Natural Pools, AI, and the Quiet Revolution Nobody Saw Coming - Rudy

This week on Floc-It Friday, Rudy Stankowitz takes listeners on a journey that starts with a surprisingly heated social media debate about natural swimming pools and ends somewhere in the future of artificial intelligence, predictive maintenance, and autonomous pool care.

After receiving a flood of messages asking whether natural swimming pools are truly safe, Rudy shares the Facebook post that unexpectedly sparked a debate with advocates of natural pool systems. The discussion explores concerns about cyanobacteria, biofilms, phytoplankton toxins, and the potential risks associated with naturally managed aquatic environments. Rudy explains why his position has never been anti-natural pool, but rather pro-science, pro-testing, and pro-data. He also shares a direct response from renowned environmental microbiologist Professor Charles Gerba, whose comments on natural waters, disease transmission, and the importance of healthy skepticism add valuable perspective to the conversation. 

The episode then shifts gears into a much larger discussion about how dramatically the swimming pool industry has evolved over the past several decades. Rudy reflects on entering the business during an era of paper route sheets, handwritten invoices, filing cabinets, road maps, and technicians whose greatest diagnostic tool was experience rather than technology. He explains how much of the industry once relied on instinct, memory, and hard-earned field knowledge passed from one generation to the next. 

Listeners will hear an in-depth examination of how water testing transformed from subjective color matching to sophisticated digital analysis. Rudy discusses the progression from OTO and DPD testing to FAS-DPD and modern photometric systems, highlighting how improved testing did more than provide better numbers—it exposed inconsistencies and helped move the industry away from guesswork and toward true diagnostics. 

Drawing from his own research into black algae and cyanobacteria, Rudy explores the concept of pools as living ecosystems rather than simple containers of water. He discusses biofilms, microbial communities, prevention strategies, and why future pool care must focus on understanding entire systems rather than merely reacting to visible symptoms. The conversation touches on copper, silver, zinc, and the broader philosophy of preventative water management. 

The discussion expands into comfort technologies and the changing expectations of modern pool owners. Rudy examines how heat pumps, cooling systems, automation, and environmental controls have shifted pools from seasonal luxuries to highly managed recreational environments designed around convenience, predictability, and user experience. Along the way, he shares the unforgettable story of Ozzy Osbourne attempting to cool his swimming pool with 3,000 pounds of ice. 

Professionalism also takes center stage as Rudy discusses how the public perception of pool service has changed. Today's technicians are expected to understand chemistry, hydraulics, automation, electrical systems, filtration, customer service, data analysis, and business management. He explains why professional appearance, continuing education, certifications, and information sharing have become critical components of industry growth and credibility. 

Finally, Rudy looks ahead to the future. He explores the growing role of sensors, remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, artificial intelligence, drones, robotics, and machine learning. Rather than replacing skilled professionals, Rudy argues that these technologies will amplify expertise, allowing future technicians to spend less time collecting information and more time interpreting it. He paints a picture of an industry increasingly driven by data while still relying on the judgment and experience that only people can provide. 

This episode is part history lesson, part industry analysis, part philosophy, and part glimpse into the future. Most importantly, it asks a simple question:

What happens when an industry stops reacting to problems and starts understanding why they happen in the first place?

In This Episode

•  Natural swimming pools and the science behind the controversy 
•  Professor Charles Gerba's thoughts on natural waters and disease risks 
•  The evolution of pool water testing 
•  Cyanobacteria, biofilms, and preventative water management 
•  Why clear water isn't always clean water 
•  The rise of digital diagnostics and photometric testing 
•  Heat pumps, cooling systems, and comfort technology 
•  Professional identity in the pool industry 
•  The future of AI, robotics, drones, and predictive maintenance 
•  Why expertise will matter more than ever in the decades ahead 

Sponsored By

•  BlueRay XL 
•  LaMotte Company 
•  Aqua Comfort Water Group 
• Service Industry News
•  Revved Up Apparel 
•  Jacks Magic 
•  AquaStar Pool Products 

Connect With Talking Pools

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The swimming pool industry didn't change overnight. It changed one innovation, one lesson, and one better question at a time.

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Having studied disease outbreaks all of my career, I have learned never to trust Mother Nature. That was from Professor Charles Gerba on Natural Pools. Just food for thought. What's up, pool dudes and dudettes? It is another Friday. Welcome to the weekend. Lots of stuff going on, lots of changes. Did you guys listen to Monday's episode with Lee, Shane, and Nick, the folks down under? About the price of ruthenium going through the roof? Why does it matter? That's what the plates inside your salt cells are coated in. That's what enables them to reverse polarity without destroying itself, which is what all of our salt cells do now. Reverse polarity, not destroy themselves, though I'm not going there. So you might want to check that episode out, give you a glimpse at the future of what's coming. Salt water generators are about to get expensive. Why? Listen to the episode, check it out. Yeah, it's funny. I don't usually talk about social media. Not on the podcast. That's Andrea's thing. Andrea likes social media. Andrea understands social media. Andrea knows what an algorithm is. I still call Facebook the internet. That's where we're at. But over the last few weeks, my DMs got flooded with questions about natural pools. Not one or two questions. I'm talking a lot. Enough that I figured maybe I should answer them. So I made a short post, not a dissertation, not a white paper, not a declaration of war against nature, just a short post listing three concerns. Phytoplankton toxins, biofilm, brain eating amoeba. Pretty standard Rudy stuff. If you've listened to me for more than five minutes, you know I'm the kind of guy who sees a biofilm and immediately starts wondering what live inside of it. It's a gift or a curse. Depends on how much sleep you actually enjoy. Anyway, I finished the post with natural doesn't mean safe, it means unsanitized. Now, in hindsight, that may have been the exact moment I accidentally stepped on a rake because apparently that sentence hit the natural pool community like I had just insulted everybody's grandmother. Suddenly, there's a guy in my comments who identifies himself only as Natural Swimming Pools. That's the name. Not Steve, not Bob, not Mike. Natural swimming pools. Sounds less like a person and more like a Batman villain. Or a rejected Marvel superhero. His special power is arguing with pool guys on Facebook. Now here's the funny part. Almost immediately he starts explaining that natural pools are not stagnant ponds. Over and over. They're not stagnant ponds. They're flowing, they're oxygenated, they're circulating. They're not stagnant. Not stagnant. Not stagnant. And after about the tenth time, I started wondering if maybe there was another conversation happening somewhere that I wasn't invited to because I never called them stagnant ponds. Not once. Go read the post. I didn't say stagnant. I didn't say the water wasn't moving. I didn't say circulation didn't exist. I didn't say pumps weren't running. I didn't say oxygen wasn't present. I said I had concerns about toxins, cyanobacteria, biofilm, and amoeba. And somehow the conversation became, well, the water moves. Okay, I agree. The water moves. I never suggested otherwise. If the water wasn't moving, we'd have a completely different discussion. Then we'd be talking about warranties. I felt like I was in one of those old Abbott and Costello routines. Me. What about cyanotoxins? Him. The water moves. Me. What about biofilm colonization? Him. The water moves. Me. What about testing? Him. The water moves. At one point I was expecting, what time is it? The water moves. Now to be fair, some of his points were perfectly reasonable. Natural pools do circulate water. They do oxygenate water. They do rely on biological systems. Nobody's arguing that. At least nobody in this conversation was. The problem was that wasn't the question. The question wasn't, does water move? The question was, what's living inside the biofilm? Those are not the same conversation. It's like asking your doctor about cholesterol and getting a 40-minute lecture on how your treadmill works. Interesting? Sure. Helpful? Not really. And here's where things got weird. Because eventually I said, fine, let's test it. Let's stop arguing. Let's gather data. Let's take a sample. Third party laboratory. Independent results. Chain of custody doesn't even matter to me. I don't need to be involved in it. You send it. I trust you. If I'm wrong, I'll publicly say I'm wrong. No excuses. No backpedaling. No moving goalposts. If the toxins aren't there, I will happily eat crow. Done it before. Do it again. And somehow that became the least interesting part of the discussion. Which is fascinating because as a guy who's spent decades in water chemistry, testing is usually where arguments end, not where they begin. You test, you get results, you follow the science, done. Instead, we somehow ended up debating philosophy, nature, ecosystems, the meaning of natural, the environmental footprint of pools, everything except the thing I originally asked. Now, speaking of environmental footprints, we could have some fun with that one, because I kept hearing about how natural these pools are. Natural, natural, natural. And I'm sitting there thinking, well, wait a second, we're digging giant holes with excavators, we're still manufacturing fiberglass, we're still producing PVC pipe, we're still installing pumps, we're still consuming electricity, we're still trucking materials all over the country. At some point, we have to admit we're not creating hidden lagoons blessed by woodland ferries. We're building pools, just different pools. And that's okay. But let's not pretend Mother Nature personally delivered them in a woven basket. Look, here's why I landed after all of this. I don't hate natural pools. I don't hate natural pool builders. I don't even I don't even hate the guy who's arguing with me. Although after the 15th explanation that water moves, I was getting close. I don't even actually know who he is. What I dislike is certainty. Because every time somebody tells me a body of water is perfectly safe, my ears perk up. I've been doing this too long. I've seen too much weird shit. I've seen green pools, I've seen clear pools with terrible water quality, I've seen things growing where they shouldn't be growing. I've seen chemistry do things that make absolutely no sense until three hours later when it suddenly does. Water is humble pie in liquid form. So when somebody asks if natural pools are safe, I'm going to answer honestly. The risks concern me. The science interests me. The testing matters. And if somebody can show me evidence that proves my concerns are unfounded, I'll happily say so publicly. I would actually like to find one locally where I could take a sample and bring it in and have it tested. And I would happily share whatever those results are, no matter what those results are. But until then, I'm probably just going to keep asking questions. And apparently that's enough to start a Facebook cage match with a guy named Natural Swimming Pools. Only on the internet, only on Facebook, and only because I answered a question. But like I said, I can be wrong. It's okay for me to be wrong. I would just like to see a test. But I like to be open-minded. So I reached out to Professor Charles Gerba at the University of Southern Arizona. Now, if you're not familiar with Charles Gerba, he's often nicknamed Dr. Germ. He's one of the world's most recognized environmental microbiologists and has spent more than five decades studying how bacteria, viruses, and pathogens spread through water, food, surfaces, and indoor environments. His research on household germs, disinfection, waterborne disease, and microbial risk assessment has made him the leading authority, frequently cited by the media, public health agencies, and the scientific community. So I asked him his opinion. And I'm going to tell you exactly what he said, and this is verbatim. And I'm sharing this with his permission. Dr. Charles Gerber said, I share your concern about the safety of natural ponds for swimming. Included are a few articles related to natural ponds for swimming. Magleria is always transmitted by natural waters. Florida is the hot spot in the USA for this infection with the greatest number reported, and in constructed pools where chlorine levels are not maintained. A concern I have is when birds and other animals share access to such ponds. I recalled an article about a case of Campulobacter from a home natural pond a child got from birds. Birds also carry salmonella, an influenza virus that can be transmitted to humans. Plant toxins also can carry substances that cause allergies. Having studied disease outbreaks all of my career, I have learned never to trust Mother Nature. That was from Professor Charles Gerba on natural pools.

SPEAKER_00 10:51

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SPEAKER_05 11:22

Then I'd go back and read the article. Service Industry News is a twice-monthly trade publication for pool and spa service texts, 24 issues a year, emailed free to over 10,000 texts and available on their app. Every issue covers nationwide industry news and real technical content you actually will use.

SPEAKER_04 11:41

Get your free subscription at serviceindustry news.net. Again, that's serviceindustry news.net. Do it now. I saw something the other day that reminded me of something when I was a kid growing up on Long Island. I remember being absolutely fascinated by the idea of this thing I read in the paper. It was the house of the future. And I can't swear to you whether it was News Day or I don't know, maybe it was on television or one of those Sunday paper sections that sat on the table until somebody threw it away. But I remember the idea. I remember the feeling of it. It was the 1970s. Everything that involved the computer still felt like it belonged to NASA, the military, or some rich guy in a movie who probably had a helicopter pad and a wall of blinking lights somewhere. And there is this house that supposedly knew things. The lights could turn on by themselves, the temperature adjusted automatically. The home could respond to the people living inside it. Doors, appliances, climate, security, everything connected, everything monitored, everything managed. Well, to me, it sounded like science fiction. It sounded like the Jetsons moved to Long Island and got a mortgage. And then life happened. Decades went by, we got older, the world got weirder, and the future that once sounded impossible started sneaking into everyday life so quietly that most people even barely noticed it. Now you can unlock your doors with your phone. Thermostats learn the habits of people. Their cars tell them when a tire is low. Watches tell you your heart rate. Doorbells recognize your faces. Refrigerators can let you know when the milk is gone. What the fuck? Future's here. But it didn't roll in with trumpets. It kind of snuck in, right? Disguised as a convenience. So I've been thinking about that house lately because something very similar happened in the pool industry. Not the whole world, not medicine, not aerospace, not Silicon Valley pools. That thing in the backyard, most homeowners ignore until it turns green, starts smelling wrong, or makes a noise that sounds like money leaving their checking account. Trust me, they noticed that one. The swimming pool industry went through its own quiet revolution. And almost nobody outside the business noticed. That's what I want to talk a little bit about today. It's not an infomercial. Nobody bought me a gold watch. Nobody is holding my family hostage behind a sand filter. This is not about worshipping products or pretending any one company saved the industry. It's about how the pool industry stopped being a business that ran mostly on instinct, memory, and chemical bravado. It became a business built more and more on systems, measurement systems, treatment systems, comfort systems, professional systems. And now data systems. From the outside, homeowners still sees blue water. But beneath the surface, everything changed. When I entered the pool industry, the business looked nothing like it does now. Routes were on paper, invoices were all handwritten, customer histories lived in filing cabinets. If a file got put in the wrong folder, congratulations, you got a treasure hunt. Now, today, if a service app freezes for nine minutes, people act like we're watching the fall of Rome. Back then, if you needed a customer's history, you hoped somebody had written it down. Hoped somebody had filed it correctly, and then hoped the filing cabinet did not look like a raccoon had been living in it. Direction There wasn't GPS. No phone calmly telling you to turn left in 800 feet. Recalculate, recalculate. No little blue dot showing you exactly where you were. You either knew where the hell you were going or you carried a map. A real map, paper, giant, folded, impossible map, the kind that you opened once and then immediately realized you'd made a terrible decision. Because getting it folded back the right way required the patience of a monk and the spatial reasoning of an engineer. Most of us just folded it into some new ugly shape and shoved it in between the seats. That was the business. Paper, memory, maps, instinct, and experience. Experience ruled. Experience ruled everything. A great technician could walk into a backyard, stand there for 10 seconds, and know something was wrong before the homeowner had finished explaining the problem. Not because he or she had a tablet, not because they had a sensor, not because some app was whispering diagnostics into their ears, because they had already screwed it up every dumb way possible and survived the education. They'd seen heaters fell. They'd seen pumps cavitate. They'd seen filters loaded with enough garbage to qualify as geological formations. They watched a perfectly clear pool go sideways after a storm. They learned what a bad circulation pattern looked like before anybody called it a hydraulic issue. Experience was the diagnostic tool. Experience was the database. It was the operating system. But the problem there is experience scales terribly. When that technician retired, a mountain of knowledge walked out the door with them like it had its own truck payment. And that happened over and over again. One generation taught the next. Some of what got passed down was brilliant. Some of it was complete nonsense wearing work boots. The phrase, because that's how we've always done it, ended a shocking number of technical conversations. It was convenient. It was also dangerous. To be fair, a lot of old school knowledge worked. Pools stayed blue, businesses survived, customers stayed happy enough to keep paying. But there was also a tremendous amount of guessing dressed up like confidence and sent out in a service truck. And nowhere was that more obvious than water testing. But there's one thing I learned from teaching thousands of pool operators, it's this. People trust themselves way more than they should. That's not a pool problem, that's a people problem. For decades, pool testing leaned heavily on human interpretation. The chemistry was real. The weak link was often the human being staring at a color block like it owed the money. I've done this in classes over and over again. Take the same water sample, same test kit, same instructions, hand it to a room full of people. Then watch what happens. One person says the pH is 7.5. Another says 7.7. Somebody else is ready to go to court over 8.0. A fourth person is still trying to decide whether the color is pink, dark pink, salmon, almost salmon or some imaginary color invented by a paint company in Connecticut. The water did not change. The people did. That was the problem. Chemistry wasn't failing. Eyeballs were. Early chlorine testing had value. OTO was simple, fast, and useful in its lane. It could tell you chlorine existed, but could not tell you enough. DPD was a step forward because now operators could distinguish between free chlorine and total chlorine. Combined chlorine became visible. The picture became clearer. The FASDPD gave professionals a level of precision that mattered, especially as water treatment became more technical and stabilizer use complicated the whole fucking conversation. Every improvement in testing removed a little bit of guesswork. But the real leap came when more sophisticated testing became practical in the field. That's where a company like Lamotte Company matters in this story. Not because Lamotte invented chemistry, they didn't. Not because photometry suddenly appeared out of nowhere like a magic trick. Laboratories had been using light-based measurement for a long ass time. What changed was access. Lamotte helped move a laboratory way of thinking into pool stores, into service trucks, equipment rooms, and training environments. That makes a difference because the pool industry's biggest testing problem was not generating numbers. It was generating consistent numbers. Think about a service company with 20 technicians, 20 trucks, hundreds of pools, thousands of tests every month. Now, imagine every technician interpreting test colors differently. That's not one chemistry program. That's twenty different chemistry programs wearing the same logo. Inconsistent testing creates inconsistent treatment. Inconsistent treatment creates inconsistent results. And customers, they do notice that stuff. The biggest thing digital testing did was not just improve testing, it exposed inconsistency. Before that, a technician's answer often became the answer. There was no easy way to compare it, no easy way to challenge assumptions, no easy way to standardize. Once better measurement entered the picture, suddenly differences became visible. Sometimes that's where what we saw was embarrassing. For years we blamed the water. Half the time we should have blamed the way we were measuring the water. But it's also how industries mature. Medicine changed when diagnostics got better. Agriculture changed when soil testing got better. Manufacturers changed when quality control got better. The pool industry was never going to be exempt. Once measurement improves, behavior changes. A recurring algae problem stops being just an algae problem. Problem. Maybe it's circulation. Maybe it's filtration. Maybe it's a contaminant load issue. Maybe it's a sanitizer demand issue. Cloudy pool stops being a reason to grab the first bottle of magic juice on the shelf and starts becoming a question. Why is this happening? That is the real revolution. Not the machine, not the question. The industry slowly stopped asking what do I dump into this thing and started asking what allowed this problem to happen. That's the difference between reacting and understanding. You guys, I'll tell you what, I know a lot of you know a couple of years ago I took a pretty nasty fall on a trip to Athens. I was up on one of the mountains and my leg gave out as it does, and I hit my back pretty friggin' hard on a slab of marble and broke a couple of vertebrae in my neck, but doctor didn't want to do surgery, so they just had basically just tough it out when it gets to a point where it's excruciating. You know, then we'll look at it. Well, slowly over time, slowly over time, it's intensified a bit. And you know, it's funny, I I don't feel it in my neck at all. Where I feel it is in my arm, my left arm. And I probably walk around constantly looking like I'm having a heart attack, grabbing my arm just because of the pain that goes through it. So I think I'm getting pretty close to that point where I'm gonna have to throw in the towel and and go under the knife, but I don't know when that's gonna be. So anyway, whatever. That has nothing to do with this. So, you know.

SPEAKER_07 23:36

I agree 100%.

SPEAKER_04 23:38

People tell me all the time, we make we made pool service harder. We didn't make it harder, we made it less reactive. It's easy to walk around and just throw shit in the pool after something happens. It's hard to prevent it. And to prevent it, you need to understand why it happened. Otherwise, you can't prevent it from happening again. All you do is keep treating the symptoms. Algae is the symptom, not the problem. So a machine can give you numbers, but it can't give you judgment. The spin touch can tell you the phosphate level, it can't tell you whether or not that phosphate reading matters in that specific pool you're standing next to. It can tell you calcium hardness, but it can't explain why scale keeps forming despite a number that looks acceptable. It can give you data, it can't give you the smarts, it can't give you wisdom. I've seen a lot of techs with expensive testing equipment who still could not explain why pH climbs in a salt water pool. I've also seen old school technicians with drop kits who understood water well enough to see a problem before the rest of us even knew there was a problem. Technology did not kill expertise, it made expertise easier to identify. The future was never going to belong to machines. It was going to belong to people who understood what the machines were telling them. Like that house I read about. Once the industry started measuring better, the next revolution became unavoidable. Because once you understand the water more clearly, you start realizing the water is only part of the story. For most of the history of swimming pools, chemistry was always reactive. Something went wrong, you dump something in. Green pool, you dump something in. Cloudy pool, you dump something in. Algae, dump something in. Stain, stain treatments, philosophy was simple. See a problem, treat the problem, move on. And for a long time, that pretty much worked. Mostly. The trouble is that by the time you see a lot of these problems, the problem has already been living rent-free in that pool for a while. By the time algae is visible, it's already established itself. By the time chlorine demand becomes obvious, something has already been eating your chlorine. By the time a biofilm becomes visible, microorganisms have already been thrown a block party inside that system for weeks. This is where my own thinking changed in a big way. Back in 2018, I became deaf Jesus. Back in 2018, I became deeply interested in what the industry calls black algae. And the more I looked at it, the more I realized we were not really talking about algae in a traditional sense. Many of these organisms are cyanobacteria. It makes a difference, a big difference, because cyanobacteria does not behave like ordinary algae. They form biofilms, they produce protective structures, they create microbial communities. They're not just floating around waiting for chlorine to slap them around. They're organizing, protecting themselves. They're colonizing surfaces. That changed how I looked at swimming pools. Pools stopped being a container of water, became an environment, a living environment, a dynamic environment, a place where important battles are often happening on surfaces inside pipes, inside filters, inside ladders, inside skimmers, and inside tiny little protected neighborhoods most of us never even think about. Biofilms are not just random slime. They're communities. They're protected. They become a lot freaking harder to deal with than most people realize. And yes, in many instances, they secrete toxins, but toxins that are quickly oxidized by chlorine. That's why the future of pool care can't simply be just stronger chemicals. The future has to be smarter systems. That's one of the reasons I find Blu-ray XL interesting as part of this story. Not because copper, silver, and zinc are new. They're not. People have known for centuries that certain metals have antimicrobial properties. Water stored in silver stayed cleaner longer. We talked a little bit about this last week. Copper has been used against algae for thousands of years. The science eventually gave us terms like oligodynamic effect, but the observation itself is ancient. What matters here is not that these metals exist. What matters is the philosophy they represent. Prevention. Constant pressure makes life harder for the organisms that you don't want to gain a foothold. Copper can interfere with algae physiology. Silver can create antimicrobial pressure. Zinc creates additional biological stress. Check this out. Just go with me on this one for a second. Close your eyes. I want you to picture in your head a mountain stream.

SPEAKER_08 28:43

Picture it. You can hear it. You can see it.

SPEAKER_04 28:47

Right? Okay. Now is that mountain stream you pictured swampy? It's crystal clear, right? Okay. Why? The minerals that the water runs over. The minerals the water picks up as it moves along. There is not a body of water, a natural body of water, a river, a stream, a creek in the United States that does not have some level of copper in it. That does not have some level of metal in it. And while you're fact checking me on that, you might as well look up the thromide ion level of seawater. They're not fast, not magic. They don't replace chlorine, and anybody pretending otherwise is selling you a fairy tale with a label on it. But they can be a part of a larger management strategy. That's the key phrase, larger management strategy. Because the real future is not one miracle product. It's not chlorine, it's not minerals, it's not enzymes, it's not phosphate removers, it's not whatever shiny new thing somebody is demoing at a trade show with a banner and a polo shirt. The future belongs to people who understand the whole friggin' system. How filtration affects contaminant load, how contaminant load affects chlorine demand, how nutrients support growth, how circulation creates dead zones, how biofilms protect organisms, how pH changes chlorine's effectiveness. Yeah, even when there's cyanuric acid in the water, it still plays a role. How surfaces behave differently from bulk water, that's the conversation the industry needs to have. Clear water is not always clean water, you know that. That's one of the biggest lies the industry tells itself. I've seen beautiful water with biological problems. I've seen cloudy water that was sanitary. Appearance and biology are related, but they're not the same thing. A pool can look gorgeous and still carry organic load, biofilm fragments, microorganisms, nutrients, and dissolve contaminants that increase sanitizer demand and destabilize the system. Homeowners don't see that. A lot of professionals don't see it either, but the pool feels it. Chlorine feels it. Every day, chlorine is asked to do a ridiculous amount of work. Kill microorganisms, oxidize sweat, oxidize ammonia, deal with body oil, sunscreen, pollen, leaves, dirt, cosmetics, sunlight, and whatever else people drag into the water. It's like hiring one poor guy to run the entire company and then acting shocked when the person looks tired. So the smarter question becomes this what can we do to reduce the workload? That's what prevention is. That is ecosystem thinking. And once you start thinking that way, you're not just treating water anymore. You're managing an environment.

SPEAKER_01 31:50

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SPEAKER_07 32:20

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SPEAKER_08 32:55

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SPEAKER_06 33:03

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SPEAKER_08 33:16

Super easy.

SPEAKER_09 33:21

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SPEAKER_02 33:51

Blu-ray all day.

SPEAKER_04 33:54

For most of pool history, the weather was in charge. If you lived in Florida, you had a longer swim season. If you lived in New York, you had a shorter one. Cold front came through, the pool became a dare. Summer showed up, and eventually the water got the memo. Nature made the call. Pool owners dealt with it. That was the arrangement. The old goal was not control. It was extension. How do we get a few more weeks out of this thing before the weather gets rude? Maybe heat the water in spring. Maybe stretch the season into fall. That was the thinking. Then consumers changed. These are people who adjust their thermostats from their phones like tiny suburban emperors. They preheat ovens before they get home. Their cars manage cabin temperature automatically. Their apps tell them everything. So eventually they asked the question that was always coming. Why can't my pool act like that too? That question changed things because a swimming pool is an environmental system. It is constantly exchanging energy with the world around it. The sun adds heat, the air steals heat, wind steals more, evaporation robs the place blind. Rain barges in like an unwanted relative. Humidity gets a vote. Everything affects comfort. For years people accepted that. Then they stopped. That's where companies like Aqua Comfort became part of the story. Not because they invented thermodynamics, they didn't. Not because they invented the heat pump, they didn't, but because they represent a shift in what pool owners expect. Control. Predictability. Comfort on purpose. How's that for a sentence? A gas heater creates heat by burning fuel. That's easy enough to understand. A heat pump does something more interesting. It moves heat. It steals thermal energy from the air and puts it into the water. Even cooler air contains heat energy. The heat pump just knows how to move it. That's why efficiency became such a big part of the conversation. Homeowners started caring about operating costs in a way they in a way they didn't before. Electricity, gas, water, maintenance, everything gets picked apart now. People don't just want warm water. They want warm water that does not financially insult them. Then came the twist that would have made an old pool guy in 1985 laugh his ass off. People started paying to cool pools. I'm not talking about dumping loads of ice in it. Do you remember, was it three years ago in August? Ozzie Osborne, rest in peace. It wasn't refreshing anymore. It felt like bath water. So he ordered 3,000 pounds of ice and dumped it into his pool. His wife Shannon at the time tweeted a picture of it. That's how I knew it happened. I saw the tweet. Him standing next to this big ass block of ice, pushed it in, lowered his water temperature exactly three degrees. Three degrees. I mean, think about it. 3,000 pounds of ice sounds like a lot. But in an apples to apples comparison, is it? I mean, if he had a 20,000 gallon pool, I don't know how big Ozzy's pool is. If somebody knows, if one of y'all were taking care of it, that'd be friggin' cool. Send me an email, talkingpools at gmail.com, because I've got questions. But if Ozzy had a 20,000 gallon pool, water weighs 8.33 pounds per gallon. So if memory serves correctly, that's like 166,000 pounds of water. So take the 3,000 pounds of frozen water, dump it into 166,000 pounds of liquid water. It's like spitting into the bathtub. So it really doesn't do much at all. So anyway, I'm here in Florida. I've measured pools that felt a degree away from soup. Technically swimmable, emotionally offensive. When water gets into the 90s, it stops feeling refreshing and starts to feel a little bit suspicious. It gets heavy, dead behind the eyes. Suddenly cooling started to matter. A ridiculous luxury, but as comfort. Comfort on purpose, like we said before. And comfort has become a major part of the modern pool experience. That's the bigger shift. For much of the 20th century, the pool industry sold function. Does the pump work? Does the heater work? Is the water clear? Can you swim? Now the industry increasingly sells experience. How does the water feel? Can I control it? Can I predict it? Can I enjoy it when I want to enjoy it? Nobody buys a heat pump because they have a crush on compressors. Nobody buys cooling because thermodynamics gives them warm fuzzies inside. They buy certainty. They want the water to feel right when they decide to swim, not whenever the universe feels generous. And once homeowners get used to that kind of control, good fucking luck convincing them to go backwards.

SPEAKER_02 39:28

Yeah. Everybody wants a cheap pool service to the damn pool turn into Jurassic Park. Now they callin me.

SPEAKER_03 39:39

You ain't paying for the hour that I spent at your date. You paying for the 20 years it took to calibrate. Every green spot of nightmare, every system ever failed. Every customer crossed in the cover, didn't fail. Studied a lot of chemistry. I don't know how to fix the next step. You won't find a start walking.

SPEAKER_04 40:41

While pools were getting smarter, the public image of people maintaining them was still stuck in 1985. Ask the average homeowner what a pool professional does, and you usually get some version of this. He skims leaves, he dumps chlorine, he empties baskets, maybe he fixes a pump if it starts making an angry noise. That image is wildly outdated. Modern pool professional is expected to understand chemistry, hydraulics, filtration, automation, electrical systems, salt chlorination, heat pumps, variable speed pumps, advanced oxidation software, customer communication, route management, regulatory compliance, and data interpretation. That's not some guy with a pole in a bucket. That's a technical professional managing a complicated outdoor mechanical, chemical, biological, and environmental system. The profession changed. The image lagged behind. That's why I think revved up apparel belongs in this story. At first glance, I know, it sounds kind of strange. Lamotte is testing, Lure XL is water treatment philosophy, aqua comfort is heating and cooling. Revved up sells apparel. Shirts. But that is only the story if you think they're in the shirt business. The more interesting interpretation is that they are in the professional identity business. And that makes a difference because perception affects trust. It just does. Trust affects business, and business affects growth. And growth affects the entire industry. Before the internet, a customer heard about your company from a neighbor. That was the background check. Now they investigate you before you know they exist. They visit your website, they read reviews, scroll social media, look at your trucks, look at your photos, look at your logo, they look at your technicians and they make judgments really quick. Sometimes it's unfair, sometimes they're wrong, but they still make them. The first impression no longer happens in the backyard. It happens online. Appearance stopped being fluff. It became part of your credibility. A uniform does not clean a pool. A nice shirt doesn't fix bad chemistry. But professionalism is communicated before a technician ever even opens his mouth. And the pool industry has finally started caring about that. That's not superficial. That's cultural maturity. Industries start caring about image after they start taking themselves seriously. Construction did it, healthcare did it, tech did it. Now the pool industry is doing it. And at the same time, education exploded. Certified pool operator training, aquatic facility operator training, manufacturer certifications, online classes, webinars, trade shows, conferences, podcasts, social media groups, the amount of information available today would have been unimaginable when I started. And that changed the industry, because for most of history, expertise was isolated. One guy in town knew something nobody else knew. Now, a technician in Florida can learn from somebody in Australia. Australia. A service company in California can hear what a builder in New Jersey is seeing. A problem that used to stay local becomes a conversation, and a conversation becomes a solution. The collective intelligence of the industry rises when information moves. That may be one of the most underappreciated revolutions of all. The future is not built around isolated experts guarding secrets. It's built around informed professionals sharing knowledge. Yeah, we have a culture of sharing now, have for the last what decade, decade and a half? And I think it's pretty kick-ass. The pool industry is becoming a profession. Not just a trade, a profession. Trades perform tasks. Professions diagnose systems. Trades fix problems. Professions ask why the problem showed up in the first place. That's where this business is headed. And the shirt is just a visible symptom. Professionalism is the cause. I need to interrupt with a quick announcement. The winner of last week's Buzzword, Revved Up Apparel Talking Pools Podcast shirt giveaway. Amy Lamoth out of somewhere in Canada, I'm not sure exactly where, I apologize. But Amy Lamoth got the buzzword. It is got your six. So there you go. Amy, gonna get a t-shirt from Revved Apparel, Reppin' Talkin' Pools. Thank you, Amy. We appreciate you so much. And everyone that listens, we love you guys. Next chance to win coming up next week. Congratulations, Amy. You rock. Our Jax Magic products swag bag giveaway winner. That's Tanner Loggins. We asked for a new slogan for Jax Magic. Tanner came back with, ready for this? Pool pros who use Jax have customers running back. He gave a second option. Cool pros who use jacks save time, money, and labor on your back. Tanner gets the swag bag. The giveaways on my Facebook page, Rudy the Pool Man. Check it out. Jack's Magic Swag Bag, Tanner Logins. Great job, super creative. Love the slogans. Are they gonna use them? But they have a hell of a backup idea now, don't they? Dicting the future is dangerous. I've been in this business long enough to remember products that were supposed to change everything and changed absolutely nothing except somebody's brochure budget. I've also watched things people dismissed as gimmicks become standard equipment. That's usually how real change works. It doesn't always arrive with fireworks. It shows up looking like convenience. Then one day everybody is doing things differently. That's where we are. That's where the pool industry is again. Sensors are getting smaller, smarter, cheaper, more connected. For most of pool history, testing happened when a human decided to test. A technician showed up, collected water, ran tests, made decisions. Between visits, the pool was mostly invisible. That's changing. Pools are increasingly capable of reporting on themselves nowadays. Temperature, flow, pressure, conductivity, oxidation reduction potential, water level, energy consumption, equipment performance, what once required a person standing beside the pool can increasingly be monitored remotely. That changes everything. We move from periodic snapshots to continuous awareness. And continuous awareness opens the door to predictive service. Imagine a pump telling you it's weakening before it fails, a heater warning that performance is drifting before the homeowner complains. A filter identifying restriction before pressure becomes a problem. I used to just think it was cool to have polarized sunglasses because you could see algae starting before the homeowner could see it. Now, this is Marty McFly kind of shit. Chemical system can see a rising demand before a system crashes. That's not science fiction. That's not a flux capacitor. These ideas exist in other industries already. The pool industry is just simply moving toward them. Artificial intelligence will not show up as some robot stealing everybody's job. It'll show up as decision support, pattern recognition, trend analysis, predictive maintenance. Imagine a system that can analyze years of service records, weather patterns, chemistry, trends, equipment, failures, and customer history. It notices what humans miss. This pool always develops chlorine demand after certain weather conditions. That pump model tends to fail after a certain number of hours. That property repeatedly develops circulation problems under certain circumstances. AI is very good at finding patterns inside large data sets. And the pool industry is creating more data than ever. Eventually, somebody will teach machines to interpret it in useful ways. But here's the important part data is not judgment. A sensor can report. A professional interprets. AI can identify patterns, a professional decides which patterns matter. Automation can simplify operations, takes a professional to understand consequences. The future technician may spend less time collecting information and more time making decisions. That's how I see it playing out. Less measuring, more thinking, that does not make expertise less valuable, it makes expertise more valuable. Same is true for robots and drones. Could a drone photograph a pool? Sure. Could it dip down and grab a water sample? I bet they can. Could it identify visible algae? Probably. Could it read gauges, scan equipment, and upload data? Abso fucking. Could a robot handle repetitive cleaning tasks? It already does. The real question is not whether the technology is possible. The question is whether it becomes economical, reliable, and useful enough for everyday service. And history says eventually, some of it will. The routine visit may change. Some service may become exception based. Technicians may be dispatched when systems identify developing problems. Commercial facilities will almost certainly become more monitored, more automated, more data driven. But pools exist in the real world. Trees fall, dogs jump in, customers do strange shit, equipment fails in ridiculous ways. Water finds new ways to surprise you. The history of this industry is filled with problems nobody ever anticipated. Problems solved because an experienced professional walked into a backyard, looked around, and said, something's not right here. That kind of judgment is hard to automate. So, no, I don't think the future belongs only to robots. And I don't think it belongs to people who refuse technology either. The future belongs to both. The best professionals will use technology to become more capable than any previous generation. This brings me back to that house of the future, the one I remember from when I was a kid. Sounded impossible. You know, the future rarely arrives all at once. It arrives one ordinary improvement at a time. Better test, smarter controller, more efficient heater, cleaner looking uniform, better way to share information, a sensor, an app, a report, a technician asking a better question. From the outside, most of it looks small. But stack these changes up over thirty years, and suddenly the entire industry is different. Homeowners still see blue water. They don't see the chemistry. They don't see the hydraulics. They don't see the microbiology. They don't see the thermodynamics. They don't see the data. They do not see the professional judgment behind the scenes. And honestly, that's how it should be. The greatest successes in this business are invisible. Nobody notices when everything works. People notice when the shit hits the fan. That's the job. Preventing a problem before it becomes a disaster. Now looking back, this story is not about Lamont, Blu-ray XL, Aqua Comfort, or Rev Up. Those are just examples I used. Important examples, but examples of something bigger. The industry moved from guessing to measuring, from reacting to preventing, from accepting conditions to controlling comfort, from trade identity to professional identity, from isolated experience to shared knowledge, from water as a thing to water as a system. That is the quiet revolution. Not one company, not one invention, not one magic product, a shift in thinking. The swimming pool industry grew up while nobody was looking. And if the last 30 years taught us anything, it's that the next revolution is probably already happening quickly. One idea at a time, one piece of data at a time, one better question at a time. That's all I got for you this week. I'm Rudy Stankowitz. This is the Talking Pools Podcast. Until next time, be good. Be safe.