make sure nothing is leaking at the equipment pad. So after you do those basic things, which are included in any tiered service at this point, you would move on to doing the full service at the pool. What I like to do is I spray a little Dawn soap in there, mixed with water, maybe like a 20 to 1 ratio that kind of takes the glare off the surface, and I can see the bottom clearly, but it also will push some dirt and debris to the sides of the pool, so it's really effective. Jack's Magic makes a really cool little drop you could put in there. It's called Jack's Magic Surface Cleaner, and it kind of does what the soap does to a next level where all the dirt gets pulled to the side. It's pretty effective. Now, there's some guys that actually use like an electric leaf blower and they blow everything to one side of the pool. I I've never done that, but you know, maybe it's worth a try on your route, see if that's effective. But the dish soap usually will take everything from the center and kind of pull it to the sides, and then I'll walk around with my leaf rake. I usually skim the pool twice around, sometimes three times. Now, you skim first for a number of reasons, and I think the main reason is it'll dislodge debris that's on the side of the tiles, it'll drop whatever's floating to the bottom. So when you go to vacuum up, you're not going to have kind of stray debris falling later. So two or three times, two is usually sufficient, and I'll skim the surface to get it really clean, and then I'll of course clean the tile to get anything else that's stuck on there off. I just use a clip-on tile brush. I like the purity purity um pool tile brush, it clips on your pool pole. They have replaceable heads, so it's a really easy kind of tool to use. Some guys carry the wooden brush. I used to carry this around too, the wooden tile brush, but it became kind of a pain to carry that back with my pole and everything. So I just use the purity pool clip on one. Now, for tile soap, there's lots of choices. There's some that you may want to be cautious about. The Biodex tile soap, you know, has acid in there, so it can stain actually the pool surface itself. So you gotta be careful with that. I don't use that one, I don't I don't recommend it for that reason because it does it can stain the surface, the decking, and so I think that's a that's a good tile soap by the way. Works excellent, but it takes a little extra effort and care when you're using it. I like the arrow, the red arrow tile soap that you get at your supplier. That's a pretty good tile soap. It does have acid in it as well, but not nearly to the level of the the biodex tile soap. So the arrow scale off tile cleaner, the red one, is really good. It has a little bit of acid in there, and just be careful around the decking, you don't get any on there. You can all, of course, use the blue arrow soap, you know. The biodex, I think it's the biodex 300 is the one I'm referring to. It has more acid in there, so just be a little careful with that one. And there's other tile soaps you can pick up, those are the ones that I'm pretty more pretty much familiar with. Geyser is another one by Hasa. The geyser is like a kind of a paste that you mix with a little bit of acid. Again, the acid is used to help kind of take the scale off, so this is why a lot of the tile soaps have the acid, just be cautious with it. The geyser comes in a gallon uh container, I think it's still readily available, and it's spelled G Y S A R. And this is Geyser F Tile Bright, and this is really good. You want to kind of cut maybe a chlorine uh gallon and use the bottom of it, or just get a container, type of ore container, and you put it, you put the geyser and a little bit of bureaucracy acid, mix it together, and you have a pretty powerful tile soap that kind of sticks on the tile as you're cleaning it. So I recommend the geyser as well, and just put a tiny bit of acid in there, you don't need a lot of it in there, and it works really effectively. So, definitely check out their downloadable use sheet so you don't damage anything, but be cautious with these tile soaps and acid, of course. And if you're you're paranoid about it, just use a standard tile soap with no acid in there. So clean the tile, and then other debris that was on the tile will fall down to the bottom, and then you want to vacuum the bottom of the pool. Now, here is where you have a lot of leeway, and I recommend having a service agreement that states what you're gonna do because sometimes the customer is gonna assume you're gonna vacuum every time, and you can easily vacuum the pool every time if you have a vacuum system, and it's something to consider is how you want to structure your business, especially with employees. I would recommend that if you have employees that you make it a rule that they vacuum the pool every time they're there. Now they don't have to have the manual vacuum hook vacuum hose and hook it up to the system, they can use the vacuum system as well, and that qualifies as vacuuming the pool. And I would recommend going that route versus manually vacuuming the pool every week. Unless there's a lot of dirt in the bottom and there's no automatic cleaner, then they will have to vacuum the pool each week. Sometimes, if there's an automatic cleaner, you just simply take the cleaner head off, put it on a deck, and connect your manual vacuum head and use a cleaner hose to vacuum to spot vacuum the pool, and that qualifies. I have a service agreement, you can get that from me by emailing me, David at swimming poollearning.com, and in that agreement it says that it says vacuum. I'll vacuum the pool when needed. So that gives you an out as well. So if you're kind of stacked and you're busy and you can't you don't want to really vacuum that pool, you don't have to. And typically you can drop in the bottom feeder or drop in, you know, your vacuum head connected to the cleaner host, and that qualifies as vacuuming the pool. And there are some instances where you can just skim the debris off the bottom and you don't need to vacuum the pool that week. I really recommend having a cleaner in every pool, suction side cleaner, pressure side cleaner if it's set up that way. And and the last resort, of course, you can sell the customer a robotic pool cleaner. I'm not a big fan of those on service routes. They're fine for homeowners that do their own pool, but on service routes, there's a little caveat about them putting the cleaner in during the week or you putting in while you're servicing the pool. And it's not quite as convenient as a suction side cleaner that's in the pool all the time, vacuuming out the dirt and debris. So, in a lot of cases, you don't need to vacuum the pool, and you want to spend extra time doing the other things. Now, I left brushing to the end, and I'm gonna go back to vacuuming in a minute, but I wanted to touch on brushing the pool. I really think it's imperative to brush every pool thoroughly every time. I did a podcast recording with Rudy Stinkowitch a couple years or a few years back when he came out with his new algae book, and it's really imperative that you do follow this to prevent algae in a pool, and it works highly effectively if you implement this. And I know it's one of those kind of getting lazy doing pool service kind of things, brushing the pool thoroughly, every pool on your route, you know, 14-15 pools a day. It's good exercise, and it's actually effective in preventing algae. And if you brush the steps, the walls, everything thoroughly, algae, microalgae doesn't tend to stick on the walls as much. And just by brushing the pool, you can prevent algae blooms or algae growth, and it's something that you should be implementing on all the pools on your route. You can get either a poly brush with the stainless steel bristles in there. I like the sweepies brush myself, and I like the poly stainless steel mixture because it gives you that little extra leverage on the plaster and pebble tech pools. Now, you don't want to use this on a fiberglass or vinyl pool, you just want to use a standard nylon or poly brush without stainless steel in there. And in some cases, you may just want to use a pure stainless steel brush on Pebble Tech or some plaster pools out there. You can get the A and B, you know, 12-inch or whatever, 10-inch stainless steel brush, and use that on those pools. I find that to be really effective as well in preventing algae. You just have to know that the stainless steel product cannot really be used on fiberglass pools or vinyl pools because it'll damage the liner, it'll scratch the fiberglass. So only use that in a polymix stainless steel brush on a plaster or pebble tech pool. And I find that brushing the pools, and there's some pool guys that have that gigantic 48-inch pool brush. I tried that one time for like a week and I couldn't use that thing, it was just gigantic. I understand the speed of it, but to me it was kind of useless, and I couldn't get the hang of it, so I just use a regular pool brush at this point. But brushing the pools are really critical, and I brush it after you vacuum because if you miss a spot here and there, brushing it gives that pool a really clean look. I wouldn't recommend brushing the pool before vacuuming because it takes about 10 minutes sometimes for all the dirt and debris to settle back down, and it really doesn't pay to brush before you vacuum. Brushing is something that you're doing to prevent algae and to kind of give that pool a final polish so that you don't leave any spots of dirt here and there. Now going back to vacuuming one more time here, I don't think it's a good method to brush the pool to the deep end and then maybe vacuum the deep end. Doesn't make any sense to do that, nor do I think it's smart to put it on main drain and brush all the dirt to the drain. Invariably there's gonna be dust in the air that's you know in the pool, I should say, still floating around. I don't know why I said air, and it just settles to the bottom, and then you leave the pool dirty. So that's not a good method, I would just say that doesn't work and it's not effective. You want to physically drop a vacuum in there. There are times when you're gonna have to set a put a manual vacuum in the pool to vacuum it if it's got a lot of dust and dirt in there. So you have to, of course, eventually manually vacuum the pool either with your 50-foot pool hose with the vacuum head or with the automatic cleaner hose, and you connect it to that cleaner and vacuum the pool. The vacuum systems are great because a lot of times when you have these suction cleaners, there's really not much in there, but some leaf debris here and there, maybe a little bit of dirt that the cleaner misses, and having the bottom feeder to drop it in there is great. The riptide is good as well, the vacuum the pools. You know, employees they they like either of these systems because it just makes their life easier, you know, than system vacuuming the pool with the pool hose and the vacuum head. A lot of pool companies like the Vac Daddy for their employees as well. Give them a Vac Daddy, they can vacuum the pool without having to get the pool hose out and connecting it and vacuuming it. So all these things, you know, if you have a little coqueto vacuum that also will satisfy a lot of customers that you're vacuuming the pool. I mean, it looks like a toy, I understand that, but they can be effective in spot vacuuming spas and pools. The water tech devices are great as well. I'm a big fan of the precision version 10. You know, you can vacuum entire pools with it or spot vacuum it, or you can get their larger volt, their larger volt fx fx a cleaner, and that's also a pretty good vacuum for the spas and pools. Bottom line, you can implement a variety of different ways to vacuum the pools out. I would really caution you to not leave any debris in the pool after you service the pool and leave. That that's like kind of you know going to a car wash and they leave the windows dirty. It's something that you really want to emphasize with your employees and of course get that ingrained in yourself. That when you service the pool and clean it, you're not leaving debris on the bottom. You're either brushing it so that it'll kind of settle evenly if it's a little bit of dirt left over from vacuuming, if there's any leaf debris. You do want to get it all out of the pool. You don't want to leave it with automatic cleaner to get because what's gonna happen? The cleaner is gonna get stuck on a pebble or something, and then the pool looks half cleaned at that point. It's gonna happen, so leave that pool as clean as you can leave it, you know. And then, of course, this goes into the last thing I'm gonna say here, which is there is a time limit that you should spend at these pools vacuuming them. If there's a windstorm, this should be in your service agreement as well. Or if there's something like a tree trimmer that leaves the pool messy, you can't spend an hour there vacuuming the pool and getting it cleaned up at that point. You have other pools to attend to. So set a 25-minute time limit at all your pools so that you know once you reach that time limit, you can move on. You have to move on and leave it as clean as you have left it. In most cases, you know, if you have pools that are big, you want to give yourself more time. The 25-minute limit is mainly for like Southern California, Florida, parts of Arizona where we have smaller pools. But if you're in Texas, of course, 25 minutes is not gonna do it, and you charge accordingly to pool size. So if you have one of those 35,000 or several of those 35,000 or 4040-gallon pools, you're gonna spend more time there, of course, because you're you're doing two pools in one basically. So you're you're building accordingly. That's why in Texas you can charge 250, 350 for monthly pool service because some of these pools are gigantic. So you're not charging based on the pools per se just across the board. You have to account for heavy debris pools, larger pools. You set your service rate and you set your timer for those pools based on the size. But for an average pool, 20 minutes, 25 minutes should be your maximum. You should be able to clean a 15,000 gallon pool in that time limit, no problem. Usually less than that, 15 minutes, and you should not be spending 40 minutes cleaning a 15,000 gallon pool. So I want to emphasize that it's not technically based just strictly on time, but the pool size is a factor. And I'm kind of basing this off a 10 or 15,000 gallon pool, which is typical here in Southern California. There are 35,000 gallon pools, but they're not super typical in my area. And you want to make sure that you're not spending too much time cleaning these pools and not getting paid for your time. If you're spending 40 minutes again at a 10,000-gallon pool, you're overdoing it at that point. And if you're spending an hour at a 40,000 or 50,000 gallon pool, that's probably typical, 45 minutes to an hour of those larger pools. So don't feel like everything has to be done at a certain time. There is factors like pool size as well. I'm just saying you're kind of you kind of know when you're spending too much time at a pool and you want to kind of stop doing that, otherwise you're losing money on your pool route, and you should charge accordingly based on heavy dream, heavy debris pools, and larger pools as well. If you're looking for other podcasts, you can find those by going to my website, swingpoollearning.com. On the banner, there's a podcast icon. Click on that. There'll be a drop down menu, 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 rest of your week and God bless.