Are you thinking about getting a hot tub or pool? Are you a pool owner and are fighting keeping the water balanced correctly? Do you want to save money on your pool system. We have in the studio Swimming Pool Steve! Swimming Pool Steve is a second generation pool & spa builder with over 50,000 hours of on-site experience. We talk about so many secrets there is no way we will be able to put them all in this show description. If you are a pool or hot tub/spa owner this show could save you thousands of dollars.

Swimming Pool Steve has a massive Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbNBM6s09xhYD4i_mjnEoLA

His website: https://www.swimmingpoolsteve.com/

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[00:00:13] Eric Goranson: for.

[00:00:22] Caroline Blazovsky: So he's the, he's the golden child in my eyes.

[00:00:36] Swimming Pool Steve: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

[00:00:40] Eric Goranson: You have been owning YouTube with your pool advice out there and, uh, it's that time of year, man, things are warming up. People are thinking about hitting that pool or, or even, uh, getting that hot tub.

[00:01:00] Swimming Pool Steve: It's hot and everyone is going to want to be swimming very shortly, uh, hot tubs, kind of the same thing, but interesting to mention, I've always wondered why close a hot tub. Like for me using the hot tub year round, like why not use it in the winter? It's the best time to use it? There

[00:01:25] Eric Goranson: The only bad part is, is that walk to the house. Cause if it's IC, that can be its own little dangerous experience.

[00:01:41] Eric Goranson: That walk of shame when it's, when it's icy out there and the chance of you eating it on a, on a cold icy deck in the wintertime. It's not

[00:01:57] Eric Goranson: There you go, Caroline. See, [00:02:00] that's what you gotta be doing in the winter time.

[00:02:20] Swimming Pool Steve: Oh, definitely in the, you know, just in general, like I've, I've got a fair bit of experience with hot tubs, uh, up to, and including, you know, managing a pretty busy, hot tub store, uh, for a period of time and a water lab. And what I discovered is that the vast majority of people, and I'm talking like 95% of hot tub owner, Are not taking care of their hot tubs properly.

[00:02:53] Swimming Pool Steve: They, you know, how do I make my water smell better? It's like, if it smells bad, it's probably not balanced to be. [00:03:00] And, uh, just to put a pin in this, the most important thing, if you have a hot tub and you're hearing this and you're like, well, I wonder if I'm one of these people when you probably are, if you're not pipe flushing, every time you drain your hot tub, before you drain the old water away, you need to clean out all of the junk that builds up inside the plumbing lines, because that's where all the bacteria is.

[00:03:33] Caroline Blazovsky: So how often should you do that? And then how do you drain it with knowing people are getting

[00:03:51] Swimming Pool Steve: The problem is, is that, that is, that's assuming that you've maintained it properly the entire time. Most people aren't, most people aren't even close to [00:04:00] maintaining it properly the whole time. Like if it ever turned green at all, even for a day, like that's a disaster, you would like, some people would just drain rate based upon that alone.

[00:04:27] Swimming Pool Steve: So you should clean your water more often. Don't try to like go six months or a year, like so many hot tub owners do. There's so little advantage in you doing so. And the amount of work it takes to just own a submersible pump and drop it into your hot tub. Shotgun a beer while you're watching it drained.

[00:05:06] Swimming Pool Steve: You're done shotgun, a beer, like it couldn't.

[00:05:22] Swimming Pool Steve: every hot tub breaks are on. So. Makes quarry. That's what you're making it at that salt.

[00:05:48] Swimming Pool Steve: Now, what you do is you just buy the same base ingredients they were using and you make your own chlorine rate in the swimming pool. So those two things are the same, but you almost said once an alternative to chlorine, and that is [00:06:00] such a hot button issue for me. Like, if you want to, if you want to see me bent out of shape, start talking to me about, you know, you're looking for an alternative declaring because you want to be healthier and it's like, man, you couldn't be further from the truth with that.

[00:06:32] Swimming Pool Steve: And I say, do you know what the main difference between us and them is it's that we use chlorine in our water to keep it safe. So I'm talking everything from the food that the water that you cook with, the water you wash your kids with, it all has chlorine in it. So when you come to me and say, you know, that stuff's dangerous, I want to use something else.

[00:07:02] Swimming Pool Steve: In the worst case scenario, you can get some bad advice, which is really easy to come by these days and you can choose an alternative completely, you know, something that may be works a little. Or maybe you choose something that doesn't work at all because there's not really any way to stop you from buying that or to stop somebody from claiming that something works really well and people get sick and die.

[00:07:37] Swimming Pool Steve: I mean, if you don't, if you don't wear a lab coat to work everyday, you have no business trying to figure this out on your own good point,

[00:07:54] Eric Goranson: But at the same point, somebody out there mismanaging, it can also make people sick by [00:08:00] putting too much or hurt them by putting

[00:08:10] Swimming Pool Steve: And again, it really comes down to just most of the people, not really knowing what they're doing and then you have to overcompensate by adding a bunch of extra. So this brings up a good

[00:08:27] Swimming Pool Steve: I'm a big fan of the do it yourself approach. Uh, I come from a family of people that, I mean, my father is a great example. He's never hired a person to do a thing for him in his life, not from doing his roof to fixing a car, to making a sandwich. He does everything himself. And so I kind of leaned towards helping those people.

[00:09:05] Swimming Pool Steve: If, if you're, if you, if you have a pool and you pay somebody to take care of your pool, go and look in your skimmer basket, is there chlorine packs in the skimmer basket? And if there is, you really should be asking yourself why you're paying this person to ruin your pool equipment. Because if you read the manual for any kind of system, which injects chlorine into a swimming pool, it says very clearly this must go last.

[00:09:44] Swimming Pool Steve: Like wouldn't that just be sending concentrated chlorine through each and every component of your equipment, which today is like 10 or $20,000 worth of stuff. Definitely.

[00:10:03] Eric Goranson: Or

[00:10:09] Eric Goranson: you have a lot of husbands go and see, we don't need the pool. Boy,

[00:10:21] Swimming Pool Steve: not an entry level one, that's an entry level pool.

[00:10:24] Caroline Blazovsky: you know, it's crazy. Right. And their pool is beautiful. I mean, it really is beautiful. And it's got, you know, curves and all kinds of like a beach area where you can lay. So they probably did really well doing it, but it's

[00:10:39] Caroline Blazovsky: and it's beautiful.

[00:10:49] Swimming Pool Steve: The first, the first point on that, but you have to, to understand, is that geographically speaking, the price of a pool changes so much, you'd think it's like, that's not even fair to have it [00:11:00] cost that much different from one place to the next.

[00:11:18] Swimming Pool Steve: And cause it's, everybody needs to be swimming always. So,

[00:11:44] Eric Goranson: Not a heating system, which to me

[00:12:09] Swimming Pool Steve: So an electric heat pump is kind of like a reverse air conditioner. And that's exactly what you're doing here is you're just transferring heat energy. And so in the same way that you can heat a pool in cooler weather, you can also cool down the pool. And so to that person, I would say every dollar that you invest into giant blocks device will be, be better allocated towards buying a chiller unit on a heat.

[00:12:31] Eric Goranson: swimming pool. Steve, it's probably not a common issue in Ontario, Canada, of how to source ice for your.

[00:12:48] Caroline Blazovsky: What do you think about slides and like waterfalls and all of these extra things? Like what, what's the hot thing now with these pools? So tell me what the hot thing is that people are doing to them.

[00:13:02] Swimming Pool Steve: Have you seen a much of this stuff?

[00:13:06] Swimming Pool Steve: are the must have elements. Like when you come to the table to have a new pool built, like most people don't do this every day. So it's a big deal. And you put a lot of thought into it and you kind of want all the bells and whistles, like who wants to just like a plain Jane pool.

[00:13:34] Swimming Pool Steve: Like where does this pool project end? Does it end with three feet of concrete wrapped around the pool here? Or do you want to add like a flagstone walkway or at some lighting or an automation system or any other thing? And, you know, it's real easy to take your $100,000 and turn it into a $300,000 project real easy.

[00:14:13] Swimming Pool Steve: So you have a more efficient pool. I don't want you to buy the slide. Like let's make the pool operate better because we have options to do that. And slides diving boards and waterfalls are massively expensive. Like you could spend a hundred grand just on slides, diving boards and waterfalls, you know, and in theory they can be safe, but, um, I'm very, very safety conscious.

[00:14:49] Swimming Pool Steve: And again, we're hemorrhaging money building this pool. So where can we put that money? Let me give you. An automatic cover is a great thing to add to a swimming pool. [00:15:00] If you have $25,000 sitting around that, you're not spending on anything else. So it's a lot of money. Yes. Maybe we have to borrow that money from somewhere else in the project, but you're getting a lot of benefit here.

[00:15:27] Swimming Pool Steve: And they know the pool will be closed all the time. That's going to increase their safety. Like there's no guarantees. You must be so careful with swimming pools. I think every pool owner does know that, but having a lot of Matic safety cover definitely goes a long way towards helping to improve the safety and security of the area.

[00:16:00] Swimming Pool Steve: That's where you just feed a hundred dollar bills.

[00:16:12] Swimming Pool Steve: Well, it's a really hard question to answer because it's a very dynamic question, you know, what's the, what's the humidity in your backyard, right?

[00:16:33] Swimming Pool Steve: That's a very hot topic, uh, issue right now, which is variable speed, swimming pool pumps. The department of energy recently changed the mandates for swimming pool pumps. You guys. Yeah. That's probably something that you've dealt with the, well, I mean the simple logic is this is that when you control the motor RPM, the amount of power that it consumes does not move in a linear fashion.

[00:17:13] Swimming Pool Steve: And that, that number multiplies, the further you dial down the RPM. So the cost savings are massive. You have to be a little bit science and math minded to look at it and say like, is this, can I justify spending one or $2,000 on this pump? And I've built an entire test lab in hundreds of videos to show you that, yes, you absolutely want to do this.

[00:17:53] Swimming Pool Steve: Wow,

[00:18:15] Swimming Pool Steve: many homeowners.

[00:18:39] Swimming Pool Steve: Now, I guess that's what, like a million dollars if you want one. Okay. But if you

[00:18:44] Caroline Blazovsky: those situations, or we tried to

[00:19:04] Swimming Pool Steve: And they're called on-ground pools. They are basically a half-breed pool. Like you probably knew people who took above ground pools back in the day and buried it kind of worked sometimes and usually ended up going to school. So they make pools that are able to be partially buried like that. Essentially.

[00:19:42] Swimming Pool Steve: And you could probably get an on-ground pool package for less than half the price of even the most elementary and entry level in ground pool package. And because I mean, in ground pools, there's a lot involved with putting in a pool, no matter what kind of pool you do. [00:20:00] Ah, great

[00:20:07] Eric Goranson: Cause, you know, unless you're really in the Southern states, heating is a big thing and the more north and you know, you get to, it's more of a big deal, you know, I see people going solar. I see people going yeah, natural gas. What are some of the best ways to go as far as heating? And I know you already mentioned the heat.

[00:20:43] Swimming Pool Steve: Because again, we're talking about huge amounts of money here. So the, what I typically tell people is there's kind of two things, two ways that you'd go about heating a pool one, you have a reduced pool season. It's not a year round swimming season for you. You want to be [00:21:00] able to extend into the cooler shoulder months, the cooler seasons.

[00:21:28] Swimming Pool Steve: So it's kind of just comes down to, what are your expectations of heat? Where are you located? You know, do you have natural gas? There's so many places now you don't even have the availability of natural gas. So then you're looking at propane and if you can get a giant propane tank buried in your yard somewhere, and because these things use a crazy amount of fuel, it's something people don't realize, uh, a family, barbecue, like a big family, barbecue might be 40,000 BTU, and it's pretty big, right?

[00:22:05] Eric Goranson: is a lot of power, but you think about how much mass you're trying to

[00:22:17] Swimming Pool Steve: So that's how it take your however many gallons you have. And times that by 8.3 and that's how much your pool ways. And you're going to need that many BTU to increase your pool temperature by one degree. Wow. So you actually, I just want to mention one more thing. Cause you, you mentioned in anybody with a pool, who's hearing us talk about heat and how expensive this is.

[00:22:51] Swimming Pool Steve: Pretty much everybody can use. It might not be super convenient cause you have to roll it out or your will might be oddly shaped. And it's not [00:23:00] wrinkles when you're trying to roll it up. And it's a little bit of a hassle, but the thermal benefits that you get from it are out standing and they're just so inexpensive these days, they're really not very much money at all.

[00:23:26] Swimming Pool Steve: You probably could get some hotter water from doing that, but you're also going to compromise the filtration system and the availability for the sanitize water to reach all the areas of your pool. Plus the pools on top of the cover, all become really concentrated with algae blooms. And when you roll up that cover all that water goes directly into your pool.

[00:23:55] Caroline Blazovsky: Okay. No. Do you have a preference out of what pools are built with?

[00:24:21] Caroline Blazovsky: Right. So what is your preference? If

[00:24:41] Swimming Pool Steve: And there's a reason that we use it for building pretty much everything that we want to last in our modern world. So yes, there are other options and there's reasons and times to use those other options. But just as a general point, concrete pools are the best. And there are a number of different concrete pools gun.

[00:25:13] Swimming Pool Steve: Like basically you just pour form and pour it like a foundation instead of like shooting it out of a shoulder mounted concrete can and there's advantages and disadvantages for east beach. But I. All concrete pools of all descriptions at squarely at the top of the heat nothing's even close. Um, and the price point does reflect that.

[00:25:51] Swimming Pool Steve: Like if you're going to build a pool, there's a ton of steel involved in building a pool and engineering specifications. I might add as well. And this person didn't do that. They dig [00:26:00] holes, they cash checks, they disappear. And that is something that unfortunately has plagued the pool industry since inception, you know, there's, there's always Cowboys out there and unfortunately this industry more so than most inviting.

[00:26:28] Swimming Pool Steve: But trust me, my experience is far more, you know, uh, uh, out for the project that we're doing here, this other guy, maybe he specializes in cleaning filters or something like that. Has he ever built a pool? Is there any way for you to know if he's built a pool? Like I, I got a question for you here. I thought of this this morning, I would think that you two would be more informed than the average home owner in terms of like, you know, protecting your best interests when hiring, let's say contractor or something like that.

[00:27:16] Swimming Pool Steve: And I was like, no, never heard of them. It's like, oh, interesting. Because like the highest caliber of water shape designers in the world get their trade certification through this program called Genesis. And it was another pool builder that was telling me about this. Cause they were thinking of joining, joining, and it's pretty expensive to join and take these courses.

[00:27:52] Swimming Pool Steve: You can't find somebody who has like any sort of certification that you're familiar with, you know, and that makes it really hard [00:28:00] for somebody to differentiate themselves as a true professional. And conversely, it does allow an open door for unscrupulous or perhaps just under skilled individuals to be doing projects that they really shouldn't be involved in.

[00:28:25] Caroline Blazovsky: The other thing too, is I see a lot of professionals, at least in our area, in the Northeast, they may not know how to apply a product.

[00:28:51] Caroline Blazovsky: It is it their fault? Or is it just the fact that it doesn't work well in our climate?

[00:29:08] Swimming Pool Steve: When you live in a climate that experiences freeze thaw conditions at pretty much every concrete application that you can name let's expose to these. It just does funny things. It can, it can be very difficult to manage or predict what's going to happen. And what you end up with is kind of just a difference in what is an acceptable standard.

[00:29:43] Swimming Pool Steve: Th every single one that said this needs to be taken out and redone. This is not good enough. If this is, this is failed, it's reached the end of its service life. And I would say it's a week old, right? Exactly. That's what happened. There's just the quality of the workers for that type of work around here are not [00:30:00] the same as the areas like again, Arizona for, you know, how to apply cool deck.

[00:30:13] Eric Goranson: such a great point, but you bring up a great thing with climate. I mean, especially like where you're talking about, you know, just from Vancouver to Whistler that hour and change to get between point a and point B, you have two extreme climates that treat anything concrete, completely different, and it's an hour.

[00:31:03] Swimming Pool Steve: So it's people throw money at pool projects. Like it's, you couldn't believe that even to this day, I think about the projects that I did there and I'm building pools and reflecting ponds that are worth more than my house. 20 years later on the east coast. Like it's

[00:31:19] Caroline Blazovsky: I don't know what the.

[00:31:36] Swimming Pool Steve: Yeah,

[00:32:00] Eric Goranson: When it's all cured up at the time, it's pretty much done. You still have that surface, but now you've got to have a crass person go through and lay tile over that surface. And then they have to make that tile, which is now submerged, underwater stick to. And miraculously hold for, for years to come. What's your thought about that?

[00:32:29] Swimming Pool Steve: I don't think people understand when you say outrageous there, they're thinking a number less than what it actually is because it's much higher than what they're picturing. Um, you can spend a hundred thousand dollars just in product costs to bump from one tile to a tile.

[00:33:03] Swimming Pool Steve: And I go back there, they're like, yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. Like, it's, it's all very fast and loose when it comes to tile in terms of what the average homeowner is going to experience. But the reality is the number of tiles, which are actually suitable to use in swimming. Pools are very small and the ones which are suitable are usually quite expensive, uh, more so than what people are expecting further to that.

[00:33:41] Swimming Pool Steve: And in three seasons you have tiles all over the place. So here's what happens. Here's here's the disconnect. When you build a concrete swimming pool, it's built out of concrete, right? The shells concrete. And then you have like, maybe let's say a plaster surface is common and tiles around the top. That plaster is just sand and [00:34:00] cement.

[00:34:16] Swimming Pool Steve: So that's the disconnect. You get a lot of swimming pools built traditionally. And even to this day, built without any waterproofing at all, and you can get away with it. The pool's buried in the ground. The w the concrete will become saturated with water and its rate of water loss will slow somewhat, but ultimately that pool is leaking from day one.

[00:34:53] Swimming Pool Steve: And I don't know what the numbers are, but it's not high enough. Not enough swimming pools are built with waterproof [00:35:00] waterproofing systems in mind, and there's a bunch of them out there. There's a whole lot of great options and it's a technical subject unto itself because there's the right one for the right application.

[00:35:26] Swimming Pool Steve: And then you're going to put that into your pool, which is $30,000 on top of what the plaster would be. So we're talking minimum of $130,000 put like some decent glass tiles into. You want to be sure that they're going to last, you want to have certification that shows that they've undergone the right, uh, testing for things like thermal shock, um, and the, uh, the porosity and the, the, the meshing that attaches to the back.

[00:36:10] Swimming Pool Steve: And they shouldn't be, cause those tiles are not going to last. They probably weren't the right ones and you might not have a waterproofing system at all. So, I mean, you've really got to do your homework and protect yourself when you're buying a w again, we're talking about concrete pools and specific.

[00:36:39] Swimming Pool Steve: What should I do? And it's like, well, you need to start over. That's such a hard conversation to have. Have you seen, I

[00:37:00] Eric Goranson: Or a water doesn't come through that has that any of that made it

[00:37:19] Swimming Pool Steve: You put it into the mix itself as an add mixture, and it grows a Silicon based crystal, which essentially seals all the pores and makes it waterproof. I've used those back in the day and they worked really well for like a waterfall or, you know, some outdoor feature. But I saw it used in an application where somebody had a pool above indoor living space.

[00:37:56] Swimming Pool Steve: Well, how come you had to waterproof that shower, but you don't have to waterproof your [00:38:00] pool. You have to waterproof your cool and there's other products like that as well. Three of them, that's

[00:38:14] Swimming Pool Steve: Yeah, exactly. It's kind of the one that I'm hoping people will be familiar with so they can make that connection like, oh yeah, we didn't have to do. It does seem like my pool should need something like that as well. And if it were over living space or on the roof of a hotel, you'd bet it would need something better than that.

[00:38:32] Eric Goranson: fence red guard, but I'd want to go something a little more heavy duty than just that, on that

[00:38:43] Swimming Pool Steve: Those are two names that I think would, I would be Googling if I were a, you know, a homeowner looking at building a concrete pool, trying to get my head around waterproofing. And again, this is a very deep technical subject and should enable you to have conversations with, with pool builders where you can kind of get a [00:39:00] better feeling for their technical abilities.

[00:39:15] Caroline Blazovsky: that typically built in, like Eric's talking about into the concrete it's part of it, or is it a separate process that goes on before you put the.

[00:39:42] Swimming Pool Steve: So that's kind of the way it goes is, and each one is the technical steps. Have to be perfect. They really do. It's not like where you can kind of read the instructions. It's going to be like, oh, well, I mean, it's too hot today, but we're going to do it anyway. No, you have to, you have to follow the instructions because this we're talking the really technical stuff here,

[00:40:00] Eric Goranson: oriented.

[00:40:18] Eric Goranson: But you're right. You got to do the research on this because otherwise you might as well just go take that $400,000 and put it in a barrel out in your driveway and burn it because you're going to need it next time.

[00:40:33] Eric Goranson: Well, speaking of a hot tub, so if people are out there, that's a great, that's a great transition to this question, Steve.

[00:40:58] Swimming Pool Steve: Again, this is another [00:41:00] pretty deep question inside dividers, the beginning of this pre manufactured hot times. And then there's like a custom built concrete, hot tub. A being that I was accustomed, built, concrete, hot tub guy. I definitely would say those are great. And I would endorse them heavily again, if you've just got like Scrooge McDuck levels of money and look towards the concrete hot tub through fantastic.

[00:41:34] Swimming Pool Steve: But look at what you get with a concrete hot tub. You might spend 50, 60, $80,000, and it's a box with eight jets. That's what you have. There's no ledge, there's no lounge. There's no clustered jets with 40 jets on your back, nothing like that. Whereas with the pre-built market, that's what you're getting.

[00:42:12] Swimming Pool Steve: Uh, you know, it's quite expensive. Uh, but I mean, that's what it is. There's a lot going on in a hot tub these days. And sure. Uh, the high end of the market is much higher than that to, you know, another 10,000 on top of that for some of the premier brands. But you're going to get seven to 10 years. That event they're very highly insulated.

[00:42:49] Swimming Pool Steve: Uh, maybe a little bit more now, uh, you know, because everything's getting more expensive, but. Even if it was $45 a month, that's not very much money to be able to use a hot tub every single day, which is what I do with [00:43:00] mine. Like every single day of the year, I'm in my hot tub and there's a lot of advantages we're coming to hang

[00:43:06] Swimming Pool Steve: well, you'll have to bring your own hot tub because there's, there's two types of hot tempers in the world.

[00:43:14] Caroline Blazovsky: my God, me too. I'm with you. I am. So with you, Steve, like, I don't really want to share my hot tub with you. No thanks. I'm going to laugh at this. You're going to laugh at this question, but I've gone. I'm a tiny person, right?

[00:43:45] Caroline Blazovsky: Is this like a common problem? Like, do you have to have it? You have

[00:44:01] Swimming Pool Steve: Like if you're just sitting there and it's only coming up to like to the middle of your stomach, it's not as enjoyable as it is for everybody else. At six foot eight, but

[00:44:12] Swimming Pool Steve: like me, but yeah, exactly. The, or the, like the six person hot tub, like, but everybody's feet are just sandwiched on top of each other, the foot Wells, only 12 inches square,

[00:44:35] Swimming Pool Steve: It's, it's a lot easier. And that way you can at least get to the right level where the jets aren't shooting into your ear doesn't sound good. I've

[00:44:51] Eric Goranson: I had one, a number of years ago that did that. And, uh, and that was pretty, pretty handy.

[00:45:10] Swimming Pool Steve: Uh, for one, it takes up a lot of room in the, in the spa, but also it just doesn't work. As soon as you lay back like that, you just float. It is what it is. And, uh, you know, women especially can have a real problem with that. You know, if you're a specially buoyant, it's, it's not the relaxing experience. So now you're on a weighted pillow with weighted pillows on top of you.

[00:45:34] Caroline Blazovsky: for me to fight in there. Like I lose calories.

[00:45:50] Swimming Pool Steve: Well, okay. It depends. If we're talking about again, a custom built product versus something that's that pre-built model the prebuilt model all have that electric [00:46:00] element style heater, which is like your kettle, right? It's just a piece of metal that, that heats up and it is the least efficient way to heat water, not being said.

[00:46:24] Swimming Pool Steve: Quite often, the hot type is attached to a swimming pool. It's called a shared pool and spas system. And it's a way to kind of share the equipment between the pool and hot tub, such that you get both without maybe necessarily 100% of the cost of the pool. Plus 100% of the cost of the small. We can shave a little off by saving by sharing the equipment.

[00:46:58] Swimming Pool Steve: So the water is shared between the two [00:47:00] and you decide, well, I want to use my hot tub tonight. You turned it on. And the heater changes the set point from 80 to 104 and starts heating. But how long is that going to take? Are you comfortable waiting an hour and a half for that? Because most people wouldn't be, we typically want to be under an hour and ideally under half an hour, but heating.

[00:47:36] Swimming Pool Steve: If it could even do it, you know, the temperature would allow

[00:47:57] Eric Goranson: The hot tub. Great. Uh, give me a [00:48:00] couple hours

[00:48:20] Swimming Pool Steve: What is the disconnect? Like why is nobody calling me back? And there's two reasons. One, we're all run off our butts right now because everybody wants to open the pool at the same day, essentially. But what most homeowners don't realize is that the landscape of the pool industry, it looks a lot more like the automotive industry.

[00:48:52] Swimming Pool Steve: Pool industry is the same. Like I'm a cool guy. Right. And if anybody meets me or swimming pool, Steve. Yeah. So my hot tub is broken. How do I [00:49:00] so-and-so it's like, look, I definitely appreciate your hot tubs broken. I charged a thousand dollars an hour. Are you sure you want to talk to me about, and that's what you don't really realize when you leave a message for some random pool company, you looked up and you're like, Hey, I'm looking for somebody on Friday to come out and pressure wash, you know, bird crud off of my pool deck.

[00:49:32] Swimming Pool Steve: I own a concrete pool. I need a renovation. I own a vinyl liner pool that needs a liner, or I just own a pool. And I'm looking for a weekly service company. Your message should include that because no pool, guy's going to answer you. We can't every live call. I take, I miss 10 at this time of year. So you have to leave a message.

[00:50:06] Swimming Pool Steve: These lines are very hard within the industry and there's very few people that cross those lines. To maximum effectiveness, many people cross those lines just to stay busy at times, but not necessarily doing their bread and butter work. So when you're a homeowner, you need to recognize that this the landscape of the pool industry is very complicated.

[00:50:40] Swimming Pool Steve: Pools are super expensive and super complicated. So you just need to be aware that that's the situation, that there's a lot of different kinds of pool workers out there in the more specific that you can be with what you're looking for, the higher, the likelihood you're going to find somebody that can help you well.

[00:50:56] Eric Goranson: I'm a, I'm a technology guy and I do a lot of [00:51:00] speaking across the country with technology. What do you think about these pool? Robotic vacuum? That are out there on the marketplace, you know, there's, uh, there's a lot of cool technology out there. What do you, what are your thoughts?

[00:51:15] Swimming Pool Steve: , it used to be suctioned based and pressure based vacuums that relied on the pool filtration equipment in order to operate. Uh, or sometimes it's going to have a separate pump as the kids have a pressure side cleaner, and they, they work well enough, but we can now divorce the cleaner from the filtration system.

[00:51:49] Swimming Pool Steve: Like if you open your pool and the tree fell into it over the winter, and it's a disaster, don't just kick this port robot into the pool and be like, all right, good luck, buddy. I'll see you later

[00:52:05] Eric Goranson: It's not, it's not there to clean up the natural disaster, but if I need things

[00:52:12] Swimming Pool Steve: But we're not quite there yet. Hopefully soon. I've got a

[00:52:40] Swimming Pool Steve: the filter.

[00:52:58] Swimming Pool Steve: Th I really don't have any [00:53:00] problems at all with any of the toys out there with the whole idea that you got to take it out when you're done, don't just leave everything in the pool because that's, um, uh, harming your chlorine demand, right? And your querying, like attacking this thing and oxidizing it, like it's a foreign invader.

[00:53:30] Swimming Pool Steve: If I'm there to clean your pool and I have to spend 20 minutes just pulling stuff out of the pool so that I can access the pool. I don't, you don't understand. I don't get that kind of time of the day. I don't get Washington breaks. I eat my sandwich while I'm walking. Like there is no fat in the day of a swimming pool worker.

[00:54:02] Swimming Pool Steve: Be respectful when you have to have service workers working in your backyard. Good

[00:54:17] Swimming Pool Steve: track you down.

[00:54:23] Caroline Blazovsky: Your knowledge base is incredible about pools. How did you get into

[00:54:38] Swimming Pool Steve: Uh, and I got the, like really the best case scenario is I kind of came into the family business after the big boom. And it was more or less maintaining the existing clientele, like changing a line around a pool that we had built 15 years earlier or something like that. But I worked one-on-one with my uncle for basically 10 years, and I don't know where he got the patients from, but it was amazing.

[00:55:19] Swimming Pool Steve: And he told me, well, definitely tell them that you want to be a crew leader. And I'm like, what are you talking about? A crew leader? These, these are all men and the child's here. And he was a hundred percent right. The skills and the knowledge that I had were far more than anybody else that they had on staff there.

[00:55:55] Swimming Pool Steve: There was no way to figure it out. And even if there was people were not forthcoming with [00:56:00] information, like these are trade protected secrets. I'm not going to tell you my secret to doing a thing because now you're going to be my competition. And we just kind of irked me because the industry socks, we have all of this lack of technical congruency from one pool to the next, like, you could literally take 10 pools in any town, whatever town you're in, go find 10 pools.

[00:56:35] Swimming Pool Steve: And maybe even some builders are starting to follow those rules, which is fantastic. But I think we have a lot of growing to do. And, uh, I I'm doing, I'm doing what I can to change that. Like I just put everything I know is available at swimming pool, steve.com. Are you? There's absolutely nothing that I hold back.

[00:57:11] Swimming Pool Steve: It's I think I'm up to almost 500 articles that I've written on the website, a thousand videos, just under a thousand videos on my YouTube channel. So there's definitely a lot of information there. Like probably more than you can absorb as an average pool owner. Uh, but I think that it's, I think that I've made a difference.

[00:57:42] Swimming Pool Steve: They're going to have heard of these things before. Like I remember encountering a sacrificial annulled on a pool 20 years ago, and I could not find a person that tell me what it was there for and the guy who will own the pool. It must've been an electrical engineer because it would be the only reason that somebody had that knowledge back then.

[00:58:05] Eric Goranson: man. Is there anything else out there that we didn't cover today that you wouldn't mind throwing out there as a tip? That's a, that's a hot one for everybody else.

[00:58:31] Swimming Pool Steve: And if you don't do it. There's not really any obvious signs. The pool still looks good. The kids don't come out with purple hair, so everything must be fine. But then your heater failed at year five. You don't want to heat. It was like three or $5,000 these days. And that's such a bummer. You would you remember your grandparents used to get 20 or 30 years out of their heater?

[00:59:25] Swimming Pool Steve: So that's, that's basically the number one thing is don't ignore chemistry. I don't think just because of the water. Oh, it looks pretty clear. Everything must be fine. You can't tell by looking, you really should be trying to, uh, understand the numerical values behind water testing. Like don't ever say to me.

[00:59:59] Swimming Pool Steve: [01:00:00] Well,

[01:00:11] Eric Goranson: super great. Thanks for coming on the

[01:00:17] Eric Goranson: and I'm Caroline B and you've been listening to around the house.