Ask the Pool Guy: YouTube Q&A

Tired of white dust on your dark pebble finish, shredded filter media, or the stress of a sudden cold snap? We dig into the practical, money-saving tactics that keep pools clear and equipment safe, backed by decades in the field and feedback from real service routes. You’ll hear exactly why pressure washers and cartridge filters don’t mix, plus the simple nozzle upgrade that speeds cleaning without wrecking pleats.

We unpack calcium scale on pebble interiors with a plan you can actually use: manage the LSI slightly on the corrosive side to limit scale formation, lean on the Orenda app to get the math right, and use a sequestrant like EasyCare Butech for added protection during new-surface break-in. When deposits set hard, we explain why acid washes disappoint and why professional media blasting is the dependable reset—along with realistic costs so clients aren’t blindsided.

Cold weather throws another curveball. Freeze protect typically kicks on around 37 degrees and can run pumps for days without harm, but power outages are the real danger. We share a simple emergency checklist—from opening drain plugs to pulling salt cells—and why a standby generator is the best insurance in deep freezes. We also spotlight a patent-pending cartridge assembly for the Bottom Feeder and Shrimp vacs that captures 20-micron debris, transforming fine-dirt cleanups. To cap it off, we clarify how to get the most from suction-side cleaners: leave them in, let variable speed schedules do the work, and avoid hose memory by storing lines straight during parties.

• why pressure washers damage cartridge filters and safer nozzle options
• how LSI management reduces scale on dark pebble finishes
• when to use sequestrants and when blasting is the only fix
• realistic costs and cadence for bead blasting pebble interiors
• how freeze protect works and what to do during power outages
• a cartridge add-on that lets portable vacs capture fine dirt
• best practices for leaving suction cleaners in and scheduling run time

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Chapters

• 1:53 Host Intro And Format
• 2:32 Cartridge Filters And Pressure Washers
• 4:46 Dark Pebble Calcium And LSI Strategy
• 8:57 Bead Blasting Costs And Expectations
• 9:51 Freeze Protect And Outage Risks
• 12:54 Bottom Feeder And Shrimp Upgrade
• 14:38 Suction Cleaner Run Time And Care
• 17:42 Where To Find More And Coaching

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:02

Hey, welcome to the Pool Gun Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm going to expand on some YouTube questions that I get, and you'll find these podcasts helpful as I cover a lot of different aspects and territories of the pool industry when I kind of expand on some of the comments that I get or questions I get on my YouTube channel. So I hope you find these expanded answers helpful. 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 Swimmypoollearning.com. This first question comes from a cartridge filter cleaning video and it says, Hi Dave, I hope you're well. Is it a bad idea to clean it with a small pressure washer? Now the manufacturer recommends not cleaning your cartridge filter with a pressure washer. You have to look at the cartridge filter as kind of and it's hard to kind of imagine it because it doesn't feel like it, but it actually is a paper material. Now of course pleat coat feels more like a plastic material, but the other cartridge filters are basically a paper type material. And think about using a pressure washer on paper and how that would affect it. So there is there is a time when you could probably use a pressure washer on a very low setting just to kind of increase the water pressure if you're in an area where you have poor water pressure. And the reason why you would want to use a pressure washer, I think, would be to speed it up to create more pressure. But just note that a pressure washer can take you know uh calcium and dirt, grains and dirt off of cement. So, how would that affect the cartridge? It'll probably tear right through the pleat if you're using really high pressure on it. So, my initial answer was you shouldn't use a pressure washer, but if you have a very low setting, and if I didn't really go into detail about increasing your pressure, because I think that's why he wants to use it, because a lot of times you have low water pressure in your area, and to increase the water pressure, you can actually use different nozzles, they have different pressure increasing nozzles out there as well. You can get on Amazon. One of the best nozzles that I've found for areas where you have low pressure or just regular good pressure is the Orbit Sunmate Hose End 58361N. And again, that's the Orbit Sunmate Hose End. And this is a great nozzle, it's really used to be really inexpensive, it's like$8 on Amazon now, but these are great to increase water pressure without damaging the cartridge filters. So I would say pressure washer, no, and maybe a high pressure nozzle would be your best bet if you're in an area where you have low pressure and you're trying to clean your cartridge filter. Here's one that I often get, especially with darker pebble tech, it says help, had a black pebble finish installed, let it cure for three months, but ended up with white dust discoloration. I chemically treated it or marinic acid, looks pretty good after a few weeks, and then now the discoloration is coming back again. Now a lot of this has to do with calcium and how quickly it forms in a pool, and believe it or not, in a new pool, if it's not cured correctly, typically with a pebble tech pool, the builder will give it a light acid wash before filling it up, and sometimes they don't do that. And this really helps kind of protect it from the calcium buildup, which is really noticeable in the darker pebble tech. So if you have dark pebble tech on your pool route, you'll notice right away that there are some light marks on the pebble tech. And typically, this is calcium buildup pretty quickly in some cases. In the first six months of having a pool like this particular person, very common to have the calcium buildup, especially if you're in a hard water area. There's really not a whole lot you can do except try to balance the LSI. If you don't use the LSI, especially for a pebble tech pool, I would recommend using this index. This is an index that will help you deal with scale and also corrosiveness in the pool. And I would say the Arenda app has the best LSI calculator, and there's a lot of factors of LSI, but basically, if you have a Pebble Tech pool with a dark color, I would suggest keeping the LSI in a slightly corrosive range, not like super corrosive, but a little bit more on the corrosive side and on the scale forming side. And this should prevent some of the buildup. Something else you can do is use a product called EasyCare Butech. This is a pretty good product that helps prevent the scale forming, especially if your pool's new and you just filled it. I would use I would put a cord in the pool, and then I would use the maintenance every week going forward to make sure that the pool, you know, you have a little bit of defense against the scale building up. But over time you're going to have this white calcium buildup on the bottom in different areas. I'll give you an example of a hard water area. My dad lives in Indio, California, and the water there is extremely hard. He has a Pebble Tech pool, it's kind of like a tan color, dark tan, and every other year he has the pool drained and then completely bead blasted because of the calcium buildup. And the years in between he has the water drained about six inches and he has the tile cleaned with the bead blasting. Now, how much does it cost to have the entire pebble tech pool bead blasted to remove the calcium? It depends on the size of the pool. He has an 8,000 gallon pool, relatively small pool, and it costs him about$1,400 to have it completely bead blasted. And that's the only effective way, by the way, to remove the calcium from a pebble tech pool. An acid wash is not going to do it. So you can drain it, acid wash it, the calcium will still be there unless you kind of power sand it, which I don't recommend. I recommend bead blasting a pebble tech pool with the same thing that you would use to clean the tile line. You would clean the entire pebble tech pool to get rid of the calcium buildup on the surface itself. You just need to understand that pebble tech is basically river rock. And if you've ever been to a river, you see all the river rock is covered with calcium, and the same effect is going to happen in the pool. Again, some things you can do to mitigate that. Keep the LSI a slightly corrosive in the balancing of the pool, and then also add the Easy Care Butec to the pool. That should help somewhat with some of the calcium, but over time it's going to build up. It's just a natural thing that happens in a pebble tech pool. Here's a question that comes from Texas. I live in Texas and the temperature drops below 32. Only rarely is a freeze setting good for that, or do I need to run it all the time? And I would say that the freeze protect mode on your variable speed pump or automatic system is sufficient in most cases to protect your pool from freezing. Most freeze to freeze protect modes come on at 37 degrees. This does happen sometimes in my area of California. It's very rare that it happens, but if it does sense the temperature being that low in the pool, it'll actually come on and turn on the pump. The reason why the freeze protect mode actually activates, and this is something that you of course need to know doing pool service, and you should educate your customers as well of why their pump comes on automatically. It comes on to circulate the water because at 32 degrees the water will start to freeze. Now, when it comes on at 37 degrees, that's just to prevent or 38 degrees, that's just to prevent the pool from potentially freezing. But anything under 32 degrees, the pool has a potential of freezing, and that's why the freeze protect comes on. So this could be 24 hours, 72 hours. It will run continuously and don't worry about your pool pump. They're actually designed to run 24-7. The motors are very similar to what you would find on a swamp cooler on a roof of a business that's running 24-7. And so don't worry about your motor burning out. It's one of those things where it's not going to affect it running 24-74-7 in most cases. And so it'll run until the temperature of the water gets to the point where it gets out of freeze protect mode. So is freeze protect mode sufficient? Well, if your area gets really freezing temperatures all the time, I would suggest winterizing your pool at that point. Call a local pool service company, have to come out there and drain your equipment and winterize the pool properly. That means clearing the water from the pipes and then covering the pool. But if you're in an area where it gets where it gets freezing temperatures once in a while, you don't generally need to winterize your pool. You can usually rely on the freeze protect mode in most cases. Now, if you're paranoid about it, go ahead and put it in service mode on your automatic panel or your pool pump and just run that thing 24-7, and that way you're going to prevent that the pool from turning off. The only danger with freezing temperatures is if you were to have a power outage and then all your equipment turns off, that's a problem. And having a generator that can come on and run the pool equipment would be wise, a gas or propane powered generator, because if the pool is off for three or four hours when freezing temperature, you know, like in the tens or 20 degree, your pipes are gonna freeze, everything's gonna freeze in the equipment, and you know what you can maybe do to save it is open up all the drain plugs on your pump and filter, and you know, remove the salt cell, turn all the equipment off, and that may save some of the equipment. There was a deep freeze in Texas a few years back that destroyed tons of equipment, you know, filters cracking, salt cells exploding, all these things happen because once the water starts to defrost, it starts to expand, and it'll cause the kind of cracking of equipment. And it's one of those things where the power outage is the only danger you have in freezing temperature. And the freeze protect mode usually works pretty effectively. Here's a comment on the new bottom feeder and shrimp cartridge filter assembly. It says, Oh man, I love this vacuum. I have two for pool service company. I need to get this filter for this thing. And the new cartridge filter assembly kit for the bottom feeder and shrimp is a pretty innovative product where you can now pick up dirt in the pool. Vacuum systems were limited to leaf debris and maybe dirt down to about 60 microns, which means that a lot of the finer dirt, algae dust, DE powder, goes right through the vacuum system bag. So now with the cartridge filter assembly, you can actually use this and go from cartridge to a bag in about 10 seconds. So it's a great innovative device. And if you have a bottom feeder or if you have the new shrimp cleaner, I highly recommend getting this for that bottom feeder and shrimp. If you don't have one yet, they actually have a package available for sale with the bottom feeder and shrimp with the cartridge assembly. And it's definitely a game changer for the vacuum system market because now you have the ability to pick up dirt in the pool. So definitely, if you have a bottom feeder and shrimp, I would order one of these today because now you could pick up dirt in the pool down to 20 microns, which is something that is unheard of prior to this, and it's an industry industry first, really. It's a patent pending cartridge filter assembly kit that threads on to the top of the bottom feeder and shrimp. And I highly recommend the product. The feedback so far from people that are using it is fantastic, and it's an awesome idea for those areas where you have dirt in the pool as well of leaf debris. And this last question was posted on my Polaris Max review. It says, How long do you recommend I leave this unit running in the pool? How many times a week? Now the thing with the suction side cleaner, and most people will understand this if once they get the suction side cleaner, there is really no need to remove the cleaner from the pool unless you're having a pool party. And it's one of those things where the cleaner can work 24-7, or actually you can leave the cleaner in the pool 24-7, I should say, and then run the cleaner when the pool is running. A lot of times you may have a variable speed pump, which actually is very ideal for these suction side cleaners, because on low speed the cleaner really isn't moving much in the pool, and then on the higher speed, the cleaner will move pretty much normally in the pool if you have the speed set correctly. And what's really nice about this is that this will actually save on the wear of the suction cleaner. So, really, there is no need to remove the suction cleaner from the pool. If you run it a normal amount of time in the in the pool, I would say eight to ten hours a week would be a normal time in the summertime and for most pools that have the suction cleaner running in the pool. And in the winter time, you cut that back to like four to six hours a week. And with the variable speed pump, this is really easy to do. Just increase the low speed, that will really pretty much stop the automatic cleaner from working in the pool, and then reduce the medium or high speed, and that will effectively change the runtime in the winter versus summer of the pool. And there's really no reason to take the cleaner out of the pool. Just think of the suction side cleaner as if you're standing there with a vacuum hose with the vacuum head on a pole, and you're just vacuuming the pool all day long. And that's the beauty of the suction cleaner is that it's continuously keeping the pool clean, and there's really no reason to take it out of the pool unless you're having a party. I do recommend taking out of the pool when you're having a party. When you take it out, just lay the disconnect the hoses and lay them somewhere safely, or lay the hose if you have a 30-foot worth of hose, lay it straight in the backyard somewhere, but don't coil it up because that's going to give the hose a memory, and it's going to follow that same pattern once you put it back in the pool. So again, store it carefully. But you can typically leave a suction cleaner in the pool 24-7 without any effect on it. They're really robust. They're gonna, of course, fade over time and start to look a little ugly, but there's no reason to take them out of the pool. I think you risk damaging the cleaner more taking out of the pool than leaving it in there when you're not having a party. And they're designed to be left in the pool anyway, all day long, and 24-7, and just run the pool during your normal cycle, and it should clean the pool, you know, really effectively. And I don't recommend taking it out, putting it in, taking it out, putting it in. That's not how a suction cleaner works, that's more how a robot a robotic pool cleaner works in the pool versus a suction side cleaner that's connected to the pool filtration system and it's designed to run when the pump turns on. And if you're looking for more podcasts, you can find those on my website, swingprolearning.com. Click on the podcast icon in the banner. There'll be a drop down menu with over 1800 podcasts there for you. 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. God bless.