The part the brochure leaves out

Okay so. Something happened to me reading through this week's stuff, which is that I kept hearing the customer's voice before I got to the answer. Like every single one of these started with somebody standing next to you holding a sentence they got from somewhere else.

My neighbor went salt and it's basically maintenance-free. I read online you change the sand every five years. There's a shock you can swim in after fifteen minutes. A guy on a forum said borates fixed his pool. Can you just add my rental to the route. And then the ones that are in your own head, which -- those count too. Winter's dead, I should hang Christmas lights. That customer's just difficult.

And none of those sentences are wrong exactly. That's what makes them annoying. They're each like, a true fact with the bill torn off the bottom. And I think the whole week, if you squint, is about the same move, which is you hand the bill back. The whole thing. Early. Before anybody's drilled into a pad.

So let's start with salt, because it's the cleanest example of a brochure answer I've seen in a while.

The customer's neighbor converted, the water feels softer, and now your customer wants to know why you never brought it up. And what they've heard is three things. Salt is cheaper, salt is gentler, salt basically looks after itself. Two of those are kind of true. One of them is not, and the operator who says so on day one is the operator who doesn't get blamed in year four.

The install part is actually simple. Cell in the return line after the filter and heater, control board on the pad, tablet feeder out, salt to the cell's target -- usually thirty-two hundred ppm. Systems run around four hundred to eighteen hundred installed.

And then there's the salt itself, which is a real amount of salt. Tucson and Marana, two trucks, sixty-eight pools, and the fill water out there is hard. A Marana customer on an eighteen-thousand-gallon pool wants to convert. The honest quote is about fourteen hundred for the system and install, plus roughly four hundred eighty pounds of salt -- twelve forty-pound bags -- to get fresh water to thirty-two hundred. Cell stays off about a day while it dissolves.

But here's the line he adds. He writes in a cell replacement near year four, around six hundred dollars. On the quote. Before anything's installed.

Because the cell is a consumable. That's the thing the sales page leaves out. The plates have a coating that gets used up a little every hour the cell makes chlorine, and it gets used up faster by scale, by running the cell hard to make up for bad chemistry, and by acid cleaning on a schedule instead of on sight. Cell life's something like three to seven years, replacement's three to seven hundred bucks. On soft water with pH held in range, you're at the long end. On hard water riding high pH all summer, you're at the short end, and Marana is the short end.

And if a customer only hears the install number, they file the pool as paid for. So a six-hundred-dollar cell in year four doesn't read as a part wearing out. It reads as a surprise bill from you. Whereas if it was on the quote -- the conversation about year four already happened. On paper. Nobody's ambushed.

And over five years a converted pool costs about the same as a chlorine pool. It's not cheaper, it's -- the money moves. Weekly chlorine turns into the system, electricity, salt, maybe a cell, and a lot more acid. Same neighborhood, wider spread.

And that acid part changes your stop, which I think customers genuinely don't expect. The reaction in the cell pushes pH up constantly. A salt pool you leave at seven-four this week wants to be at seven-eight or higher in a week or two. So on a salt pool your recurring job stops being add chlorine and starts being fight pH. Acid on most visits. And the rest of the panel's still there -- free chlorine two to four, stabilizer's still needed, calcium still matters -- you just add a salt reading and a look at the plates for white scale.

Okay and then the no. Because some pools shouldn't convert and saying so is the advice. Hard fill water, like well over four hundred calcium, scales the plates in weeks in summer. Old copper heat exchangers and unbonded metal. Unsealed soft stone coping, which flakes. And the big one, which is -- if the reason they want salt is so they can cancel weekly service. That pool scales its cell and drifts its pH out of range inside a season. A salt pool still needs a tech. It just needs a slightly different visit.

So that's the pattern, right. The neighbor's sentence is true, it just stops before the part where somebody pays for something.

Borates are almost the exact same shape, which is why I want to do them next.

You know the pools I mean. Every route has a handful that eat acid. You bring pH down to seven-five Tuesday, next Tuesday it's eight-oh and there's a scale line starting at the tile, and your tech's carrying an extra jug just for that one subdivision. And someone on a forum says borates fixed their pool. Which, I mean, maybe they did.

What borate does is buffer pH against going up. Held at thirty to fifty ppm, it pushes back as pH starts to climb, so a pool that needed acid every visit needs it every second or third visit instead. And it works with alkalinity, not instead of it -- actually a borated pool can often run alkalinity lower, like sixty to eighty, which means less carbon dioxide gassing off in the first place, which is the reason pH was climbing. Two effects, same direction.

Side benefits are small and I'd keep them small. Mild algaestat, doesn't kill algae, doesn't replace chlorine. Water feels softer. That's it.

And then the bill, which is mostly the first fill. A fifteen-thousand-gallon pool from zero to forty ppm is roughly sixty to ninety-five bucks in borax or boric acid at bulk prices, and a branded bucket is often a hundred fifty or more. After that there's basically no ongoing cost, because borate only leaves when water leaves. But that first number is what makes you hesitate before doing forty accounts.

So don't do forty accounts. That's -- honestly that's the whole answer. Borates are a fix for a pool, not a policy for a route.

Mesa and Apache Junction, forty-four pools. Eleven of them are older plaster on hard water, most with a waterfall or a spillover spa, and every one of those eleven takes acid every single week. So the operator picks six of the eleven -- all about twelve thousand gallons, all long-time customers -- and borates them. About thirty-five pounds of borax each, over two visits, acid to bring pH back, call it fifty-five dollars a pool, plus one twenty-five dollar bottle of borate strips shared across all six. And the other five get left alone, on purpose.

Then eight weeks of logging acid at every visit. Borated pools go from a quart at nearly every visit to a quart about every third visit. The five untreated ones keep taking it weekly. That's roughly thirty-five quarts a year saved per pool, around fifty bucks of acid. So payback on product alone is about a year. And the bigger return was honestly the truck space and the time.

And one of the six, a pool that goes green every August, didn't -- but its chlorine was also steadier, so borates get partial credit at most. That's the difference between a forum post and a measurement.

Quick mechanics, because borax runs a pH around nine and will bite you. Dump the whole dose at once and you can push past eight-five, then chase it with three gallons of acid and etch plaster. So split it over two visits, acid in portions after it circulates, roughly a gallon of muriatic per fifteen pounds of borax.

And skip it on flat-pH vinyl and fiberglass, on pools where pH falls, and on accounts you might lose, because the first dose leaves with the customer. And dogs -- borates are toxic to dogs that drink pool water regularly. So you ask about the dog. Before.

Okay. So those are two chemicals where the brochure oversells. The next one is a chemical where the brochure is literally accurate and still leads people wrong, which is non-chlorine shock.

Every claim on the bucket is true. Shock without chlorine. Swim in fifteen minutes. No harsh smell. All true. And none of them tell you the thing that decides whether it belongs on your truck, which is the list of stuff it can't do at all.

It's potassium monopersulfate, MPS, roughly a pound per ten thousand gallons, label governs. And it's an oxidizer, not a sanitizer.

And I want to sit on that for a sec because it's the whole thing. Oxidizing breaks down organic stuff -- sweat, oils, sunscreen, urine. Sanitizing kills living things. Algae is alive. Bacteria are alive. MPS doesn't touch either at any dose you'd reasonably put in a pool. So a green tint, a slick wall, cloudy water with no free chlorine -- that's not an MPS pool, ever.

And what goes wrong if you use it there is really predictable. The organic haze clears, so the water looks better for a day. The algae keeps growing because nothing killed it. You come back Thursday to a pool that's further along. Every day you spent on an oxidizer was a free day for the bloom.

There's a subtler version with combined chlorine, and this is where it gets oversold. MPS will knock down a modest combined reading by eating what's feeding it. It is not breakpoint chlorination. Once you're at like half a ppm combined or more, clearing that takes free chlorine at roughly ten times the combined reading in one dose, and a half-effort leaves you worse. So MPS is the thing that keeps you from getting there. Or a holding action when you can't run the real dose today.

Which is where the fifteen minutes comes in, and that's the actual product. A chlorine shock closes a pool for eight to twelve hours while ten ppm falls back to one to three. MPS closes it for about as long as it takes to coil the hose. On a backyard pool nobody cares, it was sitting till evening anyway. On commercial water it's everything.

Scottsdale, one tech, nine HOA and hotel pools. The Tuesday hotel pool can't close in season -- people in deck chairs at seven a.m., front desk won't hang a sign -- and it reads point-seven combined on a July morning after a wedding party all weekend. MPS goes in at six, pump runs, swimmers are back around six-twenty. HOA pool two stops later reads the same point-seven. But that one's closed Mondays anyway. So it gets a proper cal-hypo breakpoint on Monday for about a third of the chemical cost.

Same reading. Two products. And what separated them wasn't chemistry, it was whether the pool could afford to be shut. Which I think is a great question to just, like, ask first. Every time. And the hotel pool still needs its breakpoint eventually, the MPS bought time, it didn't close the ticket.

And the bill: about three times a cal-hypo treatment. Fine on nine commercial pools, indefensible across a residential route. And no chlorine, calcium, or stabilizer is real, but every dose leaves sulfates, which only leave by dilution -- years of weekly MPS on the same water is the case to watch.

One more practical thing. The visit record has to say which bucket went in. A pool that got MPS Tuesday and gets tested Wednesday behaves differently from the same pool after cal-hypo, and a second tech looking at just the numbers can't tell. So write down the product, not just the reading.

And that actually leads straight into stabilizer, because this week had a post on raising cyanuric acid, which -- almost everything written about stabilizer is about having too much of it. On a route the opposite problem shows up a lot, and it costs money in a sneaky way.

The pool that was drained for an acid wash. Refilled after a replaster. Or run on liquid chlorine for three seasons with nothing putting stabilizer back. You add chlorine Monday, reads fine when you leave, basically zero by Wednesday, customer calls about cloudy water before you're back.

Dose math fits on a sticky note. About thirteen ounces of granular stabilizer per ten thousand gallons for every ten ppm. Target thirty to fifty on an outdoor chlorine pool, sixty to eighty on salt. Size it from the gap, not the bag -- target minus current, times point-oh-eight-three-four pounds, times gallons over ten thousand. Eighteen thousand gallons at fifteen, you want forty-five, that's about four and a half pounds. And round down. Because stabilizer only leaves when water leaves, so a light dose you top up next month costs nothing, and a heavy one costs a partial drain.

The mistake isn't the math though. It's the retest. Granular stabilizer takes three to seven days to fully dissolve. So a tech doses three pounds, retests two days later, sees twenty where they expected forty, adds another three pounds. Week later the pool reads seventy. And the only way back is draining water.

So: skimmer sock with the pump running, not on the floor. No backwash for two or three days. Retest next weekly visit. Not Wednesday.

And then the diagnosis, which is the part I'd actually steal. Zero chlorine on a weekly test looks identical whether the sun ate it or something in the water ate it. Opposite fixes. So test at dusk after the sun's off the water, test again at dawn. Drops a ppm or less overnight, nothing's consuming it, the daytime loss is sun, that's stabilizer. Drops more than a ppm in the dark, that's demand, and stabilizer won't touch it. And you're not going to be at a pool at dusk and dawn, so leave the customer a strip, or do it on your last and first stop of the day.

Chandler and Gilbert, two trucks, seventy-four pools. After a spring replaster season, five accounts got drained and refilled. By June the techs are putting a gallon of liquid chlorine in at every visit on those five and finding under one ppm the next week, while the rest of the route holds three on less. Drop kit reads stabilizer below its lowest mark -- which on that kit means anywhere from zero to about twenty, it's just unknown. So they assume ten, bring it to forty. Fifteen thousand gallons, that's about three and three quarter pounds in each sock. Dose noted on the visit, no retest till the next weekly stop. Pools read thirty-five to forty and held three ppm all week on the normal dose.

And skip it on indoor pools, bromine pools, and tab-fed pools already around twenty-five -- the tabs get there on their own.

Okay. Sand. And sand is kind of the mirror image of the brochure thing, because here the tidy answer is a calendar.

The customer's standing there, water's been dull three visits, chemistry reads fine, and they read that sand gets changed every five years. And they want a yes or no and a number.

And the calendar isn't useless. Five to seven years residential, three to five on heavy-use commercial -- that's when you start looking. But two filters installed the same spring can be a year apart or three years apart depending on bather load, oils, hard water, backwash habits. The pool decides.

Why it wears out is kind of neat. Fresh sand is angular and the edges catch fine stuff. Years of backwashing polish the grains round, and a worn bed still backwashes totally normally, which is why nobody catches it.

So three tests beat the calendar. One, pressure that won't come back down -- right after a full backwash and rinse, if it's still four or five psi over that pool's clean number, the bed's holding stuff the backwash can't lift. Two, a clean pressure that's crept up across seasons. A filter that ran fourteen clean in year two and now reads eighteen, nineteen right after every backwash hasn't gotten dirtier, the bed's compacted. And that creep is invisible on any one visit. You only see it if somebody wrote the number down every time. Three, open it up -- the top of the sand should be level and loose enough to push your fingers in. Crust, craters, tunnels down the tank wall, marble-size clumps, that's water going around the sand instead of through it.

And channeling is the sneaky one, because it lowers pressure. Oils and calcium bind the grains into clumps, water finds the cracks, runs through a few narrow paths, and less of the bed is working, so the gauge reads normal or even two or three psi low. So a tech sees a fine gauge, goes back to the test kit, keeps dosing a pool whose chemistry was never the problem, and the customer keeps buying chlorine that clears nothing. Only way to know is open the tank and look.

But blame the sand last. Chemistry first, then baskets and runtime, then the gauge itself -- they stick high, so swap in a known-good one before a number justifies a four-hundred-dollar job. And sand on the pool floor is almost never old sand. That's a cracked lateral, a part repair.

Fresno and Clovis, sixty-three pools. One Fresno pool has run fourteen clean since its second season and now reads nineteen the morning after a full backwash. Chemistry in range, baskets clear, fresh gauge reads the same nineteen. Sand went in spring twenty-twenty. Seventh season. That's not a dirty filter. So he says so, instead of backwashing it again next week.

And the quote goes out around three-forty, two hours booked on a Friday afternoon. Not crammed into a twenty-five minute Tuesday stop with twelve pools waiting. Because it's heavy slow work -- a hundred fifty to three hundred fifty pounds of old media out, and while the tank's empty is the only moment you can actually see the laterals. And the customer conversation's short when you can show them the clean pressure from two seasons ago next to today's. People approve a sand change pretty fast when they see the numbers. Much less fast when it shows up as a feeling.

Okay. So that's the chemistry and equipment half. And I want to switch to the business posts, because I think the same move is sitting there, just -- it's about accounts instead of pools.

The rental one first. Because the first rental pool usually shows up as a favor. A customer buys a second house in Scottsdale, lists it, and asks can you just add it to the route. Looks like any backyard. And then a guest texts the owner a photo of cloudy water at six p.m. on a Saturday, and the owner forwards it to you with three question marks.

And the thing is, same water, almost none of the same conditions. Swimmers go from zero to twelve depending on the booking. There's a check-in clock that doesn't move. And the owner lives two states away. So the post's framing, which I like, is it's light commercial work with a residential-size pool attached.

Chemistry follows the booking calendar, not the season. A pool losing one to two ppm a day empty can lose three to five with a full house, so four ppm Friday morning is near zero Sunday afternoon -- exactly when the review gets written. Leave it at the top of your target before arrival, and test combined chlorine instead of trusting clear water.

And the service day gets set by the listing, not your route. Checkout ten or eleven, check-in three or four, usually Friday or Saturday. A Wednesday visit leaves the water to three days of the last group.

Scottsdale and Old Town, solo guy, forty-four pools. Took on seven rentals over two seasons, kept six, at two-ten a month against his one forty-five residential. In season each one gets two visits a week, and both Friday visits land in the morning between the cleaners and a four p.m. check-in. So he rebuilt his Friday -- rentals first, grouped by area, residential stops moved to the afternoon. Costs him about twenty extra minutes of driving. And no guest has walked in to a pool nobody touched since the last group.

And the pricing's where people go wrong, which is quoting it at the residential rate because it's the same size pool. Twenty-five to fifty percent above is where it tends to land, and the math is easy if you price visits instead of the pool. One forty-five a month weekly is about thirty-four dollars a visit. Six visits a month at that rate is already two-oh-four, before extra chemicals or a single phone call.

And the agreement does the talking, because the owner isn't there. A gate code that doesn't change between bookings, as a condition. A callout fee, like ninety-five. A spending limit so you're not waiting on a guy in another time zone before check-in. And guests call the owner, not you, unless it's safety.

And the report after the visit, with the readings and a photo of the water, time-stamped, which the owner gets the same morning -- that's the thing that answers Sunday's complaint. Was it dirty when you left Friday, or after twelve people used it for two days.

And he dropped the seventh one. Old Town condo where the gate code changed with every booking. Three times in one summer the tech shows up on turnover day to a code nobody sent, sits on hold with the management company, leaves without servicing. Each one becomes a guest complaint the owner blames on the pool company. Two-ten a month didn't cover one of them. Replaced it with a residential pool two streets from his Friday rentals. Lower rate, no weekend calls.

Which -- okay, that's the bridge into the firing post, because this is where the brochure answer is one you tell yourself.

Every route has the one. The stop your tech saves for last because it always runs long. The owner texting Sunday about a spa he keeps refilling with a garden hose. The pool still paying what it paid in twenty twenty-one. You already know which account it is. What you don't know is whether dropping it is a business decision or a tantrum.

And he's difficult isn't a test. He costs me fifty-five minutes on a stop priced at twenty-five, that's a test.

Four of them. Time against price -- minutes on site plus the detour, against what it pays. Callbacks -- more than one unpaid return trip a month, three months running. Payment -- late two or more cycles, or a balance past thirty days. And how they treat your tech. Two failures is the trigger, one failure is just maintenance on the account. The exception is the safety one -- a tech who doesn't want to go back to a house ends the account by itself, no price fixes that.

But before you drop anybody, you raise the price. And that's the honest version of the decision, because it settles it either way. Quote what the stop actually takes, let them choose. They accept, the account stops losing money. They decline, they ended it, not you -- which is a much easier story to tell later if anybody asks.

And the number has to close the whole gap. A hundred fifteen dollar stop eating eighty dollars of capacity isn't fixed at one-thirty.

Katy and Cypress, solo, fifty-one pools. One Cypress account pays one-fifteen, sits fourteen minutes off the loop, averages two callbacks a month over that garden-hose spa. On-site time plus detour is about fifty-five minutes against a twenty-five minute route average. So it burns about eighty bucks of capacity to bring in one-fifteen, before the callbacks, which are free. He prices it at one sixty-five and offers it. Declined. Comes off with thirty days' notice, and the drive time it was eating absorbs two Katy pools he'd been turning away for lack of room.

And that last part's the one people miss. Dropping an account doesn't just cost its revenue, it trades revenue for capacity. With a waiting list, releasing a money-loser's close to free. With three empty afternoons, fix the price or the routing and keep it. And honestly most bad accounts are a routing problem or an old price wearing a personality.

And the exit's short. In writing, once, thirty days, specific last service date, final invoice on normal terms. And say less than you want to. We're no longer able to service your pool after October fifteenth. No list of the callbacks and the Sunday texts, because every reason you add is something they can argue with in public. If they ask, the route changed and your pool doesn't fit it anymore -- which is true almost every time.

And then the off-season post, which is kind of the one that ties it all together for me, because it's September, and the brochure answer there is the one you've probably heard -- winter's slow, go find a side business, hang holiday lights, buy a plow.

And that ignores the two things you already have. A truck full of pool equipment, and a list of people who trust you in their backyard.

The lines that fill a winter are jobs those customers were buying anyway, moved to when nobody's swimming. Pumps, twelve to twenty-two hundred installed. Heaters, up to fifty-five hundred. Filter service -- and yeah, a sand change is a perfect November job. Covers. Reduced-frequency chemistry at fifty to ninety-five a month.

A pool owner will fight you over a pump replacement in June and sign for it in November, because in June the pool's down while you work and in November nobody cares. So the quote goes out in October.

Las Vegas and Henderson, two trucks, ninety-six pools. About thirty stay open year-round, sixty-six drop to monthly. All summer the techs log the same few things -- filter pressure, a motor getting loud, a heater that didn't fire in April. Every October he goes back through those notes and quotes what's worth quoting. Last winter fourteen of the sixty-six became equipment jobs averaging about eleven-fifty. Roughly sixteen thousand dollars of work across the months when the route alone wouldn't have covered a second tech's hours. Nobody laid off. Nobody re-hired in March.

And sell the winter in September, not December. By December they've decided, and what they decided was nothing till spring. Two questions on the end-of-season pass. What happens to the service this winter, and is there anything on the pad you want dealt with while it's closed. Forty stops, one afternoon. And write the winter offer down once -- monthly November through February at a set rate, the equipment work in that window at today's price, weekly resumes in March, no new agreement. The customer who improvises their winter usually improvises their way to cancelling.

And the quiet weeks aren't only for revenue. It's also the price increase. Ninety-six pools at a hundred twenty average, five percent is about five seventy-six a month, sixty-nine hundred a year, from one letter in November. That's more than most single winter lines, and it costs a stamp. And yeah, the Cypress stop.

So -- okay. That's the thread. Salt quoted with the year-four cell on it. Borates on six pools, five left alone on purpose. MPS where the pool can't close. Sand changed because the pressure crept, not because a calendar said five. Rentals priced by the visit. The price increase before the exit. The winter sold in September.

Every one of those started with a sentence somebody handed a customer, or that you handed yourself. And every one of them gets better when you finish the sentence. Put the whole bill on the quote. Say the no out loud. Tell them what it costs before anybody's drilled into the pad.

Because the customer who was told on day one doesn't feel ambushed in year four. That's pretty much the job.

Alright. That's it for this week. Go quote some pumps.