The Pool Has Been Sabotaged!

Your pool problems might not be a “bad product” or a “bad test kit” problem. Sometimes the real issue is simple: the homeowner is unknowingly sabotaging the pool between service visits. We walk through the patterns we see constantly in the field and how they snowball into cloudy water, stubborn algae, and chemistry that never seems to hold.

We start with pool filters, because filtration problems hide in plain sight. DE filters get opened with no diatomaceous earth at all, or they get overloaded with way too much DE. Cartridge filters go years without a replacement until the pleats are blown out and the element is basically done. We also talk sand filters, including what happens when someone never backwashes for years and why backwashing too often can actually reduce performance.

Then we hit the chemical trap: trichlor tablets and rising cyanuric acid (CYA). When customers run multiple floaters packed with tablets, CYA can climb so high the pool becomes impossible to manage with normal chlorine targets. 

Finally, we cover the daily-operation sabotages that drive pool pros crazy: consistently low water levels and customers who cut pump runtime to two or four hours a day. We share tools like simple autofill options, plus real strategies to get buy-in, including linking poor circulation to higher chemical cost and even splitting timer schedules to reduce resistance. 

• Customers cleaning filters without understanding DE dosing and basic filter function
• DE filters running with no DE or far too much DE
• Cartridge and DE grid replacement neglected for years, causing chronic poor filtration
• Sand filters ruined by never backwashing, plus why over-backwashing also hurts performance
• Excess trichlor tablet use driving cyanuric acid too high to manage normally
• Using the free chlorine to CYA relationship to explain why the pool needs more chlorine
• Recommending partial or full drains to reset CYA, TDS, and overall water balance
• Low water levels reducing skimming and circulation, plus simple autofill options
• Customers cutting pump runtime too far, leading to algae risk and higher chemical use

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Transcript

DIY Filter Care Gone Wrong

Sand Filter Backwash Mistakes

Tablet Overuse And CYA Trouble

Drain Advice And Water Imbalance

Low Water Level Wrecks Circulation

Pump Runtime Battles And Timer Tricks

More Resources And Closing

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Hey, welcome to the Pool Way Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm going to talk to you about the pool being sabotaged by the customer. And these are things that customers do unintentionally, sometimes intentionally, that really sabotage the pool care or your ability to maintain the pool properly. 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. Some of these that I'm talking about today are when you initially take over the account, you'll discover this problem, and sometimes it's of course an ongoing issue while you're servicing the pool. I'll start with the first one, and that is the customer taking care of their own filter. Now, you can take care of your own filter, and a lot of do-it-yourself homeowners clean their own pools, clean their own filters. But there are some things that you have to keep in mind about the filter itself, and a lot of times this is neglected. It's kind of like if you change your own oil in your in your truck or car, and you never change the oil filter, or you never change the air filter, or you never change the in-cabin filter. So there are a lot of little things that your mechanic or jiffy lube knows about that you don't really know about unless you, of course, you know, go on YouTube and watch all these videos on maintaining your own vehicle. Same with pool filters. A lot of homeowners don't really go into detail, and a lot of them don't know a lot about filters. For example, I've taken over several dietomaceous earth pool filter accounts where I opened up the filter and there's no dietomaceous earth in the filter. And of course, logically, what makes you think you have to put anything in this filter? It's got these grids and it's got you know the cloth on him, it should filter the water. But in reality, the filter without DE, it does not run properly. I know usually right away when there's a problem with the filter when I'm doing the bid, when the pool looks kind of murky, doesn't look quite right, and typically it's a filter issue. Either, again, no diatomaceous earth, or I've run into this, and you've probably run into this yourself when you take over a pool. You'll take the DE filter lid off, and it's like a compacted clay model basically inside there, and the whole filter is full of diatomaceous earth, and this happens, and sometimes the customer will pour the whole 20 pound 25 pound bag into the filter. I'm not kidding, and it's just one solid brick of diatomaceous earth. You're just you just have a pile of DE that you're scooping out with your hands, and you're it's coming off the grids, and this has happened as well. So, too much DE is also a problem, as well as too little DE. I've taken filters apart that the customers have been caring for, and there's just this light, very light coating of DE on the grids, barely any DE on the grids at all. And so there there is a correct amount of titomaceous earth that you need to put on a DE filter or put into a DE filter for it to operate properly. It's certainly not rocket science, but very few people look at the instruction for the filter, and a lot of them just kind of wing it. The other thing I notice is that the filter elements for a pool that's being cared for by someone is usually not replaced as often as possible. I always talk about my rule of thumb here to replace diatomaceous earth grids and the quad cartridge filters, that's the four cartridge filter types, every three years, with the only exception being the stay right system three. Those are pretty robust cartridges. Besides that, they're extremely expensive and they seem to last a lot longer than most of the elements in the filter. But for in most cases, you'll take over a pool and you open up the cartridge filter, and it looks like the cartridge has been in there since the 1970s. I mean, the bands are all gone, they're all on the bottom of the filter, the pleats are wide open, spread out, you know, the top's cracked and crushed. It's one of those things where it's like, wow, when's the last time they changed this cartridge? And probably five or six years ago, they changed that cartridge. Usually it's really heavy too, because it's really saturated, and it's not something that they think about often changing. I've also opened up diet to make sure there's filters where there's you know all kinds of silicone on the grids. The grids are all cracked, all the skeleton inside there is broken, they're they're collapsed down on the edges. You could tell that the grids have been in there for five or six years or or even longer. And this does really affect the filtration of the pool. The good news is when you take over the account, and this happens all the time, you tell the customer you need to have new filter elements put in. You know, some are a little reluctant, but most are like, okay, yeah, you're the expert. I understand that's got to be done. You put the new grids in or you put the new cartridges in, and the pool is like night and day. The quality of everything improves drastically. Any kind of algae or cloudiness disappears, and it's one of those things where it really helps you a lot when you take over a pool that has really poor filter filter elements. And sand filters are not immune to this. One of the members of my group was in air is in Arizona and he had a he took over this pool, and I guess the customer never backwashed her sand filter. I mean, literally never backwashed it in years, and so he opened it up, and the sand was just like a solid piece of cement, basically. It's the truth because the you know, if you're not backwashing regularly, the sand just starts to clump up and it starts to get harder and harder, and basically that filter just had to be thrown away because you could not get that piece of cement out of that filter. And so sand filters do need to be backwashed. Now, a mistake a lot of people make with sand filters is they backwash them too often. Sand filters actually work better when you're not backwashing them every week. In reality, you should only backwash the sand filter when the psi on the gauge, the pressure gauge goes up by 10 psi. So if your sand filter is at 20 and then it's at 23, you don't backwash it, but a lot of people do. When it gets to 25, some people backwash it as well. Wait till it gets to 30 every time, and then backwash that filter or 10 psi over the clean, it might be right around that area. And the sand filter actually does a lot better when you don't over-backwash it, but of course you have to backwash it when it gets dirty, otherwise, you're gonna have the problem with the sand and channeling, all kinds of problems happen when you don't regularly backwash the sand filter when it needs it. Here's another one that I run into when I take over an account, and I understand the struggle with maintaining the pool, and I've taken over pools, and this is no joke where there are two floaters, chlorine floaters in the pool, and both of them are were full of tablets. So basically, they're running 10, 8 to 10 trichlor tablets in their pool every week, and I see buckets of empty tablets there, and usually there's you know tablets on the side, and I don't even bother checking the cyaneric acid in that pool. I know that it's probably unreadable. Something you have to know about cyaneric acid testing is that once you get to 100 parts per million of cyaneric acid, it's really hard for the melamine, the chemical used to test cyanaric acid to be accurate. It's usually accurate up to about eight to a hundred, and then you can do a dilution test, of course, where you dilute the water with you know bottled water and the pool water, and you just take that number and cut it in half. Sometimes that's somewhat effective, but sometimes that still gives you a false or not an accurate cyaneric acid reading. But if someone's running eight or ten tablets in a you know 15,000 gallon pool and they have buckets of tablets on the side, empty buckets everywhere, you know the cyaneric acid is off the charts. I usually recommend draining the pool to the customer. In a case like that with a cyaneric acid, you know, is it three or four hundred parts per million? And believe me, I run into pools where you know the cyaneric acid level is at that height. You can tell right away just by how the customer is caring for the pool that's that the cyaneric acid is out of control. And I use this formula a lot, and this is why the customer has to run more and more tablets and put a second floater in, and you know, have eight to ten tablets running in that pool because of Bob Lowry's ratio, and this is something I mention all the time, is that the free chlorine level needs to be 7.5% of the cyaneric acid in the pool. And so if you have a pool that has cyaneric acid of 400, let's say, which is not atypical, but it can happen when people are running trichlor tablets like crazy in the pool. Because a lot of people don't really know that the trichlor tablet is adding cyaneric acid to the pool. Still, this day it's hard for people to understand that half of that trichlor tablet is cyaneric acid. So if you have a 50-pound bucket of trichlor tablets and you use it in the season, you're adding 25 pounds of cyaneric acid to the pool. So a pool with with 400 parts per million of cyaneric acid, and by the way, Lamotte makes a test strip that goes up to 500 parts per million, and there's a reason why they made this test strip, is a cyaneric acid test strip that goes from zero to five hundred parts per million, is because of this very problem where you have pools that are running really high cyanaric acid where you can't read it. And I think those test strips are fairly accurate. But if you have a pool that has a cyaneric acid of 400 parts per million, you need to run your free chlorine at 30 parts per million. That sounds pretty crazy and insane, but you've probably taken over pools that have had really high cyaneric acid. So draining half the water at least, or draining all the water, is a great way to start with a pool like that. And what I tell the customer is I don't really point out the failure too much to rub it in, but I will tell the customer something like this oh, so when's the last time the pool's been drained? And they'll say, Well, I don't know I've owned the house for eight years, I've never drained it. Then you tell them, Well, it's definitely time for the pool to be drained because the water really has an imbalance of you know TDS, and you can explain a little bit of what dissolved the total dissolved solid is, because a lot of things, you know, all the clean stuff evaporates out of the pool, basically, and everything else is left behind calcium, salt, cyaneric acid, and that has to be drained out every so often. And so, usually when I tell them that we're gonna drain the pool and start fresh, and the water is gonna be much better for your family to swim in and easy to balance, they're okay with it. In fact, it's one of those things where it has to be done at this in this case when the cyaneric acid is too high. There's not much you can do except drain the pool to get things back in balance. Here are two that can be an ongoing problem that sabotage the pool care, and these are kind of irritants for me. So I'm gonna address these one after the other. The first one, of course, is low water in the pool constantly. There's a lot of customers, for whatever reason, of course, they don't have autofills, and they feel like they're wasting water when they fill the pool up, when they're supposed to fill the pool up, if that makes sense. And so they let the pool run to where it's usually below the skimmer sometimes when you get to the account, or the pool's running dry, or the water level is just really low, and the pool is just not circulating properly. A lot of debris is on the bottom, the surface is full of debris, because a lot of the new pools have what's called a float diverter valve in there. I call it the UFO device, but that actually will collapse down when the water gets too low, and then the main drain will activate and the pool will pull from the main drain and not the skimmer. Of course, this leaves the pool a mess because there's nothing being skimmed off the surface from the with the skimmer, everything falls to the bottom. The the water is not circulating, in my opinion, correctly at that point, and it's one of those things where you know it's it's kind of an irritating thing for the customer not to add water to the pool for whatever reason, you know, they want to conserve water or they just neglect that aspect of it. A lot of times I'll recommend you know a device that adds water for the customer. To me, the pool sentry is okay, it's a fairly decent device, it's called the pool sentry. It goes on the deck, you attach a garden hose. There's a few caveats, you have to have a brand new garden hose, that's what I start with for the customer, and you have to make sure you put some Teflon tape on a threaded part so that there's no leaks when at that point. But the pool sentry is pretty good, it has like a toilet bowl kind of plunger type thing on it, and it kind of monitors the water level, and it'll actually keep the pool fill for you. So if you have a customer that just doesn't fill the pool up, recommend that. Putting in an in-deck autofill is kind of expensive, but it can be done. You're looking at like$2,000 to have it plumbed in. Probably wouldn't go that far, and a customer would probably balk at that idea. But doing something that's topical like that, you can also get something for the the hose, the hose connector on the house itself with a timer that will add water, but those can be a little bit tricky. So I think the old school pool sentries on the deck work fairly well, or just tell the customer, and this is another thing that I tell them is you know, that if the pool runs dry for a period of time, the pump can get me damaged, and we'll have to replace it, and that's like you know, 1800 bucks or whatever. Just give them a number that's pretty scary, and then they'll take more care of it. I also tell them that since the pool has been running dry a lot, I'm adding a lot more chlorine. So I'm gonna have to charge you for a 25-pound bucket of cow hypo and leave it at your pool because I'm using a lot of maintenance chlorine to keep your pool up because of the fact that the pool's not circulating and running properly, and customers don't like spending money on extra chemicals, of course, and so they'll be more conscientious about filling their pool at that point. Just kind of make it a monetary pain point for the customer. Either you have to buy more chlorine and leave it at the pool, or their equipment is going to be damaged over time, and you have to replump certain things because the pool ran dry, and sometimes that is effective. But this is one of those things that is a real irritant for pool pros, is when the water level is always low at the service account. This one also is an ongoing problem where the customer is standing out there and the pool looks fairly good, and he's like, Well, you know, running the pool two hours a day. Look at this pool, it looks fine. I don't I don't think you need to run it any longer than that. You know, why do you need to run it more than two hours a day? This happens a lot out there too with a customer, and I'm not exaggerating by the way, two hours a day. A lot of people think that's all they need. And I've had customers reset the intermatic timer on me, I've had customers reset the automatic system on me, the automatic panel to run the pool a very short amount of time. That really does no good for you. I mean, you can maintain a pool, I guess, in cold weather if no one's using it, running at a really small amount of time, but in summer, this pool needs to be running, and you just have to educate the customer. Again, make it a monetary thing for them that since you're only running the pool four hours a day, algae is developing, the chlorine is not being circulated in the water properly, so I have to keep a higher chlorine level. I have to put this in the water for you, and this is the cost that's gonna you're gonna incur, you know, you're gonna save on electricity, of course, but you're gonna have to buy a 50-pound bucket of Calhypo. I'm gonna have to put you know a pool or X in there, all these things, and the customer has to kind of foot the bill for that. And I really think if you make it a monetary pain point, they'll definitely run their pool longer. And it's one of those things where even with a variable speed pump, I have customers fighting me on the runtime. It's this thing about their electric bill, they feel like the pool is wasting energy, and it's a constant battle to have that pool, you know, running at a certain time. And sometimes I'll do this little trick too where I'll tell the customer that you know I can run your pool two separate times during the day and at nighttime as well, or in the evening, so I could put an extra on-off tripper on there, so I'll run it in the morning for like three hours, you know, from nine to noon, and then the pool will be off. That's not ideal by the way, because you want the pool running during the day when the sun's hitting it. But some customers, you know, they fight you on this, and so I'll put the timer on in the morning, and then I'll have the timer come on again in the evening from like five to eight or five to nine. And this is for a single speed pump, of course. And people like kind of like having the spillway going at nighttime and in the evening, and this seems to be effective, you know, like soothing having the pool running, I guess, while they're watching and eating their dinner. So this sometimes works by splitting the time, and the customer doesn't really feel like you're running the pool for eight hours straight or ten hours straight if you split it. So try splitting the timer and see if that helps. But yes, it's a problem, and it's something that really sabotages pool care when the pool's not circulating or the pool's not running long enough. If you're looking for other podcasts, you can go to my website, swimmingfoldlearning.com. On the banner, there's a podcast icon. Click on that. There'll be a drop-down menu of over 1900 podcasts for you. And if you're interested in the coaching program, you can learn more at poolguycoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have the rest of your week and God bless.