Quick & Easy Pool Skimming Hacks You Need

Leaves don’t just clutter the surface; they choke flow, stall cleaners, and push water chemistry off a cliff. We tackle the leaf problem at the source, sharing the exact tools and tweaks that keep debris moving into capture zones before it ever sinks. From a return-mounted secondary skimmer that threads into a 1.5-inch return to modern solar-powered surface bots that roam all day, we break down what actually works, how to install it, and the small details that make the big difference.

We start with the PoolSkim approach: how to bias flow with restrictor eyeballs or a plugged return, set the weir height at the waterline, and turn a leaf magnet into a quiet surface vacuum that protects circulation. Then we go hands-on with solar skimmers—what’s changed since the early Solar-Breeze units, why durability and motor design matter, and simple setup hacks like foam bumpers in the skimmer throat and hose weights on suction lines so the bots don’t get trapped. We even cover cord protection on robot cleaners and how to keep intakes clear.

Finally, we dial in the “free” gains: aim return jets to build a steady surface current into the skimmer, confirm the weir gate moves freely and seals when the pump shuts off, and explore aftermarket skimmer accelerators that sharpen intake velocity. Stack these steps and you’ll cut vac time, prevent clogged baskets, stabilize chlorine demand, and deliver the crisp, glassy surface clients notice first.

If you’re ready to turn a leaf-heavy headache into a low-maintenance system, hit play, take notes, and put these upgrades to work on your toughest pools. Enjoyed the episode? Subscribe, share it with a fellow pool pro, and leave a quick review so more techs can find it.

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Transcript

Why Surface Skimming Matters

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Hey, welcome to the Pool Grey Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm going to go over some things that you can get for your customers, or the customer can purchase, I should say, for their pool to help with the surface skimming. And in some cases, this is a very dramatic improvement by getting one of these things I'm going to mention here today in this podcast. 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. A lot of the pools out there on your route are going to have a lot of surface debris each week. It's just part of where it's located. It could be nearby a neighbor's tree, or there could be trees over the area. Regardless of what's causing it, if you do have a pool with a lot of surface debris, this could be very frustrating for a number of reasons. One, you're spending a lot of time there skimming it each week. Two, all that debris falls to the bottom and it stops the automatic cleaner from working properly, so you're gonna have to use your vacuum system or manually vac the pool because of all the debris on the bottom. And three, since the skimmer basket gets impacted by the debris, the pool flow is affected, which leads to you know really a lot of water quality problems like cloudy water, algae. And of course, this makes the problem even worse because as the skimmer basket gets full of debris, that means that no new debris can go in there, which means that a lot of it will fall to the bottom of the pool or stay on the surface. So it is a really messy thing, and it is very frustrating to have these pools that maybe seasonally have heavy debris, maybe every week they have heavy debris, and you're spending a lot of time there cleaning that pool. So there is help, and these are highly effective, and until you use one of these in the pool with heavy debris, you won't really realize how effective these things can be. I'll start with one of my favorite devices to use in a pool with heavy debris. Now there are a few things that need to be there's a few parameters that the pool needs to have for this to work in it, and so it's not for every pool, unfortunately. I wish it could be used in every pool. So it's called the pool skim. You can get it on Amazon or directly from them, and basically it's just a secondary floating skimmer. It has a weird that floats and it pulls in debris into a debris bag, and it actually works amazingly well. It when you look at the device, you're like, eh, this is not gonna work. I mean, how is this gonna actually clean the debris off the pool surface? But amazingly, it works really good, and they don't endorse me, they don't sponsor me. I'm just saying that this product is just a really awesome product for leaf debris on the surface. So basically, you're going to need one and a half inch threaded return lines, and preferably you're gonna need more than one return line. Although I I have installed it in a pool, an older pool that had one return line in the deep end, and it had an attached spa. So what I did is I kind of fiddled with the return a little bit so that I increased the spa return so that that one pool return jet, which is a weird setup, but it can happen, had enough had less power, so it wasn't overpowering the pool skimming and operate, and it actually worked really well with the spa the spa returns activated a little higher. That one pool return kind of modulated down a little bit, and it worked with one return jet. But the caveat here, and the only way to really install this properly, you can use some aftermarket products to try to install it in a in a pool where you have stub pipes coming out of it, but really one and a half inch threaded return lines is going to make this optimal. And you install this device by removing the eyeball and then threading in this device into the side of the pool, setting it at the right level to where is at the water line where the wear gate activates, and this will actually pull in debris into the basket. And I can guarantee you that if you have a pool that fills up the skimmer basket, that when you get there, you can kind of walk across the surface of so much leaf debris on top. All of that will be eliminated, it'll be pulled into this device. And I've had many pools where when I take the bag off, there's debris coming all the way up to the top, coming out of the weir, basically, because it's so full of debris. But it's really an amazing device. This it's a product that was designed in South Africa. Believe it or not, South Africa is a lot like the USA with pools and suburbia. Australia is another country that makes a lot of innovative products because they're very similar to us, with a lot of homes with pools in the backyard. So it's a South African product that really is innovative, and people try to copy it, but this is the only one that actually works, in my opinion, that attaches the return line. There is one thing that you probably should keep in mind as well, since it sits in the pool and stays in the pool. It's not the prettiest looking thing. So I put it in this house one time, it's like a million-dollar, multi-million dollar home, and the pool has so much debris in there that I was kind of frustrated. So I just put it in and told the customer I want to try this in the pool. And she's like, after she went out there, and of course the surface looked great, but she's like, That thing is this really ugly, can you remove it? And so that could be a problem for some service accounts if you have this in the pool. It does sit in there, it's not the prettiest thing, but it is highly effective. So most customers probably won't care as long as it cleans the surface. And I really push it by saying that if you really need to disconnect it for a party or something, you can easily disconnect it. It's really not that hard to disconnect, and but it does really serve a good purpose in the pool. And I usually don't have any problems installing these at accounts. Again, one and a half inch threaded return lines, preferably more than one. There may be some restrictions. You may have to get a restricted eyeball on one of them. So if you have like four return lines in the pool, you may need to get a couple restrictor eyeballs. They're they're the eyeballs that have like a little pinhole in it, basically, to kind of restrict it. You may even have to plug a line off, which I've had to do before. You just get a one and a half inch threaded plug and thread it into the return line to increase the power to the pool skim. But basically, the setup is easy. And once you set it up, it's highly, highly effective in removing surface debris. I feel like at this point I should throw in a pair of ginsu knives for this one. And if you're younger than age 50, you have no idea what I just referred to there. But if you're in my generation where the infomercials were dominating the airwaves, you kind of get the joke. The other product that I think is highly effective is a solar power surface cleaner. Now, it looks gimmicky, and if you've never used one on your pool route, you may be wondering if these actually work. Now, there's a few brands out there. There's APR, there's I think the Dolphin has one now, and also Zodiac Polaris has one as well. It's actually the Ariel that they purchased because Ariel went out of business. Now, Ariel was something that was one of the original solar surface cleaners. It was actually solar breeze. And if you're familiar, if you did pool service in you know the mid-2000s, the solar breeze was really popular, and it's something that I thought was one of the better cleaners, but the parts were really hard to replace and work on. It was kind of a mess inside there internally. I tried to rebuild one one time, it's just a disaster, and so they kind of were going out of business or transferring it to Ariel, and then Ariel had all kinds of problems with their particular machine, and I think they had a fire sale, and then of course Polarisodiac Fluidra purchased the design, so they have that one available. That's a long story talking about one company acquiring another one, but the reality is it was good technology, and I think it's still pretty effective. Dolphin bought the other part of the company, which was Skimbot, is that the Dolphin has that other end of the Solar Breeze design cleaner, which I think is a pretty good cleaner as well. And then you have a bunch of other brands like the Beatbot. The beta, the beta cleaner, I should say, to me is the best one out of the bunch. No, they don't sponsor me either, but I've tried all these surface cleaners, and I think beta has the best technology. I actually did a little bit of their beta testing, and it's one of those things where they sent me one just to see how it works in a saltwater pool and how it worked, you know, in the California environment. And I gave them a lot of feedback saying that the motors didn't hold up, they were pretty much junk at that time, because they, you know, were just starting out designing it. But of course, all that's been completely improved to a point where they work perfectly fine. The motors are extremely robust. The actual system itself wasn't a problem, it operated really well in the pool. It's just that the motors would get corroded. So testing that cleaner, of course, I realized that it is a really well-made cleaner. I put it through a lot of testing, and compared to the other ones where they have some glitches every so often, like the SMOBOD and the A Pier, these are very glitchless, if that's the term I could use. And they just work really well going back and forth in the pool, cleaning the surface. So the beta cleaners, they have three different versions. You can look those up on Amazon and or directly from their site, and they're really good, they're really robust and they work really well in the pool. And they do pick up the surface debris continuously as they're running, which is kind of like what the pool skin does, parked on one side of the pool. These will work by moving across the pool continuously and work really effectively. Now the Beta cleaner does ship with a foam noodle that you can cut the size for the skimmer, and this is really important because one thing that happens to these solar cleaners is that they tend to get sucked into the skimmer when the pool is running. It's just something they don't have enough power to get out of the skimmer, and so this noodle you put in front actually blocks that or actually stops from getting sucked in to the skimmer. Prior to this, I would just put a pool float 3-inch chlorator floater in front, and that would pretty much do the same thing. But the foam noodle is much better. Put it inside the front of the skimmer. And by the way, this is like a really fat foam noodle, so it actually is really effective in keeping it from getting sucked in to the skimmer while the pool's operating. If you have suction side cleaner hoses, a good hack here is to get the hose weights and strategically place them on the suction side cleaner hose so that the cleaner hoses drop down a couple of inches below the pool surface. And this will allow that solar skimmer to cross the pool and really not have interference from the pool hoses. You can get these hose weights on Amazon and you just put them on, you clip them on the hose, and the hose will sink down somewhat in the water and allow it to get full surface coverage. So that's what I use out there when I have a suction cleaner with one of these surface cleaners to kind of keep it from getting stuck in one area, the getting trapped by the hoses and only using one area of the pool. And if you have a robotic pool cleaner with a cord, there's actually a little tab in front now that comes inside the cleaner where you can keep it the cord from getting sucked into the propeller. It's actually not a propeller, it's more like a turbine, like on the back of one of those river boats, you know, like in the Mississippi, and that's what pulls in the debris. So there's a little clip that you can fold down in front of it to prevent the cord from being pulled into it. So they've thought of a lot of different things and a lot of different scenarios in the pools where you know the cleaner could pull something into it. It's actually a really robust way to clean the pool's surface. So I would definitely recommend a solar power surface cleaner, and you can get any brand you want, just do your research out there and you know get one of these for your customer, sell it to them, and you really will appreciate having one of these in the pool. And I I've tested a lot of these different models, and all of them are pretty effective. So it's one of those things where if you're if you can just find one that you like and utilize it in those pools where you get heavy debris, these solar surface cleaners are definitely worth the investment. A few simple things you can do besides these two things that you can purchase is to position the return jet so that the water is going in a circular pattern towards the skimmer. It sounds pretty simple, but a lot of times when you take over a service account, the return jets are just pointing straight and you haven't no one's adjusted them properly so that it pushes debris towards the skimmer. So you can do that if there's no eyeballs in there that you can adjust, you can actually purchase them and put them in so you can turn them at an angle. There's all different kinds of return jet attachments you can use to achieve this, but if the water is moving in a circular pattern into the skimmer, it's probably the best clockwise towards the skimmer, so the debris goes in there, and that really helps as well. Another thing that can help too is to make sure that the skimmer has a working wear gate. I can't tell you how many pools I've taken over where the water the debris is on the surface, it's really not a ton of debris, but it's just not moving, and that causes a problem because it falls to the bottom and it's not being picked up by the skimmer, which causes, of course, more chemical usage, and it's one of those things where the organic debris, you would want it to go into the skimmer basket to get it out of the pool. And a weird gate is a big thing that helps a lot. It's a little gate that goes in front, it's a plastic piece of plastic that's rectangular, that's like seven or eight inches wide, and it clips in usually. You can get aftermarket ones that spring clip in, and this is highly effective in pulling in the debris into the skimmer. Also, when the pool turns off, it'll actually close the skimmer off, and that's why it's called a weir gate. It's like a gate. And when the pool turns off and there's no more suction to the pump, it actually closes, and so all the debris that's in the skimmer, in the skimmer basket, or floating above it, stays in the skimmer, it doesn't fall back into the pool. Now, a lot of pools that don't have weir gates, you'll get to the stop, and you'll see a lot of debris at the de at in front of the skimmer on the bottom of the pool, and that's because when it turns off, all that goes out back into the pool. So the weird gate is something that you would want in every pool on your route to make sure that the weir gate's operating, and you want to make sure that it's it's sized properly so it doesn't get stuck in the closed position at any point, but it's highly effective as well in pulling in debris. And I used to endorse the Skim Doctor 2.0. It's a great aftermarket device that you put on your skimmer basket, but they had all kinds of problems with internally with I don't know exactly what was happening. I'm sure they were making money and good money, but it wasn't being managed properly. And effectively the the company is is gone, it's out of business in all sense of purposes. The website really isn't operational and you can't find it anywhere. But it was one of the best aftermarket skimmer accelerating products that I really found out there to be effective. So the Skim Doctor 2.0 was really great and it worked really good. And I'm not sure exactly what happened internally, but that was a great product that helped accelerate the skimming, you know, as as opposed to a weird, both in conjunction, made the debris come into the skimmer really fast. Now there's the skimmy cyclone, you can find it on Amazon. I haven't tried it, but it's called the Skimmy Cyclone, and it looks like it would be effective as well. It just sits on top of the skimmer basket, and it seems to have a the Bernelli effect where it pulls in the debris faster. So I think I pronounced that correctly. Probably not, but that's something that you may want to look into, and it's something that may accelerate the skimming of the surface as well. Anything that you can do to make the debris able to be pulled into the skimmer faster and more effectively is something that's going to help with the surface of the pool, besides, of course, the solar surface cleaners and the pool skim. And of course, you just want to try your best. Sometimes you might have to have both of those in the pool, actually, but you want to try your best to remove as much surface debris effectively, and this goes a long way in making the pool much more easy to manage with the bottom debris as well as the surface debris, of course, and with the chemicals and with filtration and circulation. If you're looking for other podcasts, you can find those on my website, zooming4learning.com, on the podcast on the banner, click on the podcast icon, and there'll be a drop-down menu with over 1800 podcasts for you there as well. And if you're interested in the coaching program, you can learn more at bullguycoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have you rest of your week and God bless.