Pool Guy Tips: Knowing When to Stop Trying

A single pool can hijack your entire day if you don’t have a line you won’t cross. We’re sharing the kind of “only learned in the field” pool service knowledge that saves hours on a route and keeps you from chasing problems that refuse to cooperate.

First, we get practical about one of the most common time traps: a pump that won’t prime after running dry. We talk through quick checks that actually matter, like lubing or replacing the pump lid o-ring, using an attached spa to help establish suction, and knowing when to stop repeating the same steps. The big takeaway is a hard boundary: if it won’t prime fast, shut it down, clean what you can, and come back with time or hand it to a repair tech who can go deeper.

Then we shift from equipment to business survival with a clear approach to late payments. We lay out a simple billing rhythm, when to remind, and when it’s fair to pause service so you don’t end up funding someone else’s pool with your own chemicals and payroll.

We also cover “mystery algae” that isn’t really a chemistry problem at all. Sometimes the homeowner is turning the system off for noise, cutting variable speed pump runtime to save money, or stopping a standalone VS pump during a party and forgetting to restart it. We finish with a few honest strategies for handling chatty customers so you can stay focused and keep your route on track.

Subscribe for more real-world pool pro guidance, share this with a tech who needs boundaries, and leave a review with the biggest time sink you’ve had on a stop.

We share field-tested pool service boundaries that save your route when problems, payments, or people start eating your day. We walk through priming failures, late-paying customers, mystery algae tied to pump runtime, and simple ways to keep moving without being rude.
• setting a 10-minute limit when a pool pump will not prime
• fast priming fixes using spa suction, o-ring lube, and basic tightening checks
• recognizing hidden blockages like debris in the suction line
• leaving the system off and scheduling a return or referring repairs out
• creating a firm billing timeline and stopping service for non-payment
• understanding why overdue balances snowball and rarely get “caught up”
• diagnosing sudden algae by checking timers, schedules, and customer changes
• educating homeowners on variable speed pump electricity use and runtime
• preventing shutdowns on standalone VS pumps after parties
• using honest exit strategies with chatty customers to protect focus and speed

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Transcript

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Welcome And Quick Coaching Plug

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Hey, welcome to the Pool Guy Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm going to give you some more pool guy knowledge, and this is kind of inside information that you only learn when you're doing pool service out there in the field for quite some time. So it's kind of a way to get some experience before actually getting the hands-on experience, so to speak. 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 Swimmipoollearning.com.

The 10 Minute Priming Rule

SPEAKER_00 1:43

This first one I've learned the hard way, and I'll call it when to cut and run. And this is when you face a problem and you're putting a lot of effort into fixing it. When do you pull the plug on this particular problem? And it could be a number of different levels. I'll start with the first level. You get to a pool and you notice that it looks pretty bad, like it hasn't been running all week. So you go over to the equipment, you turn it on, and you see that the pump is trying to prime, but there's no water in the wet end. You take the pump lid off, and you may even see that the pump basket is melted since it ran dry, and you try to prime that pool. Now there could be a number of reasons why that pool is not going to prime. And you can spend 10, 20, 30 minutes an hour there trying to get the pool to prime. And believe me, I've done this where I've spent 45 minutes to an hour trying to get one pool to prime. And if you have 10 more pools to do it the rest of your day, this really takes the wind out of your sails and makes it for a very frustrating time to continue your pool route. So there's one good example of when to cut and run. When you're trying to get a pool to prime, and so you can do a number of things. So the first thing I do if there's an attached spa is that I'll fill the pump up with water, put the lid on, also lube. I found that this is really important. I lube the lid pump lid o-ring up with magic lube. Sometimes I'll even replace the o-ring. I find that once the pool pump overheats like this in a situation where it's been running dry, then it's always best to lube up the o-ring or change it before you start anything and before you go through all these hoops to try to get things running. So if there's an attached spa, I like to put it in spa suction and leave it in pool return and try to get the pool to prime from the spa. Sometimes you can be successful in doing this. And once you get the pool primed, you can slowly turn the giant valve back to pool suction, and you'll probably get some air in there and it'll cavitate. Then you just simply turn it back to spa suction and keep doing that for about a minute until you finally can turn it to full pool suction without it cavitating or air forming in the wet end of the pump, and you can get the pool prime that way. So that's an easy solution. And if that happens in the first five minutes, you're golden. But I've done this before and nothing happens. So then I'll go to my truck, I'll get my drain bladder, I'll put it in the skimmer line, I'll try to run some water in there. That may not be effective either. Then I'll try some other things. I'll I'll look tighten the unions, I'll unto tighten them, I'll I'll do whatever I can to kind of make sure everything is tight at the equipment. But already at this point, you're at 15 minutes in, and you can go through this whole routine again and start over, which I've done before, you know, start all these troubleshooting tips over again. Put water in the pump, you know, maybe even put the garden hose in the pump wet end and try to prime it that way. I've done all these things, and if you can't get it primed at that point, you simply need to leave the system off and then tell the customer that you'll come back or you'll send someone back to get it working or to get to figure out what's wrong with the pool. And this, you know, it could be a number of things that you can't get the why you can't get it working. I'll give you one example. I was going through this routine one time and I spent 40 minutes trying to get it working, and I find out later from the repair man that I sent there that there was a t-shirt stuck in the suction line. It got sucked into the skimmer. Another time the suction line was clogged up with water balloons. They had a party, somehow the water balloons got past the skimmer basket, which is not unheard of. The skimmer basket floats sometimes and the pool's off, and this clogged up the pump. So it could be something like that. It could also be a a leak in the pipe, it could be you know air getting in from the unions or from the threaded fitting of the pump. So there are a lot of reasons why the pool is not priming. And you can do all these tricks to try to get it to prime and it won't prime. And again, 20, 30, 40 minutes pass by and you're no better off than you were before. The pool's still a mess. You even have even haven't had time to brush it or skim it or treat any allergy in there or put some chemicals in it, you're just spending all this time trying to get the pool to prime. So I'll let you know that when you run into a situation like this, give it 10 minutes. If you can't get it to prime within 10 minutes, I'll leave everything off. I'll clean the pool the best I can, and then I will come back on a day when I have more time to work on it. Or I'll send someone out there that will fix it for me. It's sometimes good to refer it out to someone else if you have a dedicated repair person that can go there and do that because they have more time. And they may find things that you couldn't find, they may have CO2 gas to blow out the line which you don't carry, or maybe you do, but you come back on a different day to do it. The point is draw a line of when you're gonna stop and when you're gonna move on to your next pool, because it time can get away from you very quickly at this point.

Late Payments And When To Stop

SPEAKER_00 6:46

Another thing also on another level is how much time do you give a customer that's paying you late. Well, it's it's you know very friendly and very you know benevolent of you as a business owner to give them two months, three months to pay you. But I'm gonna say right now that this probably goes unrewarded. So there are certain things, like if you have rental properties and you let a tenant go for 30 days and you don't bug them about the rent being late, there's a point of no return at this point because if they're that late, how are they gonna make up the payment? And the same kind of translates to a full service customer. If you charge 160 a month and they miss a month, what makes you think that they're gonna be able to come over $320 the next month or $400? I don't know I can't add right now. Let's see, $320 plus $6380, so $480 after three months, you know. So it's one of those things where it's compounding, you're not getting paid yourself, and for them to give you a check for $480 is unrealistic at some point. So how long do you go when a customer with a customer that's not paying? Well, you should bill, I usually bill the 20th of the month for that month. So if it's in let's say it's in August, I'll bill on August 20th for the August month's dues. And it's due on September 1st. If they don't pay me September 1st, I'll remind them like on September 7th or 8th. And if it gets to September 15th, 12th or 15th, somewhere around there, then you just simply tell them, Oh, I have to stop service for non-payment if you don't send me the money within this week or this time. And that's kind of how far you should go because I've learned from experience that if they're a chronic late payer, that's gonna get them to pay you, of course. But if they are someone that is chronically late all the time and you know they pay you whenever they feel like paying you, this is not gonna work for you in the long run. And it's better for you not to deal with that kind of customer anyway. It's nothing but headaches, it also messes up your bookkeeping, and it's something that you shouldn't put up with. There are people that just normally pay late, it's just their personality, but you don't have to deal with it. And there's a certain point where you have diminish in returns when you let them go for 30 days, 60 days. I have a friend who has 20, you know, 20 service trucks and a thousand accounts, and you know, one of the things that happens to him is that he'll be too nice to people, and then he'll let him go for 30 days or 60 days, but then he has to pay his guys, of course. And then by the time he goes to collect the money, the person usually cancels service or something, or has someone else or doesn't pay, and you've lost all that money, and you're paying the employee to go there and you're putting chemicals in. So there's a lot of layers to this, and there's a certain point, and it should be pretty early in that service next service month when you tell them that if you don't receive payment for August, you're gonna have to stop in early September doing their pool, not on the first, of course, of the first week, but if you wanted to get all the way to like the 15th, you know, the month, middle of the month, that's fair because you're gonna build them again anyway on the 20th for that month, and you should be getting August payment before that point, and then September payment between the 20th and the 1st of October. So if you don't get those payments, again, it starts snowballing, and the customer, if they couldn't pay you that month, they're certainly not gonna be able to pay you three months from now a large sum of money, and then you're gonna find yourself negotiating with them to take less money for the work you've done. So at some point you're gonna have to just cut and run and just call it quits when the customer's not paying you on time. So I did spend a lot of time on this segment, and I think it's really important that you implement some strategies in your pool service now for those situations. Here's another one that you may run into out there, and this is like strange algae issues. And I've I've run into this before

Mystery Algae From Pumps Being Off

SPEAKER_00 11:08

where let's say you have a pool that really never gets algae, and then all of a sudden you're noticing algae is in the pool, and you're kind of scratching your head. Maybe the chlorine is zeroing out, maybe it's not. And there are a lot of different reasons for this happening. I'll give you some that have happened to me, and keep an eye out for these situations. There was one situation where this pool I was doing really didn't have a problem ever before, and then I started noticing that there was algae forming in the pool. The pool looked kind of murky, like it wasn't running properly. But then I checked the system and everything is working fine, and you know, the timer's set right. And I I find out later, I found out kind of by accident. I was at the pool, the customer was out there doing her gardening, and the pool was off. And I was like, whoa, the pool should be on right now. It's 11 in the morning, it should be running. I know what the time is supposed to be on, and and then I'm going over there to turn on the pool because it's off. And she says, Oh, I I've been, you know, gardening a lot the last two weeks in my yard, and I don't like the noise at the pump. So I've been turning off that little dial every time because it's really annoying when I hear it. So can you leave it off while you while you clean the pool? And that's when I had to tell her, Oh, you know, this is the problem because I noticed for the last two or three weeks that the pool has been looking really bad, it's got algae and it's been getting cloudy, and then I explained to her that I could simply just change the timer to come on in the evening for you, and the pool has to run. Easy solution, quite a mystery of what was going on until I ran into the customer. Another time, and this is something that I I realized later with this other customer, is that he didn't like his pump running, it was a variable speed pump, and he thought he was losing money with the pump running 14 hours a day. And so he went into his easy touch system and reset the pump down to four hours. Now, I didn't know this because I wasn't paying attention to the run cycle. The pool would come on when I'm there in the morning, and I didn't think it's gonna turn off at 11 o'clock in the morning, you know, or 10 or noon, instead of running till seven or eight at night. So the pool was starting to look really bad as well. And so I think it was like it took me two or three weeks to figure this out. I've it's kind of embarrassing, but I finally went there and checked the schedule, and I realized that it was running for four hours only. I was like, oh, what happened here? And so I set it back to the regular time. I got back to the pool the following week and I noticed the pool didn't look that great either. And I looked at the schedule and it was set back to the four hours. So finally I text the customer and he's like, Yeah, I don't like the pool running because it's costing me a lot of money and my electric bill is so high this month. And then I explained to him that the VS how the VS pump works, spent a lot of time telling him that it's even though it's running 14 hours, it's not using any electricity hardly compared to your regular old single-speed pump. Not the same, totally different. Don't worry about it, and so solve that mystery as well. So, this is something just to keep on the radar that there could be something that you're not really thinking of being the problem. You're gonna be testing for nitrates and phosphates and adding extra chemicals and maybe cleaning the filter when it's just the customer turning off the system because they don't like the noise, or they're you know, they don't like it running a long time. Another problem you're gonna run into is with a standalone VS pump. This happens all the time in the summer, where the customer is using their pool and they don't like the noise of their pump. And I understand it could be loud out there if you're sitting there talking and the pumps by the pool, they'll hit stop on the variable speed pump, but they'll go in the house later that day and they won't hit start again. And so if you know anything about the standalone VS pumps, unless you turn it on and off or start and stop, it'll just stay off and won't go back into its normal scheduled mode. So I've run into this a lot. I know exactly what the problem is right away because when I get to the pump, I see that it's off, and I realize the customer turns it off because they had a party or whatever, or they're using their pool. So educate the customer that you can't just turn it off or hit start stop and not go back out there and hit start again with a single with a standalone variable speed pump because then the pool is not running that whole week. This last one is something that to consider kind of having some ways to implement exit strategies, and that is when you're back there and a customer is chatty and they're taking your time talking to you, and this could be a chronic thing where they're like waiting for every week and then they have this kind of deep conversation or to tell you all these things and they keep the conversation going. For me, I can't concentrate and work. I also feel kind of bad because I'm like walking around the pool cleaning it, not really looking at them, paying attention. Also, like sometimes

Honest Escape Plans For Chatty Customers

SPEAKER_00 15:43

I get out of my routine and I'll forget to do something because of their chatting. It just slows me down, and I'm not saying that you should blow the customer off or you know, whatever. And a lot of different pool guys do different things. I have a friend who pretends he doesn't speak English. I mean, that's going to an extreme, but he he has done that before. He only speaks Spanish or whatever. You know, it's you could do that, but that's that's like pushing it to the limit of, you know, if you speak English, you're you're not being honest. I had another friend, another member of the group that would pretend he's getting a phone call. Like, hello, you'll pick up a cell phone. And one time he was doing this, and I told the story before, his phone actually rang when he was like pretending to be on the phone. So again, that that's probably not the most honest way of dealing with this. What I like to do, and this is effective, I think, of breaking that cycle. Well, if you can change the service time, that's great too. Like go there at seven in the morning and don't go there at 10 in the morning when you know they're gonna be out there. You can also do this. What I like to do is I'll like to excuse myself, say, oh, I have to go get something out of the truck, and I'll go to the truck and I'll get something, of course. I'll bring in maybe a gallon of acid or I'll bring in some cal hypo shock or whatever, but I'll take my sweet time at the truck. So I'll I'll spend two or three minutes there, and then hopefully by the time you get back in that backyard gate, they've gone in the house already and lost interest in you. I mean, it's one of those things where there's no ideal strategy to kind of get out of it. But it's one of those things where the chatty customers can be a problem, especially if it's their routine to come out there and chat with you all the time. It's not a bad thing. Maybe it breaks up your day, you know, talk to anybody all day, but they're there. But to me, I'm not the kind of person that really wants to spend all day there talking. And sometimes even when you're done with the pool, they just want to continue the conversation. So again, it's something that you're gonna deal with and run into, and you have to think of some honest strategies to kind of get out of it without kind of getting yourself trapped, you know, your phone ringing when you're on the cell phone. Uh, that was a pretty bad situation at that point and quite embarrassing. If you're looking for other podcasts, you can find those by going to my website, somethingpoollearning.com. On the banner, there's a

More Resources And Closing

SPEAKER_00 17:57

podcast icon. Click on that, it'll be a drop down menu with over 2,000 podcasts for you to listen to. And if you're interested in the coaching program, you can learn more at PoolGuyCoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have you rest of your week and God bless.