Best Tools for Pool Water Accuracy

Tired of chasing the “perfect” pool water tester that does it all? We unpack the trade-offs behind the most trusted tools on a pro’s truck and show how to build a smarter testing system that saves time, reduces cost, and delivers accurate, defensible results.

First, we put the Lamotte SpinTouch under the microscope. It’s blazing fast and highly accurate across a wide panel of factors, making it ideal for commercial pools, startups, and tough problem jobs. We talk candidly about the price of the unit, single-use discs, and why it’s better as a specialty instrument than a daily driver. Then we compare practical alternatives—photometers like PoolLab 2.0 and ColorQ—highlighting their digital readouts, exportable logs, and dependable precision when you measure correctly.

Next, we move to the workhorse of most routes: Taylor reagent kits. We break down K‑2005 vs K‑2006, explain when higher chlorine ranges matter, and show how NSF-approved chemistry, low-cost refills, and quick workflows make these kits perfect for everyday pH, alkalinity, CYA, hardness, and chlorine checks. We also redeem test strips a bit: not as your core tool, but as a fast way to spot-check water and keep your day moving, especially for spas and quick visits.

By the end, you’ll have a clear, simple framework: use Taylor drops for daily baselines, deploy a photometer for monthly verification and recordkeeping, lean on SpinTouch for commercial compliance, startups, and problem diagnosis, and keep strips for rapid screening. This three-tool strategy balances accuracy, speed, and cost—and it strengthens client trust when you can show numbers, trends, and certifications to back your calls.

• the limits of a “perfect” water tester myth
• SpinTouch speed, accuracy, and cost trade-offs
• best use cases for SpinTouch on startups and commercial
• photometers as affordable digital accuracy with logs
• Taylor reagent kits for fast, daily baseline testing
• test strips for rapid screening and time savings
• NSF certification and why records matter for compliance
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Chapters

• 1:53 The “Perfect Tester” Question
• 2:29 SpinTouch Pros, Cons, And Use Cases
• 5:18 When To Deploy SpinTouch
• 6:50 Photometers As Practical Alternatives
• 9:53 Taylor Reagent Kits For Daily Use
• 13:19 Certification, Accuracy, And Recordkeeping
• 15:23 Test Strips: Speed With Limits
• 16:59 The Three-Tool Testing Strategy
• 18:17 Resources And Coaching

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:02

And welcome to the PoolGri Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm going to talk to you about the perfect water tester. Does this exist out there? And can you get a water testing device that is going to be something you can use all the time and is going to be pretty much flawless out there on your pool route? 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 of course, the answer is no. There is no perfect tester out there. There are some testers that I recommend. Every tester that tests the water factors, it's going to have some pros and cons to it. So let me start with one tester that has, I guess, more pros than cons, or it's pretty well balanced out there, at least in the industry. Pool pros like it. And the biggest con, of course, is the cost of this, and that is the Lamont Spin Touch. This device is super handy, highly effective, very fast, but it is extremely expensive. So if you are price conscious, this is definitely a huge con, and you may not even want to touch this test kit. The nice thing about it is that it does the 10 test factors. Within one minute, there's various discs you can get that do different tests like borates and phosphate, which is nice to have salinity. And basically, you get all these test factors, your you know, your iron, copper, the free chlorine, total chlorine, alkalinity, pH, cyaneric acid, and your total hardness within one minute with this disc. Now, this was kind of created, and this has already been in the medical industry. They use this in hospitals to kind of test the blood, and it has these discs with little BBs in them or ball bearings, and the regions are in there and it spins it really rapidly. That's why it's called the spin touch. And the digital readout, if you put the right amount of water into the disc, it's gonna give you a very accurate reading of what's happening in the water. Now, the device is expensive over a thousand, but the discs are also pretty expensive, you know, 250 to 280, depending on what disc you get and where you get it. And the bad thing is these discs are just one use and you throw them away. So it's one of those things where it's not the most cost-effective test kit, but if you're looking at what has what are all the pros to a test kit, this one really has all the pros lined up. It's fast, you know, all these readings in one minute, it's accurate, and it does all these test factors as well, or a variety of test factors, I should say, depending on the disk you get. So it covers three of the main categories in a test kit, and the only one it fails in is the price point of the device. So if you're looking for the best test kit, that would be, in my opinion, the best one out there with the con of the price. Now, when would you use the spin touch? Well, you wouldn't use it every day at every pool. That would get really expensive, and it's not necessary to check the cyaneric acid every week at the pool or the salinity level or copper and iron. You would use this kit, this the spin touch tester, mainly at commercial pools, of course. That's something that you would want to use it at. They pay you for your service there. There's a little bit of a premium, and so using the spin touch there is not a problem. You would use it on startups, that's something that it's really great at because it gives you not only great readings and the ranges that you need for pH alkalinity to in calcium hardness to make the startup effective, but also you can log it so that if there's a problem later, you have this digital digital record of the pH alkalinity and calcium hardness to show the homeowner that all your ranges were fine and the problem is not caused by your balancing of the water. So that's where it comes in handy. Problem pools is great for that as well. And it's really super impressive when you're doing a bid, you pop open your case and you bring it out, you do these readings in one minute, and you can tell the customer this is what the pool's readings are, they'll be pretty impressed with it, they'll think you're some kind of pool doctor. So there are some great benefits to it, and again, the only drawback that I can see with it is the price point of the initial tester and the cost of the discs themselves. Other than that, it's got a lot of pros going for it. If you wanted to get a photometer that is similar, you can get the pool lab 2.0 or you get the color Q2X Pro 7 or 2x Pro 9. These aren't as fast, but they do a lot of test factors similar to the spin touch. They're not perfect in the fact that they take a lot more time to do the testing than you would do with a region test kit or a test strip, but they do give you accurate readings, and it is something that you may want to consider. The cost isn't crippling as well. I mean, these devices are in a two to three hundred dollar range, so it's not a huge investment for something that's going to use the photometer, which is a great way to get an accurate reading without having to kind of look at the color and guess. And the photometer is a scientific device that's going to, if you measure the reagent correctly in the tube and everything set up correctly, when the light rays hit that reagent, it's going to give you an accurate reading on the display. And I've done many tests with photometers, the pool lab 2.0, the regular pool lab, the color, the uh color cue units, I've compared them in conjunction with each other. And within the margin of error, of course, I'm not in the lab, not using the exact same exact sample. The margin of error is really close to each other. So I know these photometers are extremely accurate when you measure correctly, with some, of course, variables there as well. But if you're looking for accuracy, and of course, not too worried about the cost, the photometers are the best choice to make there. The reagents for the photometers or the tablets are not nearly as expensive as a disc are, and it's something that's kind of a trade-off. You're not getting everything in one minute, but you also save on cost. So these are not perfect, these are, I think, the better way of testing, but again, you wouldn't want to use a photometer in every single pool either, because they are time consuming as well. Some pool pros will swear that the Taylor test kit is the best testing option out there. I can't really argue too much because they're inexpensive to buy the kit itself. I think you can either go with the K2006 or the K2005, both of these are really good. The K2006 uses a DPD powder, which is good if you really want accurate chlorine readings up to I'm gonna say I have to look at the manual, but I think it goes all the way up to 20 parts per million, maybe 30 parts a million. Don't quote me on that. If you just are looking for something that is going to give you really good accurate readings, but you don't really need anything above 10 parts per million with chlorine, then I would say the K2005 is an easier kit to use. You don't have to measure the powder, and it's good to 10 parts per million, it's a dye-based reagent, that's why it only goes to 10 parts per million, versus the DPD powder, which goes to a higher chlorine level, but all the other reagents are the same in there, and it is a really accurate way to test for alkalinity, pH, cyanuric acid, and the hardness of the pool, free chlorine, total chlorine. And one thing about the Taylor kit is that the reagents are inexpensive. You can buy large refills and refill the smaller bottles of reagents. You can buy small reagent bottles. The cost of using this kit is very minimal, it's really fast and easy to do these tests as well, and so it's quicker than the photometers, of course, except for the spin touch, I should say. And it's accurate to the point where you're reading it. It's NSF approved, the Taylor test kit. So it's been independently verified that if you're reading the reagent correctly based on holding the color up, then you're getting an accurate reading of these reagents or of the what the water actually is. So if it says the pH is 7.6, then the pH is 7.6. If it says the free chlorine is at 4 parts per million, then the free chlorine is at 4 parts per million, because these again, these reagents have been independently verified and NSF certified. Of course, the color cue I should have mentioned that's NFF certified as well. The pool lab 2.0 has not been certified, but in my testing, it is a very accurate tester. The certification is just one level of trust between you and the vendor that some independent company has verified that yes, using this tester, you're going to get accurate results with the margin of error based on their independent testing. The NSF certification is also important for commercial pool use. You want to use NSF approved testers. When you're doing commercial pools, the health department won't fight back with the readings you're giving them because you're using an NSF test and NSF approved tester at the commercial pool account that you're servicing. So, how does the reagent test kit compare to the photometer? Well, again, it's much faster, it's much more affordable, it's not something that's going to give you the pH of 7.6.2 or 7.7. It's because it's not a digital readout, it's your eye looking at it and kind of gauging what it is. So as far as speed, affordability, accuracy, it compares really well with the photometer. The only thing that the photometer does better, and of course, this is something that you may or may not need. I think it's important to have the photometer reading on certain accounts, so I think it is something that you should have as part of your testing arsenal. But one thing that the photometer does better than the reagent test kit, of course, it gives you a digital readout. And with the color cue and the pool lab 2.0, you can actually send that to the customer or to yourself and save that particular reading at the pool, which may be important later on. But if you don't need that, then the reagent test kit is perfectly fine. It's fast, reliable, and as accurate as it can be based on the reading you're looking at and making that reading. So I highly recommend it. I think the Taylor makes the best reagent test kit out there. One of the only companies that makes the professional reagent test kit, and I would say get the Taylor test kit if you're looking for something affordable, reliable, and accurate. Now, test strips again, they get a lot of you know bad press out there because they don't look like you're doing anything. Basically, optically, if you're bidding on a pool and you get there and you drop a test strip in and pull it out and tell the customer, yeah, the chlorine looks like it's about three, and the pH uh looks like about 7.4, you know, they're gonna lose a lot of faith in you right away. So it doesn't have the optics of being a professional tester because it is a test strip, you know, for all intent and purposes. So, you know, if you go there with the color cue with the spin touch, I should say, and you get the readout and you show it to the customer, it's a lot better optics there. Not to say that the test strip is not something that you can use out there, it's not effective. In fact, it is pretty effective and useful, it's the fastest method. As far as affordability, the test strips have gotten more expensive over the years, of course. So they're not super affordable, but they're not really expensive either to use on your service accounts. The reagent test kit is still more affordable than test strips if you do the math. By how many test strips you're gonna use during the week versus reagent test drops, it's still much more cost effective. But the test strips do have that speed that the other testers lack. So you can take a test strip, dip it in the pool, and within 10 seconds have the readings. This is great if you're in a rush and you need to get through your day fast. It's great for spot checking pools and spas. So there is a use form. I wouldn't necessarily say that you can run your whole pool route on test strips week in and week out without using a photometer or a region test kit to kind of get an idea of where the readings are in the pool. It's not something that you would want to do. You certainly can't use them at a commercial pool because the health department won't allow that. But they are great for again time savings and getting a ballpark reading. You can get pretty good at reading test strips. I'm I'm pretty good at it. I use them enough to where I can put them up against the side of the bottle and read them as accurately as anyone else can, I think. The more you use them, the more accurate you're gonna get with reading them. And then, of course, you have to realize that the test strip is just giving you a ballpark within a certain range. So the pH could be 7.6, but it could also be 7.8, it could also be 7.4. If you get the test strip and you dip it in, and it's showing that the pH is at 6.8, it could be 6.8, could be 7, could be 6.6. So you can see that it's not really something that you want to accurately rely on, but it will give you the reading to the point that you're gonna need it in most cases. I wouldn't say that test strips are the ideal testing method out there, they're a great tool out there, and I would say that it's not something you would want to put front and center in your business. The combination of using different test kits, I think, is the best way to run your pool service business. Have a photometer to do startups, problem pools, commercial pools if you have those. Have the Taylor reagent test kit to be your everyday tester, and then have the test strips to get a quick ballpark reading if you're in a rush or you want just to test the pools that they would have test strip, perfectly fine, I think, in most cases. And then, of course, you're using the other type of test kits as well to get a more accurate reading of the pool. All these I think work well together. The Taylor test kit, the test strips are pretty affordable that you can actually get those, and then add on a photometer of some sort so that you're having all three test methods on your truck at once. And to me, I think that is the perfect water tester when you have the combination of all three of them and you're using all three of them in conjunction with each other. You're going to get accurate readings depending on what you need them for. You know, at the time, if you're just going through your week getting, you know, the pH, alkalinity, and free chlorine with the Taylor test kit, that's fine. If you're going through getting test strips and using test strips to get the readings that week, but you ultimately want to have a photometer to get those really accurate readings at least once a month in the pool, every three weeks in the pool, and of course at commercial pools every time you're there with a photometer. But truly, the best testing method is a combination of all three of these together. If you're looking for other podcasts, you can find those on my website, swimmingpoollearning.com. Click on the banner, there's a podcast icon there. That'll take you to a drop-down menu of 1800 podcasts. And if you're interested in the coaching program, you can learn more at GoogleCoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Take a rest of your week. God bless.