Two techs on one truck or two trucks: which finishes more pools?

Put them in two trucks for weekly residential service. Put them in one truck for long, heavy jobs where two people can work at the same time.

The split comes down to where the minutes go. A weekly pool is a short stop with a drive on each side. A second person can only speed up the stop. A green pool cleanup or a big commercial deck is a long stop, and there's enough work for two the whole time.

When two techs ride together, you pay two people to sit through every mile. Sharing the truck doesn't make the drive any shorter.

We ran the PoolBoss route optimizer on synthetic routes to put numbers on it. These are made-up test stops, not customer data. Each run drops pools at random inside a square, starts from a shop in the middle, and puts the stops in the shortest order it can find. Driving is figured at about 25 mph in a straight line, so true road time would run longer.

Take 18 pools in a square about 5 miles across. One truck covering all 18 averaged 42 minutes of driving. With two techs riding, that's 84 paid minutes. Now give each tech his own truck and half the area, 9 pools each. Each truck averaged 20 minutes, so 40 paid minutes for both.

Spread the same 18 pools over a square about 10 miles across and the gap gets bigger. The shared truck averaged 85 minutes of driving, or 170 paid minutes. Two trucks averaged 41 minutes each, or 82 paid minutes.

The miles barely change. One truck drove 17.7 miles on average to reach all 18 pools in the smaller square. Two trucks drove 16.8 miles between them. A second truck doesn't add driving. It stops you from paying for the same drive twice.

The usual reason to keep a helper in the truck is that two guys finish a pool faster. They do. They don't finish it fast enough. We think the test is the whole stop, with the drive time between stops counted, and by that test the shared truck loses on a normal weekly route.

Here's the rule. Take the minutes one tech spends at a pool. Subtract the drive to the next pool. Cut what's left in half. The pair has to finish a pool faster than that number to match two trucks.

Hypothetical example: one tech spends 20 minutes at a pool and 5 minutes driving to the next one. That 20 sits inside the 15-25 minutes of pool time behind how many stops one tech covers in a day. Twenty minus 5 is 15, and half of 15 is 7.5. So two techs have to clear that pool in under 7.5 minutes to keep up with two trucks.

Over an 8-hour day, one tech alone finishes 19 pools at those numbers, so two trucks finish 38. Say the pair gets a pool done in 12 minutes. That's 28 pools. Say they get it down to 10 minutes, a true half. That's 32 pools, still 6 short. Somebody has to drive, and you can't split a water test.

Put your own minutes in below. If you don't know them, time a week of stops first.

One truck wins when the stop is long and there's work for two people the whole time. The drive is a small slice of a job like that, so paying two people for it costs you little.

Run the rule on a long stop and you'll see it. Hypothetical example: a job takes one tech 90 minutes and the drive is 10. Ninety minus 10 is 80, and half is 40. A pair that finishes in 35 minutes beats two trucks.

A condo or HOA property with two or three pools is the one place a shared truck gets you the full output of two techs. Park once. Each tech takes a pool and you meet back at the truck.

It works because the drive between pools is zero. Go back to the rule. With no drive, a pair only has to match one tech's time at the pool, and each of them is working alone on his own water.

So you don't have to pick one setup for the whole week. You can pair up one morning for the big properties and run apart the other days. Put those shared stops on the same day so you only lose one truck's morning.

A second truck is a fixed bill every month, so price it in pools. Divide the truck cost per month by what you charge for a pool each month. That's how many pools the truck needs before it pays for itself.

AAA puts the average cost to own and run a new vehicle at $11,577 a year, or $964.78 a month, at 15,000 miles a year. That covers fuel, maintenance, insurance, registration and taxes, depreciation, and finance charges. A half-ton pickup runs $6,402 a year more than a small sedan in the same study. A used work truck you already own will cost less. Use your own number.

Among 150 companies that post a starting monthly price for weekly service, the median is $150, per The Pool Count. At that price, $964.78 a month is about 7 pools. In the example above, two trucks have room for 6 more pools a day than a pair that halves every stop. Fill a small part of that room and the truck is paid for.

The truck is the small cost. The tech in it is the big one, and you're paying him in both setups. That's the point of the whole comparison. You already have the payroll. The second truck is what lets it pay off.

One more thing a second truck needs is its own gear. Poles, brushes, a test kit, a vacuum, and a chemical load all ride on each truck. Budget for a full second set, because two techs sharing one test kit across town is the shared truck all over again.

Your own numbers beat any example. You need three of them: minutes at a pool for one tech, minutes at a pool for the pair, and the drive between stops.

PoolBoss times each visit from the moment the tech starts it to the moment he completes it, and the visits list shows it in the On site column. Run the pair for a week, then run them apart for a week, and compare. The technician report shows visits finished per tech each week and average stops per day, so you can see what each setup got done.

A route in PoolBoss belongs to one tech. For a shared truck, put the route under the lead tech's name. When you're ready for two trucks, the same tool that covers how to split the route between the two of them moves the stops, and each tech's phone shows his own day. That's the job of seeing what each technician's day holds in one week view.