Ep162: Designing an Efficient Pool: Smart Planning for Long-Term Savings | The Deep End Podcast Pt. 4

In the final part of our four-part series on saving money on pool maintenance and upkeep, we dive into planning and designing your pool for maximum efficiency. Whether you're building a new pool, renovating, or buying a home with a pool, smart design choices can save you thousands in long-term maintenance, energy, and chemical costs.

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00:00 - Introduction
Overview of the final episode in the Saving Money on Pool Maintenance series
02:15 - Why Pool Design Affects Long-Term Costs
How smart planning during construction or renovation saves money
05:42 - The Importance of Proper Circulation & Jet Placement
How return jet positioning affects water flow, chemistry, and efficiency
10:18 - Water Features: Are They Worth It?
How waterfalls, bubblers, and deck jets impact energy and chemical use
15:07 - Surface Choices That Prevent Algae & Reduce Maintenance
The pros and cons of plaster, tile, aggregate, and fiberglass finishes
19:32 - Choosing the Right Filtration System
Comparing cartridge, sand, and DE filters for efficiency and maintenance
24:15 - The Role of Variable Speed Pumps
How a VS pump can cut energy costs and improve filtration
28:52 - Why Chemical Feed Systems Make Pool Maintenance Easier
Benefits of auto chlorinators, pH feeders, and ORP controllers
33:40 - The Best Cleaning Systems for Low-Maintenance Pools
Comparing robotic, pressure, and suction-side cleaners
38:27 - Hidden Costs of Poor Pool Planning
Common mistakes that lead to high maintenance costs
42:12 - Final Thoughts & Episode Wrap-Up
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Transcript

Russel Ownens: 0:00

Welcome to the deep end pool podcast for pool owners and the swimming pool service professional. All of our sponsors are brands that we know, trust and use in our own business. We are brought to you by pool works for healthy pool people. That's pool works.com pool W, E, R x.com, if there isn't a pool works near you, become the pool works near you. Special thanks to blu ray XL, the best pool mineral purification. System in the industry, Blu ray all day. Fluidra and their many brands, including candy pool equipment and Polaris the most advanced automatic pool cleaners in the industry, Cyclone filter tools, save time, save water and save your back all save pool, fence nets and pool covers over 25 years of providing the best equipment to secure pool areas, saving the lives of children and pet clear comfort a patented hydroxyl based water treatment system, the future of water treatment and our friends in IPSA, independent Pool and Spa Service Association, improving the industry through community education and support. The Deep End pool podcast focuses on residential pool maintenance and may not cover commercial pool commercial pool requirements. Please consult the CDC and your local authorities and code requirements for commercial pool maintenance now let's solve some pool problems with your host, Frank and Jackie Disher, Hey, everybody.

Frank Disher: 1:22

May me alone again. The water is green. Had to record two episodes back to back, and worked out where Jackie couldn't be here. So don't embarrass me. I'll hang around if you don't want to listen, just me. Just turn the sound down and just keep on trucking on. Let the episode fully play so nobody sees it, but it's just me. The ratings are worse. Thank you for joining us or joining me this week, Jack to be back next week here on boots, on ground radio. We're at the deep end. We're in the deep end. We're somewhere around the deep end. We're continuing a series I'm just getting back from Atlantic City for the pull and spa show in Atlantic City. It's best show every year. Got a lot of interviews, saw a lot of people that I've been wanting to see, got see a lot of old friends and meet some new people. We'll be posting a lot of interviews, maybe have a couple podcast episodes with interviews with different people coming up. Great show. It's gonna be the last show I go to this year, with the exception of the poll works Convention, which we've got next week, actually, here in just a couple days, and then we got we're gonna be home about a week, and then we're gonna take off to the care craft convention in Hawaii, and hopefully gonna get a whole lot more interviews and a whole lot more content for video and audio. But today, we're gonna continue our series on savings. Last week we did on just kind of a hodgepodge of things that you can do to save a little bit of money, maintaining your pool and energy usage and stuff like that. A week before that, we did a variable speed pumps, and the huge savings that you can realize through a variable speed pump. And I want to make sure y'all check out our their video we did on that. The video is titled, save over $1,000 you can save over $1,000 by utilizing a variable speed pump. And we also discussed the super schedule. I call it my super schedule, that even maximized the savings and the maintenance of the swimming pool by using various speeds on the pump. And then the week before that, we did how to save money on just chemicals, you know, just, you know, proper sanitizing stuff like that, things you can do. So this week we're going to talk about little bit off topic. We don't, we don't talk about this much, but things you can do that help you save money in the future and make maintenance much easier. This is a big pet peeve of mine. There's a lot of the things on here that it just makes me shake my head and wonder, why would a builder do that for somebody? Why wouldn't they explain to somebody why this is going to be bad for them? And typically, I think I come to the conclusion where the builder don't care if it's not good for the client. They just care if they get paid for it. So if you're thinking about building a pool or doing some renovations to your pool, or buying a house with the pool, or whatever, there's some things that you can look at, things you can avoid that will cost you money from either energy or chemicals or cost you extra maintenance and possibly give you issues in the future that's going to make maintaining that pool much more difficult and end up costing again, in extra chemicals. So the first thing I want to talk about is rock in the water line. Y'all stop doing this. Stop putting this jagged rock in the water. Water line. I know it looks cool, man. It looks like, yeah, this giant rock waterfall just kind of terminates into the water. And you can actually see it under the water. And it makes me feel like I'm in Colorado, even though there's a, you know, your neighbor's house is 60 feet behind your rock waterfall. But, you know, you can pretend. But that rock in the water line, y'all, is extremely problematic for two big reasons. One, that creates little dead spots for algae to grow. So algae can get up in the little nooks and crannies of this jagged rock, and it can create colonies and then sit there and just spit little algae spores out all the time, and that's going to cost you a lot of money and extra chemicals, because algae will double every three to four hours when the conditions are right. So you got it up in a little nook, wedge up in between two of these rocks that you got in your water line. Chemicals aren't getting up in there. There's nothing blowing water up in there to get oxidizers and sanitizers up in there, or any of the algaecides up in those little nooks and crannies. And you typically can't brush it well either. So it becomes very problematic where you always got a little bit of algae in your pool, whether it's sticking out where you can really see it, it doesn't matter. It's releasing it into your water. It's eating up a lot of your oxidizers. It's causing you a lot of problems, and occasionally it will show up in other areas of the pool where you do see it. So you got a little algae farm, feeding algae into your pool. So y'all stop doing this. Stop putting rock in your water line. It's very problematic, and a lot of times I see people the rock that they use is rock that deteriorates fairly quickly. So okay, maybe it does look good this year when you build your pool. What's it gonna look like 10 years from now, when it's eroded, you know, three quarter to an inch? And then sometimes they'll even use rock that has a lot of iron in it. Y'all iron stains. People wondering why? Well, my pool was so beautiful when we first built it. Man, I really loved that color, but now it's just kind of got this brown, reddish brown discoloration all over the pool. Well, guess what? That came from that freaking rock that you thought you wanted up in the water line on the back side, underneath your waterfalls. You know, just stop putting rock in the water line. Natural stone does not hold up well under water. If you don't believe me, look at the Grand Canyon that used to be a big old solid rock, and water ate it, because that's what water does. Water is going to wear that stone down. It's going to eat it up, especially if you've got a salt water system, it's going to break that stone down over time. And that stone is going to be looking different and different, different, and you're fighting algae and all these other issues that I was talking about earlier, because you put rock in your water line. So just stop doing that. You can go just above the water line and be just fine. You might have a little algae growing underneath the stone, or maybe some mold or something, but that's a whole lot better than having little algae farm down in your pool that you can't manage something else is, you know, a lot of waterfalls, and the stones that you're using on waterfalls and running your waterfalls all the time. All right, lot of times they'll use that same stone I was talking about that has iron in it, or that breaks down fairly easily. They're building waterfalls out of this stone and then running water across it, and it gets into the pool. So all this iron and everything is getting into the pool. Well, first of all, you know, my opinion, you should only use a waterfall if you're there to enjoy it. If you're not out there to enjoy it, I don't think you should be running it. Maybe run it just 1015, minutes a day, just to keep the lines clear and everything. But you don't want to run that waterfall all the time. One, it's messing up your pH because it's causing carbon dioxide to release from the water. I've done a couple shows on that, so it's making you use a whole lot more acid. That's called aeration. You know, look it up. One way to raise pH in a pool is aeration. Well, aeration, it causes carbon dioxide to release from the water faster, so it aerates the pool, and it greatly increases your evaporation all that water tumbling down those stones and splashing and doing all that and making waves go across the pool. All that's increasing your evaporation. So it takes more fill water in the pool, because you run your waterfalls all the time, and now it's going to take a whole lot more acid because you're causing carbon dioxide to release from the water. So it takes more acid, and then you're going to have to add a lot more fill water, because you're evaporating more well that filled water, typically, at least in our neck of the woods, you got to add acid it to get it balanced, and you got to chlorinate it more because that water wasn't chlorinated. So it's going to take more sanitizers, more acid, just all these problems and these rock waterfalls, they scale up. Yeah, and there's not a whole lot you can do about it. It's really hard to prevent. Even if you seal them, they're still going to scale up, because water is hitting spots and evaporating and it's and it's doing this frequently, and over time, the minerals and calcium in that water are going to start building up on the edges of where the water flows. It typically doesn't build up unless your chemistry is just completely whack. It typically doesn't build up where the water is actually flowing. It's building up on the edges where it gets wet. Dries get wet, gets wet. Dry gets wet, dries, gets wet, dries. All right, that that's just building up more and more calcium on the edges of that, and then it ends up looking like crap. And now you got to clean it. And now you got to bring out somebody to do some bead blasting, or some dustless blasting, or use different products to try to remove this scale. So y'all, I just recommend, man, build a scupper or something. Build a nice clean wall with the scupper. Okay, if that ain't the look you're going for and you want this big old waterfall, well, then use a stone that's going to hold up. Well, use a stone that's not going to erode. Use a stone that has a nice, hard, smooth surface so you can clean it well, and then make dang sure you seal it, but you still may get some scale on the edges, but at least you're not going to be dumping iron and stuff like that into the pole. So that's something. If you're going to be building a pool, you know, give it some consideration. Do I really want this big old, natural looking waterfall in my backyard? I've had a lot of people build these monstrosity waterfalls, and then they end up they found out that they don't even want to run them, because if they're out on the back porch, they can't even have a conversation because the waterfall so freaking loud. So, you know, give that some thought before you go having a waterfall added to the design of your pool, and they ain't cheap. So if money's ever going to be an issue for you, you know, save the money on the waterfall. If you can live without it, just live without it. And along with the waterfalls, sheer descents and bubblers on tanning ledges, those are going to give you a lot easier sound where you know more of a bubbling Brook kind of sound. But again, that they are increasing your pH in the water, they are increasing your evaporation. So just eliminating things like that is going to make maintaining the pool easier and save you a little bit of money down the road. So if you're looking for the most efficient pool you can build, don't add stuff like this. You don't you don't have to have it. You can still have a really nice, beautiful pool without having bubblers and sheer descents and all these other things. And deck jets, man, I just do not like deck jets. I've seen too many problems with them. These laminar ones look really cool. We got this solid rope of water, this nice, pretty rope of water that's lit it has LED lights in it. They look really cool. But you know what? They don't look that cool during the day, and they cost a whole lot of money, and they're increasing your evaporation, the rate causing your pH to go up. So you know what that may be, something you take into consideration when you're having somebody design your pool, and they look cool, but boy, for what they charge for them. Unless, if money was no object, I might want to add a couple to my pool, but if money is an object, I wouldn't touch them, you know, I would just do without them, because they are going to make water chemistry a little more difficult, and that's very important to me, and they're going to make maintenance a little more difficult. So all these water features, yeah, just give it some real thought. Talk to a few people that have these different features, you know, going some of the pool groups. Hopefully you got a local pool group, like, if you're in DFW area, go to the DFW area, pull owner group, get some real opinions. Lot of people, you know, spend a lot of money on some of these features and and they're going to tell you they love it just because they spent a lot of money on it, and they don't want to look like they made a bad decision. But a lot of people are gonna be honest with you, and you know, take every review and everything with a grain of salt always. Well, here's a message from our sponsors, and we'll be back in a minute.

Unknown: 14:13

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Frank Disher: 15:46

Everybody. Welcome back, and we're we're going to continue with ways that you can save money in the future, make maintenance a little bit easier when you're planning a pool, when you're going to be building a pool or redesigning a pool, some things you might want to consider. All right, we were just talking about water features or waterfalls and stuff like that. All right. First of all, y'all if, if you're going to have them. All right, use them when you're out there to enjoy them. If. But if you're not out there to enjoy them, don't use them. There's no reason to be running a waterfall if you're over at Uncle Bobby's house eating a brisket. Now, if you're in your backyard with your kids. Okay, yeah, turn the waterfalls on if you enjoy it. But there's no reason to run those things. 458, hours a day. Run them a minimum of 10 to 15 minutes a day. Just keep the lines clear and stuff like that. But don't run them all the time. The most problematic pools we have with water chemistry are pools that run waterfalls several hours a day. We've actually canceled clients because they insist on running their waterfalls. And you know what? We never typically, we never see these clients in their backyard. I don't know why they got a pool, much less, while they got this giant waterfall, they insist on running five six hours a day. But like I said, you do need to run it 1015, minutes a day. Just to keep it clear, we did have a client one time that they had a pump go out. Is a separate pump for a waterfall. And the pump had been out a couple years. They had this big old monstrosity, waterfall, big old boulders built up, and they finally want to get that pump fixed, so I come out there, replaced the entire pump, got everything plumbed up, got power to it, turned the pump on. Water finally caught a prime, started pushing water and up under that big, giant stone, up on the cap rock where this water is supposed to come roaring out and rushing out on this grotto, a family of rats had decided to move in. So this water starts forcing through all this plumbing, and then all of a sudden, we're seeing rats run out everywhere, all this trash that these rats had packed up into this void, back up under this rock and down in this reservoir, where the water puddles before it comes pouring out over the stones, and it just all this filthy crap and like probably three pounds of rat poop and fur and baby rats and everything else come washing out into the pool, and it was just freaking disgusting. And the pool owner was embarrassed. The lady ran inside. She probably never swam in that pool again, but we end up having to clean up. And, man, we shocked the fire out of it, because there's a lot of stuff in rat poo that you don't you don't want to deal with. So we, you know, Jack the chlorine up for a couple days, actually, and make sure the water chemistry is right, sanitize that pool, clean it up, real good, and it was safe after that. But, man, if that was my pull, just that image, I just don't know what that would do in my head. So if you are going to have a waterfall, you do want to run it once in a while, or you do want to run it a little bit, 1015, minutes every day. But if you're not out there and enjoy it, don't be running it. Now, if you have a waterfall that has a separate pump, that has its own pump in the winter, it's going to need to be on the freeze protection. If your pool stays open year round, like we do down here in North Texas, that pumps gonna need to be programmed under freeze protection, where anytime that the air gets cold, that pump kicks on. So that thing's going to run if, like we just went through a period of three or four days where freeze protection never turned off, so that pump would have been running for three or four days, probably costing no probably on average, you know, three four bucks a day, running 24 hours a day, maybe even more. So, I mean, that was money just wasted. You weren't out there to enjoy it. I hope you weren't. It was freaking cold, and it's increasing evaporation. We've already talked about how when air is real cold and dry and the water is relatively warm compared to the air, you'll get a lot more evaporation. Well, now you're just running those waterfalls, that's even increasing evaporation. So my recommendation is, in the winter, winter rise waterfall pumps did you're typically not going to be out there and enjoy them. So if you're not, if you don't like going out there. Reading a book or drinking your morning coffee when it's cold out, and watching the waterfall. Then just winterize them, turn them off for the winter, you know, properly, drain them. We got several videos in our winter Pool Care playlist on our YouTube page. You can find our YouTube page by search. It's called How to swim and pool. You can search at the at sign, deep into Frank and find our YouTube page. Well, we have a playlist. It's winter pool care, and there's a really good chance I have in one of those videos that we have in there is going to be the pump you have and how you can winterize it and protect that waterfall pump from freezing over the winter and just let it be off during the winter. But remember when you go to turn it on the first time. You may like that family. It turned we finally got that pump turned on and flushed a bunch of rats out into the pool. You know, that may happen. I doubt if it happened over winter, because typically rats are going to nest outside, something like that during the summer, but during the winter, you know, just when you first turn it on, there's no telling what may come flushing out of there. But yeah, I recommend, if you're not going to be enjoying that waterfall pump during the winter, then winterize that pump. You could still run your filter pump and everything run everything else normal, but so you're not wasting all that electricity every night when it gets cold and causing water chemistry issues and extra evaporation from that pump running. Then just go ahead and winterize that pump and just be done with it for the winter. Come spring, get her fired back up. All right. Other things you can do to help save you money and maintenance in the future, when you're planning a pool, make sure they place return jets into the pool strategically to eliminate dead spots and where you can turn the pool properly, either either clockwise or counterclockwise. Make sure you're going to have jets set up where you can get water up over tanning ledges, over steps and benches and swim outs and stuff like that. If you got grottos or big seating areas, make sure you get where you can move a lot of water back up and around in those areas, because dead spots are our biggest problem on tanning ledges. I highly recommend that you if you're going to have a bubbler up there or whatever, but you also have a return where you can put a side slotted jet that's a jet, instead of having a hole in the middle, has a hole it comes up a little bit, has like a slit in the side of it that can spray directionally. So up on top that tanning ledge, you can have one of these over at one end of the tanning ledger or the other, depending on which way you're going to turn the pool, either clockwise or counterclockwise or in the middle, but have it spray back, or have it aimed back towards where the tanning ledge meets the wall of the pool. That way, you can keep that little corner all the way around that tanning ledge nice and clean and keep the water exchange there. That is a huge problem. I see on a lot of pools that whole rest of the pool looks great, but they always got a little bit of staining, or they always got a little bit of algae when the water is nice and hot up in that corner around where the tanning ledge meets the wall, and they also have discoloration, because the water chemistry is different there. They're not moving water well there, so the water gets a little hotter back up against that wall, and heat makes water more scaling. So if they ever approach the verge of scaling, the first thing that's going to scale is the areas that get warmer. So up around that edge where this tanning ledge meets the wall, you'll get some scaling, and you'll have algae issues. So just make sure that you do something that when you're running your filter cycles, water is going to be moving across these tanning ledges. And again, the same thing in these seating areas. Everybody wants to do these tabletops now on their swimming pool, and those become the most stained and algae overrun areas in swimming pools sometimes, because no thought was given to, how are you going to move water well back up, around those benches and in the foot well of these seating areas, and all the way around that column that's that's coming up, that's holding up that table top. You want to make sure you're doing something to get water up in there. And it ain't easy to brush. Y'all, you put a table top on it. It's not going to be easy to brush. Those angles are hard to get to. So even if you are going out there and doing every, you know, brushing your pool once a week and all that, even if you are getting good circulation, you still can't brush up in those areas. So just give some thought to that when you're designing your pool. Yeah, that'd be really cool, but you're probably going to find out it's not used as much as you think it would be. You know, when you're picturing it in your head, you're picturing every time Junior Little Susie and Little Timmy and their friend Doug from across the street come over. Every time they get in the pool, they're just gonna be sitting around this table. Boy, it just don't happen that much. You know, it's tanning ledges get used a lot. I mean, I highly recommend people get tanning ledges, because people use the fire out of them. It's the places the girls like to be. It's the places the babies like to be. So tanning ledges are. Awesome, but these seating areas, if you're not sitting down, drinking something or eating something, what's the purpose of having this table in your pool? And typically, people are going to want to be up there next to the barbecue, eating anyway, watching a ball game. So give some real thought to that before you go putting these benches and in stools and stuff and swimming pools if you're really going to use it that much. Now, I know a lot of people, they'll set up. They'll they'll design their pool where they have these seats and a nice TV in a position where they can watch a big old, big screen TV up on their back porch and just sit in the pool have a beer. They set their beer on the coping of the pool. They can just sit there and watch the game. I get that, but these seating areas in these little cutouts, like on the backside of the pool or something, you're boy, I'm a I'm really afraid you're gonna find you just don't use it that much. So it may just be money you could have spent doing something else instead of adding this table area in your swimming pool. And we're gonna go to another break, and when I come back, I got another couple dead spots I want to talk about that I find in a lot of swimming pools,

Unknown: 26:09

and the water is green. Hey,

Frank Disher: 26:11

Jackie, hey Frank. Have you ever wondered how you can clean between all those pesky filter pleats on a cartridge filter?

Unknown: 26:18

Yeah, I lose sleep over it. I mean, it's so tedious and it takes forever. I can never seem to get them all clean. Well, here's

Frank Disher: 26:24

a pro tip. Try the cyclone filter cleaner. It uses water pressure from your garden hose to spin the filter as you clean it. This allows all the filter pleats to get thoroughly cleaned out. And the best part is it is fast and doesn't hurt your back. Wow. The cyclone filter cleaner. You got it? The cyclone filter cleaner, you can thank me later. Thank and what I love about their filter cleaner is they have this wand. It's the best filter cleaning spray device I've ever used. We've tried many, many different ones. They got a short version now, and they got a long version. But I love using those things, even on our de filters, we use their wands. And do we have a code? We have a special discount code. If you go to cyclone filter tools.com and use code deep end, you'll save 10% on your order so you can buy direct from them. Great stuff. I'm glad I found it. We got one on every truck. My guys love it. Guys, don't miss out on this. This is the best filter cleaning system out there,

Russel Ownens: 27:27

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Unknown: 28:03

Is it safe to swim?

Frank Disher: 28:05

Everybody? We're back. Thank you for listening to messages from our sponsors. We love our sponsors. All right. Want to talk about another area that I find is very problematic, just because not much thought was given to it in the design of the pool, and that's foot wells of hot tubs, where you have these hot tubs that spill over into your swimming pool. Y'all, you need to be moving water down in that foot well, just like up in these grottos and in these tabletop areas that we were talking about, these foot wells. Need water movement. We need that water exchanged in there. And I know a lot of times people, they'll take, you know, you'll have one center pipe coming up in the floor, that's hot tub, and then they'll put a pipe on it, and it comes up to the surface of the water, and it has a fountain on it, and that fountain does a little sprinkling thing. Everybody think is so thinks it's so cool in their hot tub. Well, doing that, and without having anything else to return water into the foot well, the hot tub, that foot well, becomes stagnant water. And in a lot of pools, I see a lot of pools where the pool looks beautiful, but they, you know, they get algae once in a while, while I go look over in the foot well, the hot tub, and they got this fountain coming up and down in that foot well, it's freaking nasty. They never use their hot tub. You know, it's just a water feature to them, and that's another thing you might want to consider. Y'all, a lot of people don't use their hot tubs. They spend 30, $40,000 to add this hot tub to their swimming pool, and then they never use it. They use it once or twice. Think it's gonna be really cool. Then they find out, you know what, we're not really hot tub people. We kind of just threw that money away. But hey, it's pretty cool water feature, right? $40,000 worth of water feature. So what I recommend in the foot wells of these hot tubs is either don't put that fountain in there, where it comes up and hits the surface and does its little sprinkly action that everybody thinks is so cool, instead of putting that in there, that socket that that fountain. Is threaded into is the same socket, typically, that is used on the returns, on the pull walls. It's inch and a half thread. Well, you can take one of these inch and a half side slotted fittings that have the slit on the side, like what I was saying you can do on the Tammy ledge, and you can thread that in the in the bottom, down in that fountain, and that way you're squirting where the water is coming up through that center fountain. It's just spraying straight sideways, and it's stirring that foot well constantly, and that water is being added to the hot tub. It's rising up and then flowing out into the pool. Now your water chemistry is going to be the same in that foot well as it is in the pool, in the hot tub, and everywhere throughout the pool. And now you know that may be the one thing you needed to complete, really good circulation throughout your pool, because we don't want any dead spots. That includes the foot well, the hot tub. So that is a great way, instead of putting that fountain in there, this is a great way to ensure that you're not giving algae colonies a place to get established and cause you a lot of chemical issues that are incurring a lot of chemical costs by just putting a little side slotted jet down in the foot well, that hot tub instead of the fountain. Now you can also talk to your builder and have them add maybe a extra return if you think you just have to have the center fountain, maybe add an extra return down there that can move water in the foot well of the hot tub and still have your fountain. If you think you got to have one of those fountains. But I find it very beneficial to remove these fountains when that's the only water we got returning to the spa in the foot well is that fountain, and it's just extremely beneficial to put a side slotted jet down there, as opposed to putting that fountain in. So just give that some consideration when you're designing your pool, and when you're picturing in your head what you what you expect from your pool and the future maintenance of that pool. And speaking of hot tubs, y'all a built in hot tub is a water feature for many, many, many people. If you like hot tubs, you're never going to have an attached hot tub that's attached to your pool, especially in a gun out pool that comes anywhere close to being as therapeutic and useful as a standalone hot tub. A standalone hot tub. Those things are contoured for the body. They have jets placed every four or five inches, and they can hit every little, you know, spot on your body and and just, you know, really give you a good massage and all that stuff, and really good hot water therapy. But in the typical gun out spa, you know, even the fancy ones, they just don't get anywhere close to that. It's just a few jets in the spa in the returning hot water into the spa. So basically, you know, you're just a stew. You're just making human stew. You're not getting much therapeutic action out of it. It's the hot water feels great. I know Jackie loves our hot tub, but we still don't use it very much, but Jackie loves it. I'm not a big fan, but really give some thought, you know, if I want a hot tub, all right, do I want a water feature that gets hot, or do I want a real hot tub, something that has therapeutic jets and stuff like that, and spinners and pulsars and all these other things. Just give that some thought before you go spending that money to add a hot tub to your to your swimming pool, you might want to spend half that amount of money and get a really nice stand alone hot tub. Now, I don't like those either, but many, many people do. But if a therapeutic hot tub, man, it's just, you know, it's not day between a added on hot tub to a swimming pool. I'm talking mainly gunite and a standalone hot tub that's made for therapy. So just keep that in mind when you go doing your budgets and looking seeing what you want to do to your swimming pool, what you what you want to add. Just a couple more things I want to discuss. One of them is chemical feed systems, including acid feeds, especially if you have a salt water pool, because one of the issues with salt water pools is they make the pH climb. It's just part of the process. I mean, that's just a fact on salt water pools, most of them have a lot of pH issues, because the pH is always climbing. So adding an acid feed system that has a pH probe that tests the pH of the water and it doses acid as needed. Those are extremely beneficial, because you get to keep your pH in line. You never get these big spikes. Because a lot of people, you know, they only test and treat their pool once a week for water chemistry and sanitizers. So you're getting these big spikes in your pH. And when your pH goes up that high, your chlorine becomes much less effective. So it takes more chlorine to accomplish the exact same thing, and the stabilizer or cya that you have in your pool when the pH is high is less effective, protecting your chlorine from UV rays. So a high pH in a swimming pool is now. Never a good thing. So if you have an acid dose system, then that becomes much easier to manage. But it isn't like you said it and forget it. You still need to test because these things you know, they can overdose, they can underdose. They may take some tweaking once in a while, and there is some maintenance on these systems that you have to perform, but the results to keeping your pH in a much better range are extremely beneficial to your chemical cost and the maintenance of your swimming pool. So that may be something you want to consider. You know what? No, maybe don't add that table, that table area that you can sit around and maybe add a pH feeder in a chlorine feed system to your swimming pool. Instead of spending the money on that, spend the money on something that's going to make that pool easier to maintain and save you money in the long run. Next thing I want to talk about is the cleaning systems. I know a lot of people want to, you know, they put in these in floor systems, and you know, they're, they're okay, they do a pretty decent job. Most of the ones I see installed weren't designed really well. So you know that that kind of leaves a little sour taste in my mouth for them anyway. But you know, they are problematic, and they don't do that good of a job. You know? They just move dirt around to eventually it gets filtered out. And then pressure side cleaners, pressure side cleaners, we talked about those, you got to have a booster pump for most pressure side cleaners to work well, and a booster pump burns a lot of extra electricity over the year those cleaners have a lot of wear items they have to be replaced, so that that money just adds up and adds up and adds up. So, you know, in suction side cleaners, I mean, there's parts of the country that do great with those. We don't see hardly any in our neck of the woods in North Texas. I know areas that just get, like, a lot of sand, like out in the desert, stuff like that. They use a lot of suction side cleaners, but we just don't see many of them here. But yo, get a robot. Get a robotic cleaner. They do a really good job when they're designing the pool. Have the electrician put a plug somewhere. If you're going to use a corded robotic cleaner, then you have to have a place to plug them in. So have the electrician put a plug somewhere where it's not in the way. When the cords running to the pool, it's not going to be a trip hazard or anything like that. Have them strategically place the plug somewhere for that, or use the rechargeable, cordless, robotic cleaners. Now, for the longest time, I didn't like those much at all, because the batteries just did not last that long. A lot of them, you had to, every time you used it, you had to pull it out and charge it before you could use it again. And I thought, and it's become a little bit of a realization, that people don't like doing that. That becomes another chore. But now they got ones like the Maddy Mac that has an eight hour battery. Now, that's awesome. You can use a Matty Mac and run it all week and just charge it once a week. Now it's not every other day thing that you got to do. So, you know, maybe consider that. But I like the corded ones. Y'all, they do a really good job. They hold up. Well, they do a really good job cleaning the pool. So do the cordless they clean the floor. They come up. They scrub the walls. There ain't a pressure side cleaner out there that does that effectively. They have large baskets. They pick up finer debris than the typical pressure side cleaner that has a bag on it. They'll pick up some of that fine stuff that typically will blow right through the bag of one of these other cleaners, and they're extremely energy efficient. So really look into robotic cleaners. If you're designing your pool, you're going to have a pool designed. Really look into that. I think that's something that's going to benefit you very well over time, make maintenance a little bit easier. And like I said, they do a great job. They really do and and the energy efficiency, there's just no reason not to do a robotic cleaner. And the very last thing I want to talk about is, when you're choosing surfaces for your pool, you know, smoother the better. Y'all. I mean, you don't want it slick, but if you get one of these large pebbles, almost everybody's using mini pebble now. Hardly anybody ever gets regular pebble anymore, but even the mini Pebble has is a little rough. But any rough surface is going to be a little more problematic with algae, because algae can get up in those little bitty nooks and crannies and get protected. The rougher the surface, the more problems you're going to have with that. Now, yes, you can overcome that with really good chemistry, really good circulation. Make sure you're moving water well, about the pool, but a rough surface is going to cause you a little more problems than a smooth surface would. So when designing your pool and making selections for plaster tile coping stuff like that, yeah, I highly recommend. The smoother you get, the better off you are. It's just easier to maintain vinyl pulls Don't, don't have some of the problems that plaster pulls have, because vinyl is extremely slick and it doesn't have the problems with algae, being able to, like, get in the little nooks and credit crannies and hold on well, so same with some of the fiberglass. Older fiberglass does start getting a little bit rough, but do. Fiberglass doesn't have a lot of issues with algae because of the roughness of the surface, but plaster pools do. And the rougher the plaster, the worse it is. We have a lot of pulls that we service on a weekly basis that we sometimes we have to get to the point where, like this plaster just so rough, it takes too much chemical to overcome the roughness of the plaster because algae, we can't get to it even when we brush it's so rough and cracked up we cannot clean it well. So we either have to start charging the client more or just drop them off a service. Just tell them, you know, look, if you ever get the pool plastered, we'd be more than happy to bring you back. But we cannot continue servicing this pool, because we cannot maintain it to the standards that we require from ourselves and that our clients would typically expect from us. So that's the last thing I want to talk about today. Make sure. Thank you to all our sponsors. Pull works, our title sponsor. Love you guys. If there's not a poll, works near you, become the pool works near you. Blu Ray, Excel, mineral purification system. We love that product. We're going to be using almost every pool this year, along with borates. Cyclone filter tools, the best filter cleaning system out there. We love it. We use it. We have it on every truck that cleans. Filters for us, fluid, particularly players, cleaners. Love Love your products. The number one product that I recommend out there is players, robotic cleaners. Thank you guys for joining us, and we'll see you next week, and hopefully Jack will be able to be back, and we'll see y'all soon.

Unknown: 41:32

And you only won. So no one works, but to some of the other guys, they can be real jerks. So take a dive into the deep end has the answers for you. The Deep End keeps you water blue. The Deep End make you pull like new. So take your diamond to the deep end. The Deep End, if you don't mind a dead joke, the deep end you can fix what's broke. The Deep End. They're really good folks. Take your time and to the deep end.

Russel Ownens: 42:43

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