Pool Guy Knowledge Vol. 5: Training Employees and More!

Your pool route can chew you up if you let it, and it usually starts with something you do every day without thinking: using your bare hands around chlorine and acid. I break down a hard lesson from early on when latex gloves made my hands worse by trapping chlorinated water against my skin, then share the simple switch that actually protects you long-term. We talk nitrile coated work gloves for handling trichlor tablets and muriatic acid, how to take them on and off between stops.

Then we get into a problem that feels harmless until it is not: ducks. If you service pools in the wrong neighborhood, a “cute” pair can turn the deck and water into a mess fast. I walk through humane duck deterrents that pool techs can actually deploy, starting with multiple floats like alligators and swans, then leveling up to reflective floating pond orbs when the usual tricks fail. 

Finally, I shift to employee training and the costly mistakes that happen when you assume something is “obvious.” Tossing trichlor tablets into a pool can leave burns and stains, and the wrong granular chlorine can bleach vinyl liners. I explain what to teach about cal-hypo vs dichlor vs trichlor, why broken equipment must be reported immediately, and how consistent basics like basket cleaning, testing pH and alkalinity, and understanding LSI keep routes easier and techs from burning out

• switching from latex to nitrile coated gloves to prevent chemical irritation and trapped chlorinated water
• using long arm gloves for cold mornings plus safer acid and salt cell work
• treating gloves as essential PPE to prevent cuts during filter cleaning and equipment work
• why ducks quickly wreck pool cleanliness and water quality
• using alligator and swan floats as the first deterrent step
• using reflective floating pond orbs when floats fail
• training employees to never toss trichlor tablets into the pool
• avoiding vinyl liner damage by teaching the difference between cal-hypo, dichlor, and trichlor
• building a repeatable service routine: baskets, debris removal, chemical checks, and LSI basics
• requiring immediate reporting when pumps run dry or equipment is broken

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Transcript

Welcome And Knowledge Volume 5

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Hey, welcome to the Pool Guy Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm gonna go over the Pool Guy's Knowledge Volume 5. And these are things that you learn out there the hard way, of course, but there's a much easier way to learn about avoiding making mistakes on your pool route, and that's learning from others that have made those mistakes before you, and hopefully this will prevent you from making some of these mistakes out there. 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. So I noticed my hands were starting to get really dry, and I started developing kind of I wouldn't say sores on my hands, but they were starting to get a little discolored in areas. And one of my relatives noticed my hands one day and he's like, What's what's happening to your hands? And you know, I actually started looking at them more carefully, and I noticed that there was definitely something wrong with my hands and the pigmentation on them. And a lot of this, of course, had to do with the fact that I just started wearing latex gloves out there because you know the chemicals are starting to bother me, and so I decided just to wear those surgical gloves, and this is when they were really cheap before COVID, I should say. And you could get these. This was many, many years ago, like 15, maybe even longer, when I started I started to try these latex gloves to to kind of offset the chemicals I'm touching out there, and it just was causing irritation because what was happening was that the water was getting into latex gloves under my skin, and it was just kind of forming a chlorine bubble of chemicals underneath there, kind of soaking my hands in it all day and drying them out and really making them look terrible. And so I was searching for an alternative, and at Costco I saw these nitrile gloves. Costco used to sell them, and I bought them, and I was I I wore them, and they're they were really excellent. These were gardening gloves basically at the beginning when they came out with them. Now they're used by workers everywhere, and I really recommend wearing gloves when you work out there, and these nitrile gloves are the best in my opinion. Now they are gonna get wet and they're gonna get soaked with water, but they dry out quickly. You could take them off when you get to your truck and put them back on between stops. I usually wear one glove continuously and put another glove on. And the glove I'm handling chemicals with, I'm also wearing that muratic acid trichlor tablets. And if you're wondering what gloves I'm talking about, you can go to my website, swimmingpoollearning.com, scroll down to the bottom where I have pool guide gear, and there's a link for the nitrile gloves there. And you can get just any nitrile gloves that are on Amazon. They'll have a nitrile coating on the front and a cloth backing, and these are comfortable, and these are ways to protect your hands from chemicals. And the the point I'm trying to make here is that the pool chemicals are very harsh on your hands, and you don't want to be touching trichlor tablets or holding muetic acid all the time and getting a splash on your hands, because your hands are truthfully what's going to make you money out there, and you want to preserve those for as long as possible 30-40 years working out in the field. If you want to work that long, of course, but you want to make sure that you protect your hands, and so wearing these gloves are critical. Also, another pair of gloves that I recommend, and you can find those also if you go to that my website and click over to the bottom, and they're these yellow gloves that go all the way up about 20. Let me see how actually how far they go. I'll click on the link. They go 26 inches up your arm, and they're called the Atlas 772 Nitro Coated Gloves. These are used mainly by people working in you know, like the butchers, they're slaughtering animals in a freezer. And you know, I got these gloves because they were selling them at my local uh superior pool product, they were just out there on the counter area, and I picked them up and they're great. And I discovered these gloves maybe about you know 15-20 years ago, and I wear them all the time in cold weather. They do help a lot. Sometimes wearing a pair of cotton gloves underneath really help offset those cold mornings, but you don't want to be out there in you know in a 40-degree morning and then with the wind blowing a little bit, and then putting your hand into the skimmer basket or on your pool pool, it's gonna freeze, you know, pretty much. And these gloves definitely keep your hands warm. I take them off between stops and put them on my dashboard where the heater can get them and heat them up. And so when you put them on, they feel so good, they're heated. You go through the pool, and for like five or six minutes, you have that residual heat you can still utilize out there to clean the pool, and again put them on your dash again, and then sometime by mid-morning you won't need them anymore. Sometimes I put them back on later when my hands get cold again, and they're pretty good. I mean, you can't do you can't, I guess you could tie your shoes still. I've done it, but it's one of those things where it is kind of a little bulky, you can't wear them all the time, but they're really great for situations like that. They're great when you're doing salt cell cleaning, you don't want to get any acid anywhere. Just put these gloves on. So gloves are key to pool service, and I highly recommend them. I wear these nitro gloves when I clean filters because your hands are gonna get scraped and scratched somewhere back there when you're taking the clamp off. So wear these gloves as much as possible. They save me from some really bad cuts and scrapes wearing these gloves. I've scraped my hand on a metal gate before, and I'm like, oh man, this is gonna be bad. And I take my glove off and it's perfectly fine. It's just red, it's not cut or anything. So definitely get a pair of these nitro gloves if you don't have them today, and get a pair of the Atlas gloves if you don't have them for cold weather. This next problem, I don't know if it's a local problem, but it's definitely a problem in my area where ducks use the pool. Now, the first time you see the ducks, they're gonna be cute and you're gonna be like, oh, look at the little ducks, they're so nice. And customers even start to feed them. But then when the ducks, when you have the ducks in the pool for a week, you realize that they're not very cute, and they seem to go to the bathroom like constantly. I mean, almost like it's like part of their nature, and you're gonna find their waste everywhere on the deck, you're gonna find it in the pool. And literally in a week, I mean the pool can be completely full of duck waste. That's I guess why ponds look the way they do. And it's one of those things where they're a real pest and a real problem for the pool. Customers will of course stop feeding him after a couple days when they realize how messy and destructive they are. Typically, it's a pair of ducks, they're they're together, you know, and they sometimes I've even been to pools where I've seen the ducks and ducklings swimming in in the water. And usually if you're in an area where there's, you know, like for me, there's there's several areas. There's a lot of gardens, botanical gardens, there's funeral homes with water features in front, there's a lake, you know, about four miles from me. And so ducks are something that you're going to have to deal with in certain areas. And how you deal with them? Well, they're protected here in California, so you can't, you know, harm the ducks intentionally or unintentionally. So the best thing you can do is to make it so that they don't really like going into the pool and then they'll eventually find someone else's pool to go into. Hate to say it that way, but that's kind of how it is. You're kind of passing the problem on to someone else when you take care of the ducks in your pool. The first line of defense for me is to get some floats, you know, three or four. I like to get more than one now. I used to just get one alligator float, but it seemed like that wasn't effective. And I find that if you have more floats in the water, the ducks will have less less of an opportunity to get into the pool. And certain floats are naturally going to repel the ducks. Not sure how they know this, but they do know it. Especially if they've never seen an alligator in California, maybe Florida, it's very common for ducks to see alligators, but here probably not so. But an alligator float seems to be highly effective. Get two of these on Amazon, put them in the pool. And then I think swans, someone told me the swans are their natural enemy. Not sure if that's true, but I found that swan floats also repel ducks, so get one swan float and two alligator floats and throw them in the pool and see if that is effective. Now, sometimes that doesn't work, and I've had that people report that the floats don't do anything. But something that does really work, and ducks don't like their reflection, or maybe something weird happens when they look at it. But these floating pond orbs, you can get them on Amazon, you know, 10 or 12 inches, they're metal and they're silver reflective orbs, and they're called pond orbs, I think. You put them in your pool, and they'll be they'll be floating in the water, and the ducks don't like them. Put like 10 of them in the pool, they're a little bit expensive, but they'll definitely cure the duck problem. I've done it effectively with these orbs. I didn't discover this. The customer actually had a pool where the ducks are just going in there all the time, and he put like 15 of these in there, and he got some really big ones too, they're like 14 or 16 inches, and sure enough, it cured that pool of ducks, and it was pretty amazing. So I've adopted this as a secondary strategy because the pool floats are less expensive. But if the pool floats are failing you, get these floating orbs and put them in your pool, and I can guarantee you that this will be effective at getting rid of the ducks in a a humane way without harming them. And this last part of the podcast, I'm gonna focus on proper training of employees in a way, not really a training segment, but certain things that you need to let your employees know so that they avoid mistakes and costly mistakes for you as well. The first one, of course, and this came from one of my members, he didn't understand why the customers were getting these black stains in their pool, and then he realized that his employee was taking the trichlor tablets and just tossing me in the pool. And of course, logically, you would think they would just dissolve in there. He never actually told his employee where to put the trichlor tablets. He just assumed that it would be logical he'll see a floater in the pool or he'll see an inline chlorinator and put it in there, and it was his fault for not really specifying to someone who never cleaned pools before that the trichlor tablets are not something you just throw in the pool and they're gonna dissolve in there. Yes, they will dissolve in there, that's true, but they're gonna leave a burn on the bottom because they have a very low pH, they're half cyanuric acid, they're an acid-based chlorine type, and they will leave black marks on the pool surface. And so, of course, let your employees know that you can't just toss these in the pool. I had someone contact me too from Back East where an employee was using, I don't know how he got a hold of it, but he went to the supplier, got some chlorine, and they gave him trichlor granular, and it was broadcasting the trichlor granular into all the pools, but these are vinyl liner pools back east, and so all the vinyl liner pools had these white bleached areas, you know, all over the bottom from the granular trichlor. And he just told me this as a warning that you know, if you're if your employee goes to the supplier and he's looking for chlorine, sometimes the people behind the counter don't know any better, and they'll hand them trichlor instead of calhypo, and or diet instead of dichlor, they'll give them trichlor, and this is a big mess. So just be aware that let your your employees know the difference between calhypo, dichlor, and granular trichlor. There's a really big difference between those three chemicals. Another big thing that you really want to get across to anyone you're training out there that's going to help you is that when something isn't working, when something is broken, report it right away. Believe me, I've heard this happen and I've seen it happen where something really critical is wrong with the pool and the employee doesn't tell you or tell anybody what's going on. You know, for instance, if they get to the pool and the pump is running dry, they'll just ignore it and just you know continue to clean the pool the best they can and they'll leave without the pump running. Big problem. A lot of times they won't clean the baskets, so you have to really train them that you know, look at the skimmer basket, make sure you empty it out, you know, check the pump basket. These are really important because if the baskets are full after they leave, the pool is not going to look good the following week. Believe me, it's gonna be a big mess. And so little things like that are really important, you know. Having teaching them a regimen of basket cleaning is really crucial and something that does happen and is something that you it's hard to really fix this problem, but this is something where the employee or someone that you're training really doesn't grasp the whole concept of pool service. What is pool service? How do you leave the pool? You know, do you leave it with debris on the bottom when you're finished? No, you don't. You make sure you clean that pool and there's no debris because you're cleaning the pool, you're servicing the pool. Do you balance the pool? Do you check the chemicals? A lot of times the employees will get lazy and not check alkalinity and and pH will just kind of dose the pool and not think about it like it's gonna have any effect to the water. So, really, a full training of you know what the LSI is, what it means to really balance the pool is really important and really ingrain it into them that they're doing a service, and this is something that they're they're doing at every pool. They're doing the same thing at every pool, repeating it. It's boring, but it's going to keep the pools looking good, save them time out there because really if the pool is starting to turn on the employee, it's really going to drain them and make them not want to do the pool service anymore, basically. You have a lot of people quitting on you. So a lot of it has to do with really teaching them that it's in their best interest, not the customer's best interest, it's in their best interest to maintain that pool so that when they get there, they can get through that pool quickly without standing there brushing it for 10 minutes when it has algae on the walls, or really scooping the debris off the bottom, or skimming the pool because they forgot to empty the pump basket or skimmer basket. All these things really lead back to them. And if they get to a pool and they're maintaining it properly, it's gonna be an easy, easy job to do out there versus something they're gonna struggle with. And so this is really important to really get this across to the employee. You know, skipping a pool one week because they're in a rush to skip Mr. Jones' pool and do it next week, this will lead to more problems for them. And I always turn it towards them. Like the pool is going to be really easy to maintain if you do these A, B, and C, and your job's gonna be super easy and it's gonna be really easy money for you, and that's kind of the best way to for them to look at it. So training the employees is really crucial and making sure that you're trying to remember everything that you want to teach them because if you fail to teach them one thing, it's gonna come back to hurt you and kind of hurt them as well. And it's one of those things where I remember when I first started out, I was working for a pool store and I was training this kid. He wasn't much younger than me, so I was still a kid. I was well, how old was I? I was like 17 or something, I wasn't even 18 yet. And I was training a another guy that was a little bit younger than me, and I tried to impart whatever wisdom I had, which wasn't much, I guess, at that point, but he did get fired because he was at a commercial pool and he was putting this is back in the you know eight 1988-89, a lot of kids were working. I don't think you see this many young people working out there anymore. It's something that's kind of gone to the wayside. But in my era, when you turn 15, you got a work permit, and at 16 you're working like part-time, and so he was a young kid, I think he just turned 16, but he left some uretic acid at a commercial stop on the pool deck with the lid off. Total no-no, and of course he got fired for that. But this is that generation was different than this generation for sure. But little things like that, you know, those failures will come back to hurt you as an employer if you're gonna bring on employees. So keep that in mind, and you know, really focus on all those little details out there that that they can miss. You're looking for other podcasts, you can find those by going to my website, somebodyfromolearning.com, and on the podcast icon, there'll be a drop down menu with over 1900 podcasts for you there. If you're interested in the coaching program that I offer, you can learn more at bullguycoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have the rest of your week and God bless.