Andrea's Pool Prep 2026

Andrea shares practical tips for pool maintenance and storm preparation, emphasizing water chemistry, cleaning protocols, and hurricane readiness to ensure safe and clean pools during the summer season.

keywords

pool maintenance, storm prep, water chemistry, pool cleaning, hurricane season, Florida pools, pool chemicals, salt systems, pool cleaning tips

key topics

• Pool water chemistry and cleaning
• Storm and hurricane preparation protocols
• Pool chemical management and safety

Sound Bites

• "Adjust your free chlorine to 3-5 ppm for safety"
• "Clean your filters regularly to maintain clarity"
• "Jack up chlorine levels before a storm"

Chapters

00:00
Introduction and Online Controversy

02:19
Preparing for the Summer Season

03:45
Cleaning and Maintenance Tips

11:23
Chlorine Management and Water Chemistry

17:03
Phosphate Management and Filter Cleaning

22:29
Hurricane and Storm Preparation

Resources

• Pool Boy Tile Soap & Acid
• Jacks Magic Products
• Enzymes for Pools
• Pool Chemical Testing Strips
• Hurricane Pool Preparation Guide
• Andrea's Email

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:53

Hello everyone. Hi. It's Andrea. Thank you for joining me. This is the Talking Pools Podcast Show. It's Tuesday. That's why you're hearing my voice. Again, thank you. Hi. Thanks for being here. How was your week? How was my week? My week was alright. I had a bunch of people mad at me on the internet yesterday. I posted a picture of a green pool and I made a the caption was about how the the Airbnb guests, the renters, thought they were helping by adding water to the pool. And whoo, let me just tell you, that one got people mad. I had a lot of people telling me, well, the renters were just trying to help and you shouldn't complain. I had a bunch of people saying that I don't know how to do my job and that I had a lot of people calling me an idiot. Well, there was just that one guy. Or two guys. Yeah, so just you know, in Florida, the pools can turn literally overnight. You can add al uh add algae. You can add algae to the pool. You can add water to the pool and have it turn green like within hours. It just all depends on what's in the water you're adding, what's already in the pool, the people, the water chemistry, you know. The pool is leaking and it's an Airbnb. So God knows how many people were in that pool in the week because I only go there one time a week and it leaks. The homeowner knows they don't want to fix it. I have no choice but to continue to do the pool. I'm I don't, you know, make those decisions. It's on my route. I get paid to clean it, I gotta go clean it. If it's 90 degrees and it rains, oh, that's the other thing. Someone was trying to say that uh it didn't rain in Tampa, and that's so I was I was lying apparently. I'm like, buddy, I am not even close to Tampa, and it rained more than one time where I am last week. So also not saying that the rain was the sole cause of the issue either, but it certainly didn't help the leaking pool that is the that is an Airbnb that had a presumably a lot of people in it. Anyway, rant over for now. And that brings me to the subject of my episode today, what I wanted to talk about. Let me get my outline up here for me. I almost said for you, but y'all don't care about my outline. All right, let me resize it so I can read from it. Okay, so I decided to talk about preparing for the summer season with a with a focus on well, not a huge focus, but like a, you know, a s a slight focus on the hurricane season, which, you know, this also could apply to any storms, you know, big rainstorms, wind storms, whatever. I don't know about snowstorms. Don't don't be asking me about snowstorms. Why why is your pool open in a snowstorm? That's my question. I said, why is your pool open in the wintertime? Because why though? All right, so we are talking about, you know, I'm just telling you the protocol that I follow, like my list, my checklist or whatever for just getting ready for the summer season. For me in Florida, it's about to get really hot and rainy. We have a rainy season. Rainy season apart from rainy season apart from the hurricane season, that is. Kids are home from school. Grant, you know, grandkids, I don't know, maybe grandkids come down for the summer from other states. And in other states, I feel like you guys are all open by now, right? What month is this? May? Yeah, you guys are you guys are all pretty much all open and good for by now. I don't even know when Memorial Day is or Labor Day or whatever. I I just don't. I gotta check my calendar. Okay, so here's some tips and you know, just a like I said, a checklist, protocol, whatever for you from me. Let's start with the waterline tile because why not? I use tile soap mixed with myriadic acid. Some people just use the tile soap and I guess are not aware that you can mix it with the acid, and then it makes it into a thick, like a gel or like a paste. And the brand that I use is Pool Boy, which I have been told that it's only available or very hard to get in other places that are not Florida. The cool thing about that particular brand is that it turns blue when you mix it with the tiles or when you mix it with the acid, it starts out clear. It's actually been a few months since I made it, and it turned it recently has been yellow because like it's really fun if you like color changing stuff. So, but any brand of tile soap I'm that you can that you get like pool specific, you know, like you'd not I don't mean just like, but I think I think it would work with like Dawn. I'm not saying mix Dawn and Acid, but you can mix vinegar with Dawn and it and it does the same thing and it makes it thicker and it sticks to stuff instead of being a liquidy, squirty thing that just kind of gets all over the place. Anyway, moving on from that. So yeah, tile soap mixed with acid. I do slightly less acid. The recipe is equal parts. I do slightly less acid because I like it thicker, as one does. Some people like to add things to this mixture, they do the tile soap and the acid and then they they mix other things into it. I've had people tell me that they mix enzymes. Somebody else said something, but I can't remember now exactly what it was. So I don't know why I'm bringing it up. But my opinion on that is that's fine. I think enzymes specifically will be destroyed by the acid mixture. So I'm not sure if that is if that works really, or if you're just like destroying the enzymes. But I mean, I'm not telling you, telling you to not do it. Then you have, although I I guess I am telling you maybe maybe don't do the enzymes because the acid, but as long as what you're mixing in there isn't a chemical that you don't want to mix, because what do we not do as pool pros? We don't mix chemicals that are incompatible with each other, right? So just be smart and don't get mad at me if you hurt yourself because I didn't tell you to do anything stupid. Okay, next up we hail our friends and my favorite products. You have your Jax Magic power blue line, you have your scum cleaner and the scale off. I want to say scum off. I don't have a bottle of it handy. Imagine that. Shame on me. But yeah, the scum, the scum and tile line cleaner and then the scale off. Both of those products work great, as you have heard me say several times. If you if you haven't had a chance to try it, go to the booth at the next pool show at your next local trade show and see if you can't get a sample or maybe like request one from your local rep if you find out who that is. They do have try me samples. It's like a little, I think it's like one or two ounce little bottle, and you can try it before you buy it. Ooh, what happened to my voice there?

SPEAKER_01 8:30

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SPEAKER_02 9:08

I'm not a tile guy, but if I'm wrong, I guess let me know. You can do like enzymes and stuff like that. I've cleaned scum line with enzymes, but that probably gets pretty expensive. Um, and I imagine you could use Dawn to clean the tile as tile soap if you wanted to as well, if you don't have access to like tile, like actual tile soap. I mean soap, soap is soap, right? Okay, so moving on. Inside the skimmer. Now, this is just one of those things that is purely cosmetic. If your homeowner doesn't give a crap about it, you know, then I leave that up to you whether or not you want to give a crap about it. But it can make a difference if you're trying to clean things and, you know, spruce things up, if you will, give it a little spring cleaning. I never recommend a magic eraser for anything in a pool. But you can use enzymes or dish soap because we know that Dawn is fine for pools. You could use the tile soap if you want. I s I've used enzymes because I just had a bottle of enzymes and I wanted to see what I could clean with it one day, and so I cleaned everything that I thought I could clean enzymes with, and it turns out I was right. You can clean anything with enzymes that you think you could, not scale, you know, obviously. Enzymes are for breaking down oils and breaking down inorganics, non-living organics, I mean stuff like that. Speaking of enzymes, you can do an enzyme purge. Now, in a pool, this will probably be fairly expensive. But if the water has sat for a long time, you might have some white water mold in the plumbing, you might have some biofilms, you might have some some schmutz, some schmegma. You don't, I mean, I was banned from that word, but Rudy keeps saying schmutz, even though he was banned from using that word.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

We interrupt this episode with a very important message. Two totally different things, Andrea. Different things.

SPEAKER_02 11:14

You it pools, right? You could do it in a pool. You would need a lot of enzyme. It's great for spas on a regular basis. You just pour that stuff right down the skimmer, goes through all the plumbings and out. That is a technical term, by the way. So yeah. Recommended though to do this enzyme purge before you do any type of high chlorination, before you do anything like that, because enzymes are oxidized in high chlorine levels, just keep that in mind. But that's well, did I say enzymes earlier? Oh, yes, I did in the tile. So enzymes are oxidized by the high chlorine, don't mix it with the acid either. But I said that I digress. Okay, next up we have our free chlorine residuals. Now, if you are one of the people that likes to run a lower free chlorine level through the winter, don't have to tell you this because you know already that it is time to bump those numbers up if you need to. I'm not telling you what to do, but you're listening to me. So, you know, do what I say. Just kidding. Now, me personally, let me know. All right, you guys let me know what how because I'm curious. I'm trying to see something, okay? I want to know what your preferred free chlorine level is for your residential pools. All right. You don't gotta tell me about your commercial pools. I can just Google your health code, okay? But yeah, email me or let me know on socials or whatever. Because me, I like I like a I like a higher end of the range. I like a three to a five, depending on, you know, the pool, because every pool is different, right? And everybody uses their pool differently and different amounts. Some people go hard, some people not so much. Yeah, let me know what you guys like. Do you like it high? Do you like it low? Now, salt cell output. This is the same thing with free chlorine. If you have lowered it, bump that shit up, bump that bleep up. Uh, and then you're gonna want to take extra steps to counteract any scaling that might occur from running the salt system at a higher output because the heat is generated and you know there's more turbulence, more electrolysis. So you want to keep that LSI on the lower side, carbonate alkalinity, very important on the side. And then um, you want to just go ahead and make sure that the temperature that it control it as much as you possibly can because I think that that's really I think the like the the biggest catalyst for the whole thing. I mean, it's always worse in pools that are hotter or in a spa. So just make sure that you if you're able to program it in a certain way or whatever you're gonna do, I don't know about wiring it or whatever, I don't know about that stuff, but you gotta have enough time for the water to flush through the system so that it cools down instead of just sitting in the heat of the cell. And then that's where the flakes are created, and then it drop, you know, and then it settles when the pump shuts off, when the pump kicks back on, it all gets pushed out into wherever it's gonna go. I talk about that in a different episode. Go back and listen to that one if you have not heard it. Now, here's a little bit more detailed information about salt systems, and this is the output percentage. So every system, every each brand has a different cycle time. I got this information from my friend who is uh a rep for a salt cell manufacturer or a company that also manuf they manufacture a lot of things, and salt cells is salt systems is one of them. This is the percent of on time versus off time generating within their time cycle, and this will cycle on and off throughout the pump runtime. Autopilot, for example, has a 15-minute cycle. So at 40%, the cell is generating chlorine for 15 times 40%, which equals six minutes, and then rest mode for nine minutes. Hayward has a 100-minute cycle, Andy has a 30-minute cycle, and Pentair, I believe, has a 60-minute cycle. So now you know what that means when you set it to whatever percent. And we know that boost mode, all right. I actually, well, this is I wanted to like go back because in a previous episode I I misspoke a little bit and I said salt systems, I think what I said was rarely, if ever, oxidize combined chlorine. And I should have said super high levels of combined chlorine because it will oxidize some, it will keep some away, but if it gets overloaded, it cannot keep up. And so at that point, the boost function or the superchlorinate function is not sufficient to remove or oxidize high levels of combined chlorine. My dog is crying. All right, what's next here? Okay, so next, speaking of combined chlorine, wow, I did this, I like actually didn't even mean to segue it this that's that that well, excuse me. So speaking of combined chlorine, you want to be getting rid of that. I'm gonna do this without saying that S word. All right. I'm not, I'm just not gonna say it. You can say it if you want to. I it just has made me so angry lately. And I'm fine if you want to say I'm going to shock the pool or your pool needs to be shocked, or weekly shocking is necessary. Just don't call the chlorine shock. Okay, you're not gonna shock the pool with shock. You're gonna shock the pool with chlorine. I had a guy on my TikTok be like, I'm not gonna tell the customer I'm gonna shock with dye chlor. Well, don't then. Just say, I'm gonna shock your pool. Anyway, I really hate it so much. Do it weekly, whatever you want to call it. Remove the combined chlorine, add a bunch of extra chlorine, test first and dose properly, but do that weekly at a minimum. If it's a bigger pool, if it's a higher use pool, if it's an Airbnb MFR, more often if you can. I smell chicken burning. Hold on. Right? Shock weekly. Salt pools, and I actually just irritated the hell out of myself because I read what I wrote, which said shock weekly, and I just said I wasn't gonna say that word. Anyway, salt pools need it. Full st they they just need it. I just explained why like two seconds ago. Rewind. Now, this is gonna be easy for my Florida people because we just be adding a whole jug of chlorine every week. That's just the way we've always done it. That's probably overkill, yes. But come do pools in Florida and tell me it's not overkill. Anyway, explaining combined chlorine to your salt people is the obvious key to solving this issue when they freak out if you add chlorine to their salt. I realize that not everybody's gonna want to hear it. I've been there, I've been through it, but that's you know, maybe they need to do their pool themselves if they don't want to listen to the person they hired to take care of their pool. I'm just saying. Again, let me be let me stress, let me reiterate, please check for these things. Rudy made a joke in the CPO class and he said you can tell which one is the number three reagent because it's the one that's always full, and LOL. That it if ain't if that ain't the truth, first of all. But second, it's really hard to even frickin' get here, apparently, when you ask for it. It takes weeks. The only other way that's fast and easy that I know of is test strips, which we all know the problems associated with test strips, although I did get to use a bottle this past like month and it was nice and easy and fast, but you know, you can't make specific complex doses if you need to, and you can't do commercial pools with them. And if there's no combined chlorine, then you don't need to remove it. You don't need to do the thing, you don't need to superchlorinate, you don't need to break point chlorinate. I'm not gonna say it. I'm not gonna say it. All right. Phosphates. Everyone's favorite favorite I can't do, I can't do it on the microphone. I feel like it would be really aggravating, but I like to sound like the cat Syl Sylvester when he does the sufferin succotash, put phosphates in there, but make it phosphates. Now these MFs are only a problem if they're a problem, my friends. That means if you don't have any algae problems and you also don't have any problems holding chlorine levels, is removing the phosphates really necessary? If you have a salt cell, yes, because the phosphates are bad for the salt systems. So excluding phosphates, I mean excluding salt systems, you know, you don't have to remove every last one of the phosphates. You don't have to get every single phosphate out. But if they are a problem, my recommendation is to do a small weekly dose instead of a big old mess of a dose, a full bottle or what have you, whatever you want, whatever a full dose is. Just do a few ounces a week. Start that now. It's gonna start helping to get them picked up by the filter. There goes the air fryer. That's why I smell burning chicken. It wasn't burning, it was air frying. Back to the phosphates. The smaller dosing more frequently, it's gonna make it easier on you than doing a whole treatment where you have to vacuum to waste and it's gonna clog the filter and la la la la la. You're gonna be able to manage the chlorine easier, faster. You're going to be able to get back to that proper chlorine level. You're gonna be able to manage the fallout from the phosphate remover, that stuff that settles at the bottom, and any algae problems. You'll be able to handle those, you know, a little bit sooner, presumably, depending, I guess, on how high the level is. Clean your filter, make sure your pressure gauges are working, replace them if necessary. Cleaning filters on a timed schedule is not necessarily allowing for the finer particles to be caught by the filter media. You want to use the pressure gauges to let you know when the PSI increases 5 to 10 PSI over the starting or clean PSI. You can deep clean cartridges with a soak in a cleaner. You can use there's filter, there's cartridge cleaners out there made by different brands. The original filter cleaner that was used by the OG Pool Pros. Rudy talks about it. TSP trisodium phosphate. Don't be scared about the phosphate. You're just cleaning the filter with it, it's not going in the pool. You can soak the filters in this, you can spray them with it. Guess what I've used? Enzymes. Wonder how much money it costs that dude in enzyme. Not my current. Current boss. Not my current boss, just you know, over the over the years. That's not funny. Anyway, then you can do an acid wash. Yes, you can. I promise you, you absolutely can. If you don't believe me, read the instructions from the manufacturer on your cartridge. The two major brands. Well, one of them suggests their own branded products, and then the other one says it. Right. So, you know, it's not I'm not making this up. I'm I'm relaying information to you. Okay. Is it time for a breakdown of the DE filter? Or is it time for a sand change? Maybe. I'll leave that up to you. Now the spa pump is one of the things that drives me nuts when I see it happening. Or like when you walk up to a new pool and it's one of the things that you have to take care of because it got neglected by whomever. I'm not like calling out any pool companies. The homeowner could very well neglect it. If there's a separate pump for the spa, sometimes if they go sitting unused for a long time, they get real gnarly on the inside. And then you're stuck cleaning out. I mean, I've seen them horrible before on like new service accounts, you know, nobody's taking care of it properly, and there's just sludge inside of that pump. So the best thing to do is to just run the spa for a few minutes or longer or how you know, 10 minutes, 15 minutes while you're there. Set the you know, put it in spa mode for like a minute while you're checking the chemicals in the pool, something like that. If you're using a if you're not using a system back, you can maybe switch it to spa mode while you're vacuuming, maybe, I don't know, while you're cleaning the tile at some point. It's a good idea to just, you know, do that every once in a while. Okay, and so now we'll come to the last little bit here of my little presentation. It's not little, it's normal sized. An idiot, sorry. Hurricane slash storm preparation. So the idea came to me about hurricane preparation just because we're in the season and it's the same questions every year. Well, we're not in the season yet, we're going to be. So this is this is the checklist. This is what we do. We're gonna go ahead and jack up that chlorine level before the storm as close to the day before, if you have warning. Always test, obviously. But you wanna just go ahead and let it go high, especially if you expect power loss. Rudy did a breakdown of it in an episode that we did a long time ago. It weighs a certain amount of pounds, and when you let that number of pounds out, obviously you're removing weight from the shell. It's going to be lighter and it's going to be easier for the groundwater underneath to push it up or pop, as we say. Unless there's a serious legitimate risk of the house flooding, there's no need whatsoever to let any water out. In fact, put water in. I say fill the dam pools in the rain, okay? I'm just kidding. Just kidding, but am I? As far as the breakers go, turning off the pump, I always say don't turn it off unless you need to or until you need to. If you think you're gonna lose power, if you lost power, that kind of thing. Someone always ar argues with me no matter what I say, so just do whatever the hell you want with the pump. I don't care. Just kidding. I do care, that's why I'm telling you about it, but just don't argue with me about it. Turn it off if you want, don't turn it off if you want either. I don't know. If you do lose power though, they say you're supposed to go and turn everything off so that when they come to fix the power, they don't get that I don't I don't know, the thing that comes back and it causes explosions or something. Someone explain that to me, okay? Let me know. Andrea.talkingpools at gmail or let Rudy know, and he'll explain it to me. Everyone's favorite furniture in the pool. I don't know why people do this. And yes, it does make me mad. I don't think it's funny. I think it's funny that people think it's fun to do, I guess. It just baffles me. Like I was trying to think of like a way to like like a thing to compare it to or like an analogy for it or something, and it's like, I don't know, I I just th thought of like the rage rooms, you know, and like you just go in and you break the stuff just for the sake of breaking it. It's like I mean, I know it doesn't damage everyone's furniture when they throw it in, but it still just feels like that to me. Like I'm just gonna throw all my dishes in the bathtub. Like with that, it just doesn't make any sense to me. But anyway, if they do insist on doing that, you are not responsible for removing it unless you really, really want to be, but you're just gonna train them that it's okay. And if you're fine with it, then go ahead by all means. Again, same thing with turning the pump on or off, do what you want. But you might be responsible for damages. You could be. I don't know. If you have insurance, I would say consult with your consult with them. Your uh your uh liability insurance, see what you uh want to do with that. Me, I say no. I'm not touching it. You put it in there, you can get it out. Because I think part of the thing is that they want to watch the pool guy get it out. Some people maybe, I don't know, maybe I'm just overthinking it. Whatever. Now this applies to Florida people again. I am sorry. But if you have people with screen enclosures, you can tell them not to slash their screens. A lot of people still do this, and you might be thinking, well, why would they do that? I'm thinking the same thing. Apparently, there used to be something where the enclosure itself was attached to the house in such a way that there was a danger of the wind catching the screens like a sail and then ripping the side of the house off or something like that. I spoke to a guy who is a screen guy, and he said that unless your house was built in unless you still have your enclosure from the 1920s or the 1930s, which I don't even know if they were doing it back then, but like the point is if if it's really old, unless it's really, really, really old, they don't build them that way anymore, and so that's not a risk. My dog wants to be on the show, and so that's no longer a risk, and so slashing the screens has just become uh a gimmick to sell new screens because they are very expensive. And then the last couple things here, and then I will let you guys go. Stock up on pool chemicals reasonably, don't be toilet paper hoarders like the last time because you know they may be hard to get later. And then you are gonna want to alert all of your customers of everything. You can tell them everything I just said, especially about the water level, don't let any water out. You can give them chemicals, you know, you can sell have them give them the chemicals and be like, here, you could save this, ration it or whatever. Or what you need to be telling them is that you're gonna charge them for storm cleanups. You have a storm cleanup rate. Because if you've never cleaned up a pool after a hurricane, I wish my job was as easy as yours is. Just kidding. But yeah, charge, charge for storm cleanups, charge for your time that you're there. I used to go by how many times I had to empty my riptide bag if I had to empty it more than once or whatever, maybe two times, depending on how I felt, then I would deem that a storm cleanup, and then I they would get my storm cleanup rate. They would be warned that that might occur. Of course, you have to do that. You can't just be like, hey, I cleaned your pool, now give me this extra money. You can't do it like that. You have to let them know first. Some people will want to clean it themselves, or you will just show up in the pool, you'll expecting it to be dirty because it's normally dirty on a regular service visit, and you're like, oh my god, this pool is gonna be so trash, and you get there and it's like they've had a vacuum the whole time and they vacuumed it because they didn't want to pay extra, but whatever, at least you shouldn't have to spend an extra hour cleaning it, and that's it. Tell them everything I just said about the power, about the water level, and the storm cleanup, and that's it. My that's that's the end. That was an abrupt ending because I didn't write the ending into my outline like I normally do, so I just kind of surprised myself. So I hope you guys had a fun time listening. Thank you again for joining me, and let's hope that we don't have any major hurricanes to deal with this year because we got enough crap already to deal with. Yeah, so follow, follow me. You can follow me personally, follow the podcast, obviously. I already said the email address. You can email me if you like andrea.talkingpools at gmail.com. I'm on TikTok, Andrea Pool Pro. I have adventures of the pool girl on Facebook. My name my actual Facebook, my actual Facebook is on there, is on the Facebook. And go listen to all the other shows. Everyone else is extra helpful. And that's it. See you guys next Tuesday. Bye.