Pool School: Chemical Safety, Hidden Leaks & Saltwater Tips

One careless twist of a lid can turn a normal pool stop into a choking, lungs-burning emergency. We get real about the kind of “pool guy knowledge” you usually learn the hard way and how to build safer habits before something goes wrong on your route.

We start with trichlor tablets and why unknown buckets, sealed feeders, and even closed-off floaters can become a concentrated chemical gas trap when water gets inside. I share what it feels like when it hits you, why it happens, and the simple precautions that matter most: slow down, open from a safer position, and treat any self-contained trichlor container like it could be compromised. If you service pools for a living, this is core pool service safety, not optional caution.

Then we shift to saltwater pool maintenance and the springtime reality of salt pool startup. I explain why you should not trust the salt system reading on its own, how a digital salinity meter helps you dial in the real salinity level, and why pool salt purity matters when you are choosing bags from a supplier or big-box store. We also cover a classic communication failure that leads to too much salt: the customer adds bags after you mention it, then you add more the next visit.

Finally, we tackle the call every pool pro gets: “I think my pool has a leak.” We break down normal evaporation during heat waves, the red flags that suggest real water loss, and a practical bucket test you can run before anyone spends serious money on leak detection. If this helps you, subscribe, share it with a tech on your team, and leave a quick review so more pool pros can find it.

We share the pool tech lessons that are easy to miss until they hit you hard, from trichlor fumes to salt mistakes and leak calls. We walk through safer habits and simple tests that protect your lungs, your time, and your customer relationships.  
• opening unknown trichlor buckets with caution and distance  
• understanding how water in tablets can create dangerous fumes  
• using proper respiratory protection around sealed chemical spaces  
• being careful with inline and offline chlorinators that can trap gas  
• avoiding surprises with floaters that customers close off  
• adding salt at seasonal startup and verifying salinity independently  
• carrying a digital salinity meter instead of trusting the system reading  
• using only pool salt for purity to reduce staining risk  
• preventing double-dosing by clearly telling customers you are adding salt  
• explaining normal summer evaporation versus abnormal water loss  
• spotting leak indicators through water level changes and chemistry shifts  
• running the bucket test before recommending leak detection services  
Learn more at swimmingpoollearning.com.  
If you finish in the coaching program, you can learn more at poolcoaching.com.  

Support the Pool Guy Podcast Show Sponsors! 

HASA 
https://bit.ly/HASA

The Bottom Feeder. Save $100 with Code: DVB100
https://store.thebottomfeeder.com/

Try Skimmer FREE for 30 days:
https://getskimmer.com/poolguy 

Get UPA Liability Insurance $64 a month! https://forms.gle/F9YoTWNQ8WnvT4QBA

Pool Guy Coaching: https://bit.ly/40wFE6y

Transcript

Welcome And Hard-Learned Lessons

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Hey, welcome to the Pool Guy Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm gonna go over the pool guy knowledge and give you some things that you'll learn the hard way out there, and I'll make it easy for you by giving you advice so you can learn the easy way by not making these mistakes or not having the knowledge of these certain things that you may not learn while you're working until you run into one of these things actually. 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. The first one is when you have trichlor tablets at the pool side or at a customer's house, and you're new to this account, so this is like you just gotta you just got a bid and you took over the account and there's a bucket of trichlor tablets there. I would urge you to open those with extreme caution. And it's really easy to get careless when you're dealing with chemicals because you kind of get

Coaching Program Quick Invite

SPEAKER_00 2:14

into this autopilot mode where you open up a bucket and it's like a natural thing to do. But with an unknown bucket, you're not sure, number one, if water has gotten into that bucket, and that's the biggest danger with an existing trichlor bucket at a stop. I did this and it was something that one of

Trichlor Buckets And Toxic Fumes

SPEAKER_00 2:34

my members did this as well that had even worse results. But I was at a new pool and there was a bucket of trichlor tablets there. Wasn't really thinking at that moment, and I opened the bucket to get some trichlor tablets out, and I just fell over basically, started gagging and coughing. You know, I couldn't catch my breath, my f I was just a total mess. Because there was water in there, and if you know anything about the trichlor tablets, they have tyaneric acid, so they have acid and they have chlorine in there, and this is very similar to the chemical that they use in World War I, the mustard gas, to gas the soldiers, and it's really overpowering and it's very dangerous. So the first rule of thumb is new account, bucket of tablets, open with caution, you know, open the lid, step up as far back as you can. Having a mask, of course, is really important. I carry a 3M mask with the filters, the pink filters on the side. Highly effective in minimizing this problem. Now, even with an existing bucket of tablets, this can happen to you as well. You know, maybe it was compromised, you didn't know about it, and you open it up and you can also get this. So it's not just new clients, but maybe a client they have a bucket of tablets that that you weren't careful and then put the lid on correctly, or it could be a cheap bucket of tablets where like the the Clorox tablets and this in the rectangular buckets, they don't feel that well. So I noticed that that's a problem as well. So anything to be cautious around there. The member I was talking about, he actually had lung damage, went to the doctor, and it was a long process to recover because he had gotten such a huge amount of it, uh such a strong inhalation of it, that it really damaged his lungs, and it can be very damaging. So caution, caution when you're opening a bucket of tablets. The same thing when you're opening up a new inline chlorinator at a customer's house. Took over a customer, opened up the chlorinator. You don't know if that thing is working because it may not even the tablets may not be dissolving in there properly. Same kind of reaction in a smaller area, really overpowering as well, just like the bucket of tablets, maybe not quite as much, but very close to that. So be very careful when you're opening up a new inline or offline feeder at a new customer's home. Also, yours could fail anytime on your route. Like regular customers' feeder can fail anytime. If that little check valve on the bottom gets clogged up, it could be a problem as well. So there's really no saying if an existing client that you already have is going to have a failure at one point with the trichlor tablets.

Safer Ways To Open Tablets

SPEAKER_00 5:12

So be cautious when you open those. And I think really caution is number one when you're dealing with trichlor and any kind of isolated, self-contained area. I've even had floaters where the customer closed off the pool floater on me, and I don't know why they did that. I think they had a party or something that I want chemicals in there. Didn't notice it that it was actually closed off, opened up the top, and there was water and trichlor tablets in there. And I did get a pretty good whiff of it as well, even in a chlorine floater that they had closed off. So again, it could be any of these things, and really it can be really overpowering and very dangerous. Transitioning a little bit here, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about adding salt to a pool and some cautions here as well. Now, when would you add salt to a pool? Well, typically at the beginning of the season when the salt water generator is firing up, I would consider adding some salt to the pool April and May in my area. It may be a little different in your area, but that's the main time where the salt water generators start coming on and you add salt. Number one rule of thumb is to have a separate digital salinity meter that you can actually get the reading of the pool with. Now, you don't have to necessarily calibrate these things exactly. They pretty much stay calibrated in my opinion. I've really not had to really calibrate the ones that I use that much. There's the Okatin one, which is a nice one. I have a video on that. It's white, it's called Okatin, I think that's the name of it. You have the Lamotte one, which I currently use right now because I like I have this long dingling thing on it. It's really cool. I just hold it at my level and drop it in the pool and it does the reading. So it's a nice feature of this one. I've also used the Hawk products as well. All really good salinity meters, in my opinion. And the way I check to make sure they're working, I just simply get some water out of the tap or hose, check it. It should be near zero coming out of the hose. There should be no salt in there. And that's how I kind of know that it's calibrated enough to get a reading within, you know, like 100 parts per million of the salt. Now, the reason why you want a separate digital meter is because a lot of times you can't rely on the system giving you the right salt reading. It could be a dirty cell, could be the system is not reading the salt correctly, any number of factors. So you can't rely on you know what the easy touch says,

Feeders And Floaters Can Gas

SPEAKER_00 7:32

the salt level is or whatever, the salt system itself. You can't rely on the salt cell either. Now you can get salinity test strips, they're not that great. I mean, they give you a reading, but you have to wait like five minutes and a lot of user error with those. I really don't like them, they're just not accurate. Now, if you have the spin touch, it does do salinity on there for you, so that's also a great bonus. So I would say a digital salinity meter is something you would want to have on your truck to start the salt pools off correctly. So I get a reading like April and May, and depending on the reading, I'll get the salt and I'll add it to the pool. In my area, adding maybe two bags or maybe three bags per pool. We don't we didn't get a huge amount of rain this year, and some areas you're gonna add a lot more salt. It doesn't really evaporate out of the pool, but it can be diluted by rainwater and by refilling and backwashing the pool, things like that. Do dilute the salinity level slightly, not tremendously, unless you get a ton of rain, but you're not gonna be adding a ton of salt to these pools. It's kind of a pain point for me. Getting older, I don't like bringing these bags of salt back there. And you have having a dolly is definitely helpful to bring the salt back, but you really can't order salt anymore and have it delivered to your house. Used to be you can go to Walmart.com and they would actually drop off like five bags of salt, but they realize now they're losing money delivering salt because it's pretty heavy. If you're an old timer like me, you remember that the bags of salt were actually 50 pounds, which made it even heavier. So 40 pounds is decent, it's light. You get the salt anywhere basically. Your supplier would have the salt, of course. They have the particular brand of whatever is gonna be your supply house. Lowe's Home Depot. It's just that you have to add pool salt only to the pool. The bag should say on there pool salt, it shouldn't say water softener or anything else because the purity level of the pool salt is important. So if the customer buys some other salt, don't put it in the pool because there's too much, too many impurities in there which could actually stain the pool surface. So just be aware of that. That the pool salt is the purest salt that they manufacture for pools. You take out any metals, any kind of impurities in there that could stain the pool. And that's the main difference is the purity level of the salt in the pool that you're gonna use. So, you know, mortin, pool salt, aqua pool salt, whatever. Just make sure you get that. And then the biggest caution I can say is make sure you let the customer know you added salt because you may tell the customer, oh yeah, your pool needs salt. I've done this before, my mistake. I'll tell the customer your pool needs salt.

When To Add Salt Each Season

SPEAKER_00 10:34

But I didn't finish my sentence or thought or instructions or clarification. I should have said, your pool needs salt, I'm gonna get three bags and add it. Didn't say that. I said your pool needs salt, and I don't know why I didn't finish that thought. The customer actually went to Lowe's, bought some salt, put in three bags of salt, two or three bags of salt, threw the bags away in the trash. Ironically, here's what happened. I get there that next week, I add the salt to the pool. I didn't check it, because why would I check it? I didn't add any salt. I go to throw the bags of salt away in his recycling bin, and there are bags of salt. And then of course, I'm not Sherlock Holmes, but I put two and two together very rapidly and realize now the pool has too much salt because the customer added salt and I added salt. Here's another one you're gonna run into often is that the customer's gonna think their pool has a leak. Now, in the summertime during a heat wave, the pool will lose a surprising amount of water. Here, like when it's like a hundred all week long or for ten days, you'll lose like an inch and a half, even up to two inches of water because it does evaporate very rapidly in really hot weather here. So there is a natural amount of water that is lost in the summertime. The reason customers think they have a leak is because they're adding water and they're like, hey, I just added water like five days ago and I'm adding water again, and I didn't do that last week. Well, heat wave will definitely do that and cause you to add more water to the pool. Now, pools with autofills, they can't really tell if they have a leak or not because it has water automatically. And until something happens is the autofill a malfunction

Why You Need A Salinity Meter

SPEAKER_00 12:10

or something or it doesn't work and you turn off the water line, then you may notice a water leak. But it just may be that the pool has evaporation, and since it had an autofill, you just never the customer always will think that they're adding too much water at that point. So if you're adding if the customer is adding water and then a few days later to add more water, that could be normal in summertime. The time when you have a leak is when you have an abnormal amount of water being added to the pool. You know, I would say that normally if an inch and a half evaporates during that week, you have a pool in your route that's losing four inches of water, there's a good potential that that pool has a leak. Another way to tell is if things that shouldn't drop start dropping. Like for instance, I mentioned the salt doesn't evaporate out of the pool, but if you notice that you're adding more salt to the pool because the salinity level is dropping, that could be an indicator that the water is leaking out. Cyaneric acid, if it's at 100 and you test it as at 50, good chance there may be a leak. If chlorine's not holding in the pool and you've done everything, phosphate removers, tested everything, and it's like zeroing out every week, you're getting algae in the pool, and the water level seems lower than normal, that could potentially be a water leak as well. The way I kind of gauge it is if the customer is losing a lot more water than other customers in the area. So if I get to a pool like I mentioned, and normally it's an inch and a half of water is lost that week. If it's losing four inches of water, then there's a potential leak in that pool for sure. Now, how do you check for the leak? Well, you can refer them to a leak detector, but before I do that, I like doing the bucket test first before they spend a boatload of money on a leak detector, which is what's going to happen. The initial visit is gonna be you know anywhere from $500 to $800 for them to come out there and check for the leak. So the first thing you want to do is make sure that you do an inexpensive way to check for a leak. And this is a bucket test. So get an empty bucket, a five-gallon bucket, like a tablet bucket is fine. You can get a smaller one, like a 25-pound

Use Only Pool Salt For Purity

SPEAKER_00 14:12

bucket that you have that you had a calhypo in, that's fine as well. Fill so what you want to do is fill the pool up to where it needs to be on a regular basis. So about halfway on the tile line was and halfway through the skimmers where I would fill it. On the first step of the pool, you want to that's where you want to put the bucket. So fill the bucket up to the level of the pool water. So what you want to do is get some electrical tape, put one piece of electrical tape on the outside of the bucket so that the pool water is touching it that's in the pool. On the inside of the bucket, put a rock, you know, a fairly sized river rock in there, it's good. Something that's gonna hold the bucket in place, maybe like a you know, one pound rock or one and a half pound rock, something like that, in there, or brick. People have used bricks too, like a brick in there, like a just not a huge brick, but one piece of brick, whatever is gonna hold the bucket because it's gonna move if you don't have something in there. Then you want to fill the inside of the bucket up with water to where you have the electrical tape with the pool water. So the outside pool water and the inside bucket water are gonna match perfectly. Put some electrical tape on the inside of the bucket as well. Now with normal evaporation during the week, and have the customer not fill the pool by the way, that's gonna throw off the whole test. Turn the autofill off, no water added to the pool. Wait about three or four days to come back and check it. So do the test on a Tuesday, come back on a Friday. So the water inside the bucket should evaporate at the same rate as the water in the pool. So when you look at the electrical tape on the inside of the bucket, on the outside of the bucket, the water should have dropped maybe a quarter

Tell Customers Before You Add Salt

SPEAKER_00 15:48

of an inch on the outside and a quarter of an inch on the inside. That will indicate that there is no leak in the pool. But if the bucket, the water in the bucket is higher than the pool, let's say the pool dropped an inch, inside the bucket, only dropped a quarter of an inch. That's a really good indicator that the pool is losing water because the water should evaporate at the same rate in the bucket and in the pool, with slight variation, but nothing dramatic like half an inch or an inch of water. Once you verify this and you suspect there's a leak, then the customer can call leak detector out, and initially it's gonna be expensive. There's many leak detection companies, big ones out there. Here there's American leak detection. I kind of like the smaller mom and pop leak detectors. They seem to be less pricey, and they seem to know a lot more uh techniques and troubleshooting tips, you know, to find a leak. You really can't isolate the leak without a leak detector. You know, you can't just assume that it's a skimmer if there's a crack in there. You can't assume that it's a return jet. Leak detector will let you know where the water is coming from or where it's leaking from. They'll do a full test. But the bucket test is the first test I do to

Evaporation Versus Real Pool Leaks

SPEAKER_00 16:59

make sure that there's a possible leak. And I've had this fail. Like when I do a bucket test and they cannot do leak detection, they're like, oh, there's no leak here. But somehow the bucket test was not a good indicator. But usually it is a really good indicator of a leak in the pool. If the water in the bucket is higher than the pool water, that means that the water is going somewhere and it's not actually evaporating, it's it's being lost somewhere. But there's other indicators like I mentioned besides the bucket test prior to that, adding a lot more water, losing a lot more water than the other pools in the area is a good indicator of a leak. And chances are there is an actual leak in that pool. If you're adding much more water, then they're adding much more water than they've previously added to the pool, and it's not normal evaporation. Looking for other podcasts, you can find that by going to my website, SonyPoollearning.com. On the banner, there's a podcast icon. Click on that. There'll be a drop down menu menu with over 1900 podcasts there as

The Bucket Test Step By Step

SPEAKER_00 17:56

well. And if you finish in the coaching program, you can learn more at poolcoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Hope you're a week. God bless.