From Trucks to Borates: Pool Service Questions

Ever wonder why a product that makes your job easier somehow never shows up on store shelves? We tackle that head-on with borates: how 50 ppm boric acid helps tame rising pH in saltwater pools, reduces chlorine and acid use, and even cuts down on algaecide. We walk through where to buy it online, how to test it accurately, and why some retailers avoid stocking it despite clear demand. The bigger takeaway: when you meet customers where they are, you win more than a single sale—you win the relationship.

From the pad to the pickup, we get practical about business decisions that compound. Thinking about a new service truck? Mileage and condition beat brand loyalty when your route adds 15–20k miles a year. We share real thresholds for when to buy, what to avoid, and why the smartest investment isn’t always the shiniest one on the lot. Then we dive into vac systems with a pro’s eye: carts like Riptide and Power Vac deliver speed in heavy debris, while cordless options like the Bottom Feeder trade thrust for zero-cord convenience and rapid deployment. 

Client optics matter too. A short, visible vacuum pass can transform how customers perceive value, even when the water looks clean. We offer a simple framework: keep “vacuum as needed” in your agreement, default to a quick cordless pass when feasible, and train your team for consistency. Finally, we break down generic versus OEM parts for popular cleaners like the MX6 and MX8—what’s worth the savings, what can backfire, and how manufacturer contracts shape what local stores can carry. The goal isn’t to pick sides; it’s to protect uptime, margins, and trust.

• why borates stabilize pH and reduce chemical demand
• why many stores don’t stock boric acid and how to buy it
• how to test for borates with reliable strips
• business logic of stocking what customers want
• how to pick a service truck by mileage and condition
• cordless vs cart vac systems and when each wins
• whether to vacuum every visit for better optics
• using “vacuum as needed” while showing visible work

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Mailbag Setup
• 3:22 Borates: Benefits And Supply Gaps
• 6:43 Buying Boric Acid Online And Testing
• 10:09 Business Lesson: Stock What Customers Want
• 13:20 Choosing A Pool Service Truck
• 19:14 Cordless Vs Cart Vac Systems

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:51

Alright, welcome to the Pool Grey Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm going to answer some of the YouTube questions I get. I do this podcast on occasion, and I think it's great to kind of hear different subjects kind of condensed into sound bites, I guess, if you want to put it that way. But I'll answer the questions in more of an expanded way than I can on YouTube. And these cover a variety of different subjects for you. 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. The first one is from a video I did on natural chemistry. They have a bore product. Well, it's just basically boric acid powder in a bucket with their label on it, and they label it their Pro Series. So it should be available as suppliers, but I think a lot of distributors aren't carrying it. And the question is, you know, I'm going to test for the possibility of adjusting the bore, so they constantly struggle with raise rising page in my saltwater pool. What I find odd is that no pool supply company in the Southwest Florida area has boric acid. Not even Leslie's or Pinchapenny. Not even for delivery. Nor do they test for it. And I think his point is, you know, if this product exists, then why doesn't anyone carry it? And it's one of those catch-22s in any industry, but in particular in the pool industry, this is the product that's going to, of course, keep you from using other products in the pool that are very profitable for distributors and pool stores to actually sell you. So basically, you're going to use less chlorine, less muuratic acid when you add this product, and you're probably going to not need any algecides during the season if you keep the level in your pool at 50 parts per million. Now you can test for it pretty easily yourself by getting test strips off of Amazon. They sell boric test strips there that are, I think, pretty accurate. You can either use the Lamotte brand or the uh Hawk brand. They're they're pretty good as far as testing. And you can order the boric acid online. So that's why I don't understand why they don't carry things. It's a head scratcher. If someone's gonna go outside of your store and buy the product anyway, wouldn't it be logical for you to sell it? Capture the client so they come into the store, maybe they'll buy an automatic cleaner from you, buy other supplies from you, or use you if they need a repair or something. So just to blanket like say I'm not gonna carry Bory products because these enhancers allow me to sell less of other products, it's kind of something that doesn't really work in business, in my opinion, because the product is available elsewhere. Now, if the product was not available anywhere but pool stores and they wanted to kind of stop you from doing that, then that's perfectly fine. I mean, you then you wouldn't, you know, the boys would not exist or the board sales would dry up. This happened to the owner of IKEA when he started to make his little furniture that's sold in boxes and you assemble it at home. All the furniture manufacturers in Sweden boycotted him and he couldn't get anyone to make his product or give him materials for his product, so he just went to Poland and did that. So there's there's always an out, and you really can't corner or block a product on the market. And so the Borid products are great, they're a great way to use less chlorine, less chemicals in the pool, and they work highly effectively. So you would want to order this online if you can't find it locally. A good online supplier for this, and my go-to supplier is dudadesel.com. So D U D A Diesel, like the diesel truck or dieselengine.com, and they have Bork Acid Powder, the little FedEx, over to you at a pretty reasonable rate. Here's one where someone asked me about a truck for pool service. They're looking at a 2004 Chevy Silverado with 91,000 miles on it, in excellent condition for$10,000 for pool service. Now, this is a full-size truck, but you you know, this is something that we could talk about as well, probably in a different podcast. I've done a few of these already on full size versus mid-size trucks or compact trucks. And the thing that I look at for a pool service truck is not necessarily the make of the truck, Toyota, Nissan, Chevrolet, Ford. What I look at is the condition of the vehicle and the mileage on the vehicle. So in pool service, 91,000 miles is great because then you have you can add a lot of miles to that vehicle without going over my threshold, which is I would say around 200,000 miles is when you would start to look for a new truck, my Nissan Frontier that I had for many many years. I sold it when it had 230,000 miles, something like that. It was pretty high mileage at that point, and then then a lot of problems started happening. I put a new engine in, by the way, as well, at 180,000 miles. I thought it would last longer than that, but you know, it's a Nissan. Basically, the low mileage is what you're looking for versus the truck model, and the the mileage is everything because you're going to be putting you know 15 to 20,000 miles a year on that vehicle. So if you start low, then you can keep that truck longer, in my opinion, versus having another truck with higher mileage at this with the same price. It's not really worth it, in my opinion. The mileage is everything, I think, when it comes to getting a used truck for service. It's got to look good, of course. I bought my Honda Ridgeline, it was a 2019, had 37,000 miles on it, which is like golden for a pool guy. You know, that's like really low mileage. And of course, you can buy a new truck if you wanted to. I just feel like that's not a very smart investment for a lot of reasons. But the low mileage, I think, is the key, or the mileage of the vehicle should be the first thing you're looking at versus Ford Chevy, Toyota, Nissan. You know, I think they're all made pretty well. I mean, you're all they're all gonna have their defects, I should say, and the little things that go wrong with them, and they're all going to have problems, you know, alternators going out, starts going out. I just think the lower the mileage you can get the truck for, for the price point you're looking for, regardless of the brand of truck, if it looks good and it's in really good shape, the mileage I think is something that you should look at versus a brand of truck. That's just my opinion, of course, and everyone has different opinions on that. Some people just like tow it to comas and they won't buy anything else. And I understand that they're a very reliable truck, but you pay a lot more for that, and you probably would have a truck with a lot more mileage on it for the$10,000 price tag of the Silverado. Here's another one here about the different vacuum systems. He said, I worked with the riptide for years. Power vac before that, I like the power vac better because of the pivot. Now the power vac had like these weird uh office wheels on them. They actually still make the power back, it looks a little different, uh, but they do still make it. Got tired of the cords and all the extreminess of carts. Also not being able to roll through car wash without taking it off. So I got the bottom feeder and made sure my build can all fit under my bed cover. Got filter top too, which does a good job with actually removing filter. No perfect system though. Bottom feeder doesn't have a great pivot, but whatever. Anything to get rid of the cord, laugh out loud, uses your use your code too. I do have a code for the bottom feeder, and it also works for the shrimp. It's called it's uh it's called it's DVB100, that's the code, and you can get$100 off when you purchase the bottom feeder or the shrimp cleaner from them directly on their site. And he mentioned the cords, and so this is something that even though the bottom feeder is not perfect, it doesn't have quite the power of the power vac and riptide. You know, the riptide has a 38-pound thrust motor. I think the bottom feeder is like 18 or 15, so it has less thrust, but you don't really need a lot of thrust to pick up leaves on the bottom of the pool, acorns. A lot of the pool guys are using the little coquito vacuums out there, the little plastic$200,$300 vacuums, and they don't have hardly any thrust, and they pick up debris perfectly fine. The water tech leaf vac has even less thrust, in my opinion, but it still does a fine job picking up leaves in the pool. So the thrust is kind of deceiving. It's just maybe for speed of cleaning. The riptide, of course, is much faster when you go to move it across the bottom of the pool because it has more thrust. But not having cords, I think, is the key. You can drop the bottom feeder in anywhere, you can spot vacuum a spa, and there's no cords or cart, and it's something to keep in mind if you're looking for something for convenience and speed. There's nothing that competes with the bottom feeder in that regard because it is truly a cordless vacuum system that has a two-hour runtime, and it's sufficient enough for most cleanups after you know a pool with heavy debris. There may be occasions, you know, like we had fires here last year, and you know, the riptide would come in handy for that for sure, because the amount of debris and ash that was in the pools was pretty phenomenal, but it's something that doesn't happen all the time, and the bottom feeder does have that advantage of not having the cord or the cart necessarily to bring it back to the stop. Here's one kind of related to that, and is do you vacuum the client's pool at each visit? And this is something that you would have to set up in your own business model, and it's something that's discussed uh often with pool pros. You know, do I vacuum every pool, do I not, especially if I'm charging for full service service, you know, is vacuuming a must? And I would say for optics, optically, and I just finished a little segment on the bottom feeder. Optically, I think it's a great idea if you vacuum the pools each time you're there in some fashion, not necessarily have the vacuum with a manual vacuum with the hose and the vacuum head. The bottom feeder is a great tool to use to kind of fit that category of vacuuming the pool. And you can use a riptide, you can use a water tech precision version 10, you can use you know the vac daddy, you could use other things besides the manual vacuum, you can connect your vacuum head to a cleaner hose if the pool has a suction side cleaner in there, that will fit the bill as well. So you're looking at optics here for the amount of money you're charging the customer, and if you're just going there and you're netting and brushing, checking the chemicals and leaving, optically the customer may think you're not cleaning their pool. And so vacuuming the pool, if you use the bottom feeder, takes like three minutes. Literally, I've timed myself vacuuming different pool sizes. So in an 8,000 gallon pool, I can vacuum the whole pool in about two minutes. If it's 15 to 20,000 gallons, maybe five minutes with the bottom feeder, maybe a little bit less, like four minutes. Using a riptide, about the same amount of time. You just have to get off the cart, put it in there, and maneuver it around the pool. So to me, it's not a big deal to vacuum the pool. If and the least you would want to take the automatic cleaner head off and put your vacuum head on there, and then you can spot vacuum the pool. But yes, you should probably do something to the pool. My service agreement says I vacuum when needed, and that kind of gets me off the hook because sometimes you're busy, sometimes the pool is completely spotless, you don't have to vacuum the pool, and so I have it out there. But it's always good visually to kind of drop the vacuum in there of some kind and move it around the pool so the customer looks like you're actually cleaning the pool because they can skim the saw the surface no problem themselves, they can brush the pool, but a lot of customers don't have the vacuum system to vacuum the pool out. So, yes and no is the answer, but optically you would want to show that you're doing some kind of work there. There's a lot of pools that you're looking for things to do there, they're great accounts, you know, there's hardly any debris in there, and you're kind of finding things to do to kill the time that you're over there doing the pool, and so vacuuming with the vacuum system would be a great way around that, and you're vacuuming the pool at every stop. Your employee should also be vacuuming the pool every time they're there in some fashion, I think, so that it it gives the customer the feeling that you're doing something at their pool. And of course, some pools do need vacuuming, of course. There's some pools that have debris and dirt in there, and you have to vacuum those pools. But if you build your pool route correctly, you'll have a lot of pools on there where you're looking for things to do at the service account versus actually cleaning the pool. Here's one that I often get, and this one is Timu sells MX6 parts way cheaper than buying them from the builders or manufacturers or the pool store. And this is true. There are generic parts for these cleaners sold. And I looked up the listing on Timu. You can buy like the tracks, the and the um I can't remember the parts. There's like a whole pack of parts, you know, that would retail here for like a hundred bucks, it was$24.95 over there. And it's pretty cool that you can get these parts for like$20. The probably the downside is that these generic parts sometimes aren't great. Now I'm not saying that you shouldn't buy generic parts because sometimes they're really good and they really work, so it's one of those things where um I don't shop on Timu, but I I get ads all the time here and there for it. And for me, that's pretty cheap because you can't even get two tracks for$24. And I pulled up the listing just to kind of see it. Yeah, so you have the two tracks. The um, if you have the MX8 Elite or the MX6 Elite, you can get the fins for the bottom, not the fins, the brushes, I should say, bearings, and you get the drive shafts for for$11.49. The that's pretty good, uh, pretty cheap. There's a$24 pack as well. There's a$56 pack with the engine and the drive shaft. So definitely a lot of savings over what you pay at a pool store or online on Amazon. Amazon has generic parts as well. So Florida kind of sues these companies and goes after them. They have a team that's dedicated to finding these companies, getting them, getting getting their listings off of Amazon. I don't know if they can get them off of Timu, and Alibaba sells parts as well. And your supplier and the pool store can't carry the generic parts because they have a contract with Floridra, Zodiac, Polaris to buy only the manufactured parts from them. And so if a retailer like a pool store or mom and pop store, they can get their contract pulled pulled from Florida and can't get products from them anymore. So the generic parts are not something that the companies like being out there because they lose money on the resale of their parts. But like anything or for any product, they're out there. You can buy generic parts for you know your iPad, you can buy cases that aren't, you know, you can buy earbuds that aren't official, parts for your car, truck, whatever. So the generic parts are definitely out there. Are the OEM parts that much better? I would probably say no, they're not that much better, but that's what they kind of sell the supplier so that they kind of keep their market share. And it also looks bad for these manufacturers if you buy a part and it doesn't work and they're like, hey, how can Zodiac make this part? Doesn't work. It's actually a generic part made by somebody sold to look like a manufactured part. So it does hurt the manufacturer in two different ways. They lose the sale of their part and it makes their parts look cheap and it looks like they make parts that don't work. So I guess you can see why the manufacturer kind of gets upset at these generic part manufacturers. It hurts their image and it hurts their bottom line as well. And so they spend a lot of resources trying to shut these people down. If you ever had like a Disney party, or if you ever have done a play that's a Disney theme play at your school or your kids' school, there's a big um royalty. You pay Disney for everything, and they have a special department because I know I knew someone who worked in that department, they work in Anaheim in an office with a crew of like 20 or 30 people. All they do is scour the internet, check for licensing, watch videos online to see who's using the Disney stuff without getting the royalty license or whatever, and they sue them. And it's one of these things that the manufacturers try to do, they don't quite have a robust team as Disney, I don't think, but you kind of get the idea that they just want to protect their brand. And the parts can work. I've got generic parts on Amazon that work perfectly fine. I've gotten generic parts on Amazon that didn't work at all, so it's one of those hit and misses. And yes, generic parts for all these cleaners are available on Amazon and other sites like Timu. So definitely they're out there and use your judgment when you purchase them, of course. If you're looking for other podcasts, you can find those by going to my website, swingingpoollearning.com. On the banner, click on the podcast icon. There'll be a drop down menu of over 1800 podcasts for you there. And if you're interested in the coaching program they're offered, you can learn more at poolguycoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have a great rest of your day and God bless.