The Right Way to Handle Pool Chemicals

Pool chemicals do not wait for a “big mistake” to hurt you. Most injuries and long-term health problems come from tiny shortcuts repeated every day: bare hands on trichlor residue, a loose muriatic acid cap in the truck, or a quick DE recharge with no mask because you are trying to move fast. We share the safety habits we rely on in the field, including why gloves that actually resist pool chemicals matter, how we think about eye protection without going overboard, and what to do when routine starts making you careless.

We also get specific about common products pool service techs touch constantly. Trichlor tablets can leave potent residue that chews through the wrong gloves. Muriatic acid can splash from one small transport error, so we break down smarter storage in cases, why loose bottles are asking for leaks, and what immediate rinsing should look like. Then we zoom out to chemical compatibility and transportation, including why acid and chlorine should never share a case and how a rear-end collision can turn poor separation into a toxic problem.

Some of the biggest risks are the ones people shrug off. Diatomaceous earth (DE) dust is an inhalation hazard tied to silica exposure, so we talk masks, low-dust DE, and alternatives like perlite. Even test kits are not automatically “safe” just because the bottles are small. We cover OTO reagent hazards and why checking the Safety Data Sheet (SDS or MSDS) helps you make better decisions for your health and your business. If this helped, subscribe, share it with a pool pro who needs it, and leave a review so more techs find practical pool chemical safety guidance.

We walk through the real-world risks pool pros face when handling common pool chemicals and how simple protective habits prevent burns, splashes, and long-term exposure. We also spotlight overlooked hazards like DE dust and OTO test reagents, then share practical ways to store, transport, and use chemicals more safely.  
• wearing nitro-coated gloves to prevent chemical burns and skin exposure  
• understanding why trichlor tablet residue can be especially harsh  
• preventing muriatic acid splashes with better storage and cap checks  
• protecting eyes with consistent eyewear and safer handling routines  
• separating acid from chlorine during transport and storage to avoid toxic reactions  
• treating DE powder as an inhalation hazard and using masks plus low-dust options  
• reading SDS sheets to understand hidden risks in everyday products  
• reconsidering OTO-based test kits and handling reagents with more care  
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Hey, welcome to the Pool Game Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm going to talk to you about safe handling of chemicals. Of course, we deal with all kinds of chemicals out there in the pool industry. And in order to stay safe, you have to kind of know certain procedures and certain cautions that you should take when handling and using certain chemicals. 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. I really think it's really crucial that you wear gloves out there when you service pools.

Welcome And Safety Focus

SPEAKER_00 1:51

I know that it's a pain sometimes because your hands get wet. But I found that I've saved myself from a lot of chemical burns. And my hands, although if you watch my YouTube videos, they're pretty torn up. A lot of that has to do with I have a dog bite on one hand that looks pretty bad when I'm filming. Actually,

Coaching Program And Support

SPEAKER_00 2:12

two hands have dog bite marks that have scarred him. So they're not really chemical burns. If you watch any of my videos, someone commented on YouTube as why I'm bringing this up that my hands look really bad after, you know, 30 years of pool service, but they're really not as bad as you would think. It's mainly from

Gloves That Prevent Chemical Burns

SPEAKER_00 2:32

two dog bites, two different dogs that bit my hands. Of course, that's a hazard out there in the pool service arena dealing with dogs that could bite you. But for the most part, my hands actually look pretty good. I mean, they're not like you know an artist's hands or someone who's a musician that doesn't do manual labor. One way that I really have saved my hands is about, I don't know, 15 years ago, maybe a little longer. I started using nitro gloves. I used to get them at Costco and they stopped carrying them. But you can get them on Amazon. If you go to my website, swimmingprolearning.com, and go to the very bottom of the website page, there's a pool guy gear section. Click on that, you're gonna see the nitro gloves that I get on Amazon, and they're really good. I buy the large size gloves, and I feel like the link that I have, a lot of them are out of stock here. Let me see if I can. They have a large 18 pack, so those are really good gloves because they they dry quickly. And the front is nitro coated, so you're gonna be protected from the chemicals. Where the back is more like a cloth-like material, so it's more breathable. So I highly recommend these nitro gloves. If you GNF is the name of the product, if you're using gloves, these are really great, a really great product, and these will protect your hands not only from kind of scratches and getting cut out there, but it'll protect your hands from the chemicals because we are dealing with pretty harsh chemicals. I guess one that comes to mind is trichlor tablets. Now, there's a lot of residue on these tablets, and I mentioned a story before that I had a customer who actually worked at a trichlor factory here in California when there was a factory here. I don't think there's hardly any of them around anymore, but this one was in, I believe, Ontario, California, and he worked there and they have these like industrial gloves that they wear when they're on the floor, and he misplaced his. I don't know what what exactly happened. So he just took a pair of kitchen gloves that you get at Walmart, those rubber gloves. And when he got home that day, his hands were completely burned because handling the trichlor all day using just those standard kitchen gloves, his hand the the trichlor

Trichlor Residue And A Burn Lesson

SPEAKER_00 4:49

went right through there and burned his hands. And so, of course, he never misplaces industrial gloves again. But that this goes to show you how potent that chemical is. It's a combination of chlorine with cyanaric acid. So it's the acid in there, I think that's what I mean. And so that's why whenever I'm handling trichlor tablets, I'm wearing a nitrile glove so that I'm not getting any of the trichlor residue on my hands or fingers. So to me, I think it would be just not very wise and pretty foolish to be handling chemicals with your bare hands. When there are gloves available that are really effective in the pool industry, so definitely get a pair of those, order them today, and wear those whenever you're handling any kind of chemicals. You have a chance of spilling muranic acid on your hands as well. I've done this, I've I've spilled it, I've spilled it on my chest. It's one of those things where you really have to be cognizant of what you're handling all the time. I think once in a while we tend to get careless out there because we get into a routine and we're always handling it, and we're not bothered by it. But really, these chemicals can be dangerous, and you want to handle them with care. The way I splashed acid on myself was that for whatever reason I didn't put the cap on the acid case correctly. Actually, it was one acid bottle in the case that the cap was not on correctly after I used it. And I went to put put it back in after I got out of my tote, because I like to put my

Muriatic Acid Splashes And Eye Safety

SPEAKER_00 6:28

acid back into the cases. I don't like carrying it on my truck loose like in the pool cart or in the the caddy because I found that they can tip over and leak. And so I was putting it back in, but for some reason the lid wasn't on right when it went back into the the case, and I was on a little slope driveway, so when I was reaching over to put it in, it slipped a little bit out of my hand, and the lid came off and it splashed on me. Of course, right away I got a garden hose and hosed it off, but it did burn pretty pretty good. It got onto my uh shirt area, and of course, part of my arm. And I wore gloves, so I wasn't too worried about the hands, but I hosed myself off, and I always wear sunglasses. Really, no matter if it's cloudy or sunny, I'm always wearing the sunglasses. You can find those on my site as well, under the pool guy tools or gear. And these are really nice polarized glasses, and so you can wear them all the time, and they're they're really effective. And wearing, of course, some kind of eye protection, whether sunglasses or safety glasses, I'd recommend that as well to protect your eyes. I mean, you don't want to look like some kind of mad scientist out there with goggles and gloves and all the way to your shoulder, but you do want to be protected because these chemicals are harsh, and you want to maintain integrity with your hands and any part of your body that these may get on. I've had members of the group get acid splashed in their eye when they're pouring it in the pool. Thankfully, it's kind of a diluted amount of acid when it splashes the water, so they just rinse their eye, it wasn't that harmful. But again, you gotta just be cognizant of everything you're doing with the acid and handling it carefully. I guess one caution that I would note is that if you are using the Hasa Returnables, and at the last pool show or at the pool shows, they had it at their booth, they had a big safety seminar on how to transport the chemical safely, and you never want to mix the acid and chlorine jugs in one case because if as you know, if you get acid and chlorine mixed together, it does make a mustard gas, and so it's very toxic. So you want to make sure that the orange cases are all acid and then the yellow cases are all chlorine cases. You don't mix those two together. Now, if you have a service cart, you can of course this you there's really not much you can do but put them side by side in the service cart when you're transferring them. If you have a tote, you can put them in each compartment separate from each other.

Transporting Acid And Chlorine Separately

SPEAKER_00 8:59

But it's really the cases that you want to keep separate, especially if you get in a car accident, you don't want to get rear-ended and have the acid and chlorine mixed together. If that makes some sense that when you store it in your truck, they don't have the acid and chlorine cases right next to each other. So maybe have a little bit of a buffer. I would hate to say this, but if you have cal hypo buckets, put in between the acid and chlorine, but the cal hypo is actually very flammable as well. So I guess there's not much you can do except maybe put your pool hose or some other things in between the chlorine and acid cases, give it a little bit of separation in case you were rear-ended that the chlorine and acid will stay separate from each other and won't mix together. It might be inevitable depending on your truck configuration. But the further away you can keep the acid and chlorine from each other, especially if you're storing at your house, you don't want to be storing the acid and chlorine cases stacked on top of each other. It's really wise to separate those if you can. It's it could be a pretty expensive cleanup. Having liability insurance is a definite must. Here's a chemical that I think a lot of pool pros take lightly and are pretty careless with. I was at my supplier one time and I mentioned a story before. There was an older pool guy and in the back of his truck, he had one of those conditioner barrels that we used to get. I don't know if you still get those or not, but back in the day we used to buy these giant conditioner barrels. I mean you can still buy them, but I don't think anyone buys them anymore as much. They're made of like a cardboard with a metal kind of clamp on top. It's a big barrel, you know, 100 pounds of cyanic acid basically. And so he was dumping these bags of DE in there. I guess that was his storage facility for the D, and the powder was going all over the place back there and in the air all over everywhere. And you know, you you may not read the the MSDS data sheet, safety data sheet on chemicals. I just pulled up one here for pool-time

DE Dust And Lung Health Risks

SPEAKER_00 11:31

DE powder and hazard summary, harmful by inhalation, may cause irritation, may cause lung effects, do not breathe dust, do not get in eyes or skin or on clothing, which is hard to deal with with dietomaceous earth, by the way. And it could cause respiratory disorders, it causes eye irritation, and it also long-term inhalation of crystalline silica dust may cause lung disease, silicosis, and it says here OSHA hazard. This material is hazardous under the criteria of the Federal OSHA Hazard Communication Standard 29C Fr. And a lot of a lot of pool pros don't handle this, I think, as a hazardous chemical that they're using out there to recharge the filters. I always wear a mask when I'm using diet to meshers. In fact, I really recommend getting the low dust DE. It's it's a little bit more expensive, but the cellar pool low dust DE, I'll pull it up here. It's going to be more expensive than your standard DE powder, but it comes in a nice kind of plastic bag, which DE should come in. I know like Leslie sells it in this box. That's not really helpful. And a lot of pool suppliers sell it in these bags that just tear, like just by looking at it, the bag will rip. So the cellar pool C E L A P O O L, this D powder, the low dust D powder is great because when you're using it, there's no dust. I mean, it's really like no dust at all. But you should be wearing a mask as well. Any kind of mask at least will protect you somewhat. Then no mask at all. So even if you use like, you know, an M, what is it? That those masks that are we used at COVID time. Is it the M98 or something? Use those masks that'll that'll definitely help you, R98 or something. But the low dust E is something is definitely what I would recommend. Or you can switch switch over to Paralite, and that's also a not a more non-toxic form of powder for the cartridge for the uh D grids, I should say. And you definitely want to take precautions because if you do read the safety data sheet on this product, you're going to not want to use it, or of course, be protected when you use it. It'll take things too lightly because this is all stuff that builds up over time. If you are not familiar with asbestos, this was used really heavily in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and a lot of people, you know, they were putting in a drywall, putting it everywhere, and they didn't know that it was as toxic as it is that we know now. And so 20 or 30 years later, after these people retired, you know, they they had this really serious disease associated with it. You can read all about it. It's a pretty interesting product that was kind of like a miracle product. They used it for everything because of the it was a fire retardant as well as a noise dampener. That's why the popcorn ceiling used it. And they use it in the pool industry and the white plaster, and also in the old heaters, there's actually asbestos, I don't know what you would call them, like sheets in there, like they're made of asbestos, like a heater from the from the 80s. So we used it in our industry as well, but no one knew how hazardo it was. I guess kind of like smoking and things like that. But this is like well known, and if you read the safety data sheet on Dietomaceous Earth, it definitely is a hazardous chemical. There are other chemicals, of course, that we handle all the time that you don't think about too much as being carcinogen. If you're using a five-way test kit or doing any kind of flash testing with OTO, OTO is a really popular chemical. This is a chemical to test the chlorine level in pools, and a lot of test kits use it. You know, if you use the poolmaster 5-way or the Extreme Power 5 or the JED pool tool kit, they all use the OTO solution, which is a known carcinogen for animals and possibly one for humans. You can look at the data sheet on this, and you know, there's quite a lot about absorption in the skin of this chemical, so you you definitely want to use this with caution. Of course, if you're wearing the nitro gloves, I I still wouldn't be careless with this chemical. The the safety data sheet is seven pages long and hazard statements H350 may cause cancer, H3O2, harmful swallowed,

OTO Test Reagent Hidden Dangers

SPEAKER_00 16:02

and H314 causes severe skin burns and eye damage. So definitely a chemical that looks pretty innocuous. You know, you're just using it to test the chlorine level, and you put it in the test file, and you see the yellow color, and that indicates the chlorine level darker, the more chlorine, the lighter, less chlorine. And a lot of people use this test kit by the way. It's very common. They sold at the hardware stores and at Walmart. Pool pros like it because the OTO is quick and easy. A lot of them do the flash testing with it. But if you don't read the the hazard data sheet, you wouldn't know that it was as a dangerous chemical as it actually is. They do sell refills too, and so you know, refilling them and using this chemical. I really would recommend maybe the Taylor test kit that uses a dye, a dye reagent instead, would be a little safer alternative. But really, if you're looking at the chemicals across the board, you would want to pull up the safety data sheets. You can find them just by googling them, and the safety data sheets are would really shed some light on what you're actually using out there. And of course, any kind of chemical you're using, you should be very cautious and you should know what is in it so you don't mix it with other chemicals, which is very extremely dangerous. But I think just being aware of what you're handling and touching all the time is going to protect you so that when you do retire, you're going to have a good quality of life afterwards. You won't be dealing with cancer or lung disease or something like that because you just weren't careful while you were out there in the field. If you're looking for other podcasts, you can go to my website, swing for learning.com, and on the banner, click on the podcast icon. That'll take you to a drop down menu of over 1900 podcasts. And if you're interested in the coaching program, you can learn more at PoolGuyCoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have you guys ever week? God bless.