10 Myths About Pool Inspections Debunked by Industry Expert Dennis Boyd - Wednesdays

Join us as we explore the critical, often-overlooked world of pool inspections with expert Dennis Boyd. Discover the myths, safety concerns, and essential knowledge every homeowner, builder, and inspector needs to prevent disasters and legal issues. Part 1 of 2.

Keywords

pool inspections, pool safety, home inspection, water chemistry, pool construction, legal issues, pool industry, inspection myths

Key Topics

• The importance of thorough pool inspections
• Common myths and misconceptions in pool safety
• The role of water chemistry and construction knowledge in inspections

Guest Name

Dennis Boyd

Sound Bites

• "Not all inspectors are trained equally."
• "Inspectors need broad construction knowledge."
• "Continuous education makes a better inspector."

Chapters

00:00
Introduction to Pool Inspections

01:45
Understanding the Importance of Thorough Inspections

09:49
Debunking Myths About Pool Inspections

29:12
The Role of Education and Training in Inspections

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Welcome back to the Talking Pools podcast, your go-to source where everything went wild and wonderfully misunderstood in the pool world. I'm Natalie Hood, Director of Education Events for The Grit Game. And today we're diving into one of the most overlooked and most dangerous areas of our industry, pool inspections. We're not talking about the walk-around and nod inspections people think they're getting. I'm talking about the real technical high-stake evaluations that protect homeowners and builders, operators and swimmers every single day. And to help us bust these myths wide open, I'm joined by someone who hasn't seen it all from residential pool disasters to construction shortcuts to courtroom cases where untrained practices turn into lawsuits. Dennis Boyd, watershaped university faculty member, accredited instructor through ISET, and certified pool inspector, and owner of Pro Pool Inspectors LLC, he is here with us today. Dennis works on the front lines of residential pool inspections, construction inspections, and professional witnessing. And he is one of the few people who can say, with authority, I know exactly how and why these failures happen. So today we're breaking down the myths that are costing homeowners money, putting families at risk, and landing builders and service pros in legal trouble they never saw coming. So if you're a homeowner, a builder, or a service pro or anyone who touches the aquatics industry, this one you're gonna want to tune into as it may save you some time and money in the future. Before we dial in, Dennis, can you give our listeners a look into your background and how you got into the aquatics industry?

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Oh my goodness. Natalie, thank you. That was a tremendous buildup. I don't know if I'm worthy of all of that. I'm not sure I can actually even attest that I am all of those things, but uh I do have a strong team that I work with every day that are way smarter than me. So uh I just happen to be fortunate enough to couple myself with uh really, really good people. Yes. So my journey in the pool industry probably like like a lot, it it came out of nowhere. I know some people have the privilege of growing up in the pool industry with family members and just uh lifelong pool people in in the industry. I did not. Actually, my background, believe it or not, my my undergraduates in religion and philosophy. So I have a degree there. My master's degree that I went on to do was uh in it with the world of education.

SPEAKER_04 2:26

I love it.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Um I went to medical school after that, and then I just recently dropped dropped out of my doctoral program because the business just was just too much. I was doing my doctoral in a DBA and for hopefully one day I'll I'll get to go back and do that. It's more of a personal accomplishment than anything, than it is necessary for what we do in the pool industry. But um, I have found that my medical training, my medical background has had a tremendous aid for me in my my industry. So what happened for me was when I got out of school, I was working as an electrician. I actually started an apprenticeship job that I went into that I was working at a local university here in Nashville, and I was I was learning electrical work and uh had the opportunity to start a side hustle as a pool service guy. I was just running one man, one truck business type of thing. But it was enough for me. It was what I was wanting to do. It was really, like I say, it was just a side hustle. I I had no experience, I had no idea what I was doing, and it was really out of accident because I was at a customer's house. I owned a company, a lighting company. I had started with my electrical experience, and I was basically selling light bulbs, doing electrical work as a business. I was working in a hospital. So when I graduated with my medical degree, I worked in a hospital and I worked a I started a service company for lighting and doing electrical work, doing almost handyman, but specifically just for electrical. And when I started doing that, I started getting busier and busier, and I was running to a code one day, and somebody asked me, could I come over and look at stuff at their house? And I realized I need to make a choice. So I asked my wife that night, I said, Hey, can I step out of the hospital and run my company full time? I said, I really enjoy that way more than I do the life and death of everyday work in the hospital. So I started doing electrical work just solely full time. And then one day at a lighting job at a customer's house, they said, Hey, can you change the pool light bulb? And I said, I don't, I don't know how to do that. But I said I do sell the bulbs. And he said, Well, could you figure it out? And so I had a just in town, and people were calling me saying, Hey, can you come clean my pool? And uh I was like, I don't know.

SPEAKER_04 4:32

Wait a second.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

I don't I'm like, where's this coming from? So and so it turned out that there's just there was a need at that time. This is like 25 years ago in Nashville. There's been more pool service companies pop up here since then. We're we're a major city like every other major city is around the U.S. But I I kind of got into the pool industry really by accident. That was my leading into it. And then people just started calling me saying, Hey, would you come clean my pool? And I got I I actually got a little scared and ran out and got a CPO just because I thought that was the thing to do. It seemed to be, and every time I would look up something, it was like, well, get your CPO. Come to find out that wasn't very helpful. I I hate to say that, but it didn't help me as a residential pool service guy because all of that curriculum was geared toward commercial. It helped a little bit. The saturation index formula was very helpful as my introduction to that. And then out of outside of that, I began to think, well, you know, I can do this because I have a medical background. My my degree in medicine was all about blood chemistry. And when I started in the hospital, I was measuring people's blood. I was doing the alkalinity and pH values of their blood. Wow. Which was that's pretty cool. Which was surprising. Yeah, it was surprising because when I was measuring the water of the pool, it was supposed to be balanced to the same pH and alkalinity that we were measuring in the hospital of people's blood. You know, that they were the same neutral area for somebody who would get sick. We would test their blood to see what those values are to tell what type, you know, were they sick or not, you know, based on their pH and alkalinity. And since the skin is semi-permeable, yeah, people can get sick from using faulty water environments.

SPEAKER_01 6:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

And so that was very helpful to me as a lead-in to the pool industry. And not only that, but the information that I just gleaned from 25 years of experience in the pool industry helped lead into my pool inspection business. And when I became an inspector by accident as well. So all of that just led up into how I got into the pool industry, which is a longer story than that right there, but the podcast is only so long.

SPEAKER_04 6:42

I love that. You know, everyone tends to get into the pool industry in different ways. I mean, I I was was really thrown into the pool industry. My mother was like, You're gonna be a swimmer. I was a swimmer, my grandmother's was a swimmer, and again, I actually hated it at first, but then I grew to really love it. But I I do agree. I think a lot of people do get into this industry because they're like, Well, I it it's a it's a quick way to make a buck, right? But then they actually get into it and they're like, Well, shoot, I don't know how to do this. And they go out and they take a class, and it's like, just because you take one class doesn't mean you're an expert. You have to continuously take education.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

Yeah, I think we're desensitized by Hollywood and movies and you know, just television in general that makes the pool service guy look like the the bumbling, you know, guy that does, you know, if he can't find a job, then he goes into the pool industry and cleans pools. And then when you get into it, you realize, wow, this is this is very significant. This is this is way deeper than just dipping leaves and bugs out of a pool. Water chemistry is very, it's very sensitive. It's very dangerous. You are you are taking care of people's families who may be introduced into a water environment that could be dangerous. I mean, if you give if somebody contracts Legionnaire's disease, which is a waterborne pathogen from a water vessel, they could die. And we dealt with that during COVID because of the comorbidities that were on board with people and they were introduced to waterborne pathogens, and now they had a double morbidity.

SPEAKER_04 8:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

And that was just it was deadly. And we dealt with that as um pool service people, which is one of the reasons why people would get um things from the federal government saying, hey, you are a necessity. Like we already know we're a necessity, you know. Yes. And the federal government's giving us permission, like you're a necessity, but we may not know why. Why do they consider our jobs a necessity? Because you're dealing with water environments that can be dangerous if not interacted with correctly on a daily basis, like daily. Water, water has a life of its own. You know, it has its own particular makeups that you have molecules working in and out of each other, which is why Mother Nature is so fantastic when it comes to dealing with water. Like you it's a study in and of itself, and I think it should, me personally, going from the journey that I've had, I think this should be taught at the collegiate level. Yeah, a lot of people just jump into the industry with zero. Yeah, you know, zero information about our industry and learn like me along the way.

SPEAKER_04 9:20

Well, and I mean I've been in this, I've been in so many different parts of this industry, and I'm still constantly learning, and I love it. And again, I this industry, we say it's small, but once you get in it, you really start to learn how big it is. And there's so many different parts of this industry. And so I'm excited to talk about pool inspections and kind of the world of that because it's it is big, but I think it's just so misunderstood. And so one of the myths, and some of these myths I'm gonna have fun with, but I think a lot of people tend to think that a pool inspection is just a quick walk around. What would you say to that?

SPEAKER_02 9:57

You know what time it is? Wednesday vibes on the talking pools podcast, we've got to do that.

SPEAKER_03 10:53

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SPEAKER_04 11:24

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SPEAKER_00 11:54

There's nothing quick about a pool inspection. Um, that would be my first comment. The word quick and pool inspection don't go together, which is why I think people that are in our industry who think inspections is its own genre, they are correct. Being a pool inspector may not be what you may be thinking a pool inspector is, but inspections in itself is the genre of the industry. Now, even several members of Watershape University and I had a disagreement on what is a pool inspection when I first started with Watershape. One of the things that they were investigating is what we would do in it pro pool inspectors as far as our curriculum and protocol, because my background is in curriculum development. When we were talking together, Dave Peterson and I, Bill Drake, and the gang that are in the industry, they're uh unbelievably way, way smarter than I am. I have no idea what you just said, you know, but it sounded really good. Uh and they're masters, not even just in their own fields, they're like in other fields. I mean, we could be talking about nautical, they could be talking about nautical things, you know.

SPEAKER_04 12:54

And they're just a good old group of guys. They're still fun to hang out with. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:58

No matter which way the conversation goes, like they they have some formal training in it somehow. So even Paolo, but they had an understanding that inspections was, in and of its own right, a place when it was all catastrophic. So meaning that an inspection meant that the pool was drained. You go in and drill three-inch holes in the pool pool wall, you take core samples, you send them out to a lab, things like that. And then I was sitting here going, well, that's not what we're doing. You know, we're doing residential pool inspections for people buying houses with pools. We ain't draining the pool and getting in it and drilling holes in the wall. We're we're doing visual. But even at that, it's not quick. I mean, our inspections, because we're good, may last about an hour and a half on an inspection, which is why we can only do about four a day, because we just lose daylight. We can't see more than that. And not only that, if you have to drive an hour somewhere, it's even worse. So you can do even less a day. But the revenue stream for that makes up for that time because we're trading one lifestyle in the pool industry for another. So we're still in the pool industry, though. And inspecting for us is as a philosophy, it's for what we do. And even when we train it, what does that mean? What's a residential inspector? It means that we are usually in our dynamic, we are training people who are specifically going to go out and do inspections for people who are buying houses or real estate transactions.

SPEAKER_04 14:27

Which is big we want to know what you're buying.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

That's correct. There's some type of transaction going on. We're we're trained in the industry as far as that knowledge needs to be.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:39

And then we can go in and give them an adequate opinion. And that's all you're doing. It's it's a professional opinion on what we're seeing based on our training, based on our knowledge, and and that in and of itself. Well, what do you mean based on our knowledge? Well, I mean literally the knowledge of the industry. You know, well, wow, that's huge. You know? Yeah, it is. It's a lot to know. It's a lot to know from, you know, do I need to know the tensile strength of concrete? Do I need to know how far rebar is apart from each other? You know, do I need to know how plaster, you know, is made? You know, do I need to know how pool equipment works? The answer to all of those questions is yes. Yeah. Do do I have to answer those questions out of pool inspection? No. You know, you won't probably have any of those questions. But as an inspector, knowing that information, it's it's paramount. It makes you the difference between one guy in the industry versus another guy or gap. You know, they teach a class on just testing bonding, binding of the equipment, bonding of the surface areas, bonding of the things around the pool, which is paramount to safety in the pool industry. It's it's why lawsuits we did a study the other day at at our firm here, and we studied the cases in America that were connected to swimming pool, residential, commercial, and other, uh, which could have been like a boat dock or something like that. And we found out that the number one lawsuit was over bonding and water.

SPEAKER_04 16:09

Really?

SPEAKER_00 16:11

It was the number one reason why lawsuits went to like the highest lawsuit it goes to, which is like a jury trial.

SPEAKER_04 16:18

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

They weren't settled out of court, that kind of thing. So we thought that was interesting.

SPEAKER_04 16:22

It's interesting. I would not guess it's a good idea.

SPEAKER_00 16:25

Yeah, well, it wasn't over, you know, the construction of the pool.

SPEAKER_04 16:28

I would have thought that.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

Yeah. It was over bonding and bonding issues. And and they were very name, and and they weren't always about death. They were, you know, people getting shocked. And and they have something called hydraulic paralysis where the muscles in water, when there's just enough current in the water, can make the muscles inoperable, which is literally why in electricity cases, you know, people that would drown in pools is because they couldn't move. The muscles of the body didn't react, you know, the way the brain, the medulla, was telling the muscles to, you know, make, you know, do this most.

SPEAKER_04 17:07

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

You you would make think like uh and and it happens and and me as a as a former leak detection expert, I I found myself in one of these cases where I dove into a pool and my wetsuit would go down to um I want to say 40 degrees, my wetsuit would go down to and protecting me, my core temperature. And I dove the pool, and I remember this to this day because I was in the pool, it was cold, and I had I had my wetsuit on, I was down there diving, and it and it's and you know, it's one of these people with a residential pool and they go, Everything's emergency. Yeah, my pool's losing water, it's an emergency. Get over here right away. No matter what the day, temperature, if it'd be Christmas Day, you know, they'll call you, you know, it'd be 20 degrees out. I don't care. You know, I'll pay you anything. Get over here. So I remember I was in the pool and I had a little, I had a little dye bottle with me. I was trying to squeeze the dye. And I remember in my head, I was telling my body to squeeze the bottle like this so that the liquid would come out to test the liquor. And my hand was just sitting there doing this. Oh and I was like, I was like, squeeze the bottle. I was my brain was telling my fingers, squeeze the bottle. And I remember my training at that moment. I was in the pool by myself, and my brain just said first thing, get out.

SPEAKER_04 18:25

Time to get out. Yep, exactly. Time to get out. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

And I did. And so that kind of stuff happens in swimming pools and is just part of training, as part of learning, as part of doing.

SPEAKER_04 18:36

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 18:37

And learning as a pool inspector myself in Nashville, I've been doing this for man, since 2012. And when I started, everybody was on their own. Like it was just chaos. And when you would ask somebody what a pool inspection is, turn your report in, they would be like, wow, this is impressive. I've never seen this much information on a pool inspection. And then I would be scratching my head going, Well, what is the other guy or gal doing? What are what are they giving them? And come to find out, they may or might not have been a person from the pool industry giving that report.

SPEAKER_04 19:08

Exactly. Well, and you know, I'll say we don't have a pool here at our house. Um, we're gonna wait for our kids to be a little bit older. I'm still a little nervous, but they're in swim lessons. They've been in swim lessons since they were little itty beady little babies. They're just to the point where I'm I'm mom, so they need to learn from someone else. But you know, I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. It's okay though. I'll stick to like the manifest. What's wrong with you? Yeah, exactly. Mom mom started when they were the the six and under and above, but now it's now it's someone else's learning. Did you walk and whistle at the same time? Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. I'm playing. Now they're, you know, anyways. But um, you know, I'll say when we had the inspector come to our house to inspect, they were here for quite a while. And I I go through that list. You know, I worked in real estate actually for quite a long time before as well as in the pool industry when I was much younger. And so I I'm gonna expect the same thing. If someone's if I'm buying a house with a pool, I want a full list. I don't want a one-page summary. I want you to fully inspect that pool. Because I'll tell you what, we bought this house and the house we sold in Georgia, we it we gave it a lot of TLC. We put in a good amount of money. This house we bought here in Tennessee. Now, don't get me wrong, I do like Tennessee. I'm not gonna badmouth it because you're in Tennessee and I have a lot of friends here. I feel like the inspector here didn't do us a service because it I feel like a lot there's many areas in this place that are duct taped that I'm like now having to pay for. And with a pool, you're gonna have a lot of issues. So to what you're saying, I feel like our inspector at our house, now I'm happy we don't have a pool because I can only imagine at this point we want a pool in the future, but it I felt like he did a quick walk around.

SPEAKER_00 20:53

So by what you're saying, you know, we're well, we don't want uh I don't I don't want to take your podcast up of just venting.

SPEAKER_04 21:00

Uh no, no, but it's true.

SPEAKER_00 21:01

I mean that's well, but I will give you so I'll give you a scenario just recently happened to us. It was really the I won't say it's the only time it's ever happened, it's the only time I can remember. So we got our first one star review the other day. And let me explain uh before people start looking at me going, wow, that guy's terrible. You know, I mean you didn't get a one-star review. You got to really mail it in to get that. So whenever you're doing a real estate pool inspection, you are the go-between as the pool expert. And let's just talk about what you've experienced as somebody who inspected your home. They go through training as home inspectors. They have a minimum in the U.S. of a 90 credit hour course they have taken. There are two organizations that do training. All right, basically two. Ashia and Internachi. Those are two organizations they can get their training from, which is kind of like the pool industry. You know, we have two organizations that are mainly our instructors in the in the industry. And I work for one of them. I work for Watershape University. They're adjunct faculty members for the pool inspection training. All right. So you got a a person. in the home inspection world that did some training and didn't do a quality inspection. You know, we have that in the pool industry where we kind of had no training. We had nobody stepping up to the plate and saying, what should be the protocol for doing a pool inspection? And that's why you had chaos in in our industry until WaterShape stepped up and said, well, this is what a pool inspection is for residential.

SPEAKER_04 22:25

It's a big difference. Very big difference.

SPEAKER_00 22:27

It's another world. Yeah. Well I had a so whenever you're dealing with real estate and I'm a former real estate agent whenever you're dealing with a home transaction and you're the person who's been hired to do the water vessel portion of the home inspection. That's your it's your specialty over there. You still have a buyer's agent and a seller's agent that are representing on this piece of real estate. So you've got somebody selling it and then you've got somebody coming in wanting to buy it and you're in the middle, all right, telling them what's good or bad about this pool. And we don't want to go to the area of codes because codes is not what we're teaching as pool inspectors. Even though codes is part of our industry for building pools, we don't go in as codes inspectors because that's not our job as this transaction goes here. Right. Now if you were building the pool and we're coming in as inspectors, yeah, we'd be inspecting the codes. All right, but it does not mean we don't use codes to get to guide our information of how we present this information. If we see see codes violations, we're definitely going to call them out. But you got to know codes to call out codes. Right. So you you have to know but you're not a codes inspector but you're general practices inspector. But when the other day I did an inspection, most of the time, I say most of the time because it's not all the time that we will do the inspection for the buyer or the buyer's agent because that's who's looking to buy the home. Right. And then they're wanting to know is everything good or not. Every once in a while you'll get a listing agent. You will get uh an auction some type of it's transitioning from one person to another somehow and they found you and want to know we did a hotel recently that was changing ownership. A big brand was coming into Nashville and they were buying a vacant hotel and they wanted to know the engineering on the pool. And so in this instance right here we were doing a pool inspection for the buyer's agent which is very typical. All right. And so three hours after the pool inspection before we had ever even written the report we had a communication with the buyer's agent in the backyard told him what was what we had found. I get back to the office three hours later my office manager tells me hey we got a one star review on the pool inspection you just did. And I was like we hadn't even written the report yet how could we get a review? Yeah this quick and the listing agent had come out there and it turned out that the buyer's agent had called the listing agent after the pool inspection and told them hey the pool inspectors found this, this, this, and this and it should be replaced. And there were things from just general maintenance, you know, the pumps not working to things like not anti-entrapment covers that are major issues in the pool industry. Yeah. Major I mean we've had we've had a law passed federally about that one issue. And this agent decides that he needs to vent by going online and attacking the pool inspector. You know, not like why didn't you attack the builder? Why didn't you attack the person that listed the property? You know, the inspector doesn't come in and now magically we're just the ones saying oh this is all broken.

SPEAKER_04 25:32

I think that speaks volume for that individual. I I I think that gives you a clear idea.

SPEAKER_00 25:38

But that's what we're talking about with the with the the industry of inspectors as far as real estate goes it's just part of the business. It's just like pool service, it's like pool building it's like all of our industries rolled up into one. You will have you know people that are completely understanding of how things work together and people that just are you know no clue they're just out to make your life miserable because they think they can. And this agent, you know, thought that was the way to handle this instead of contacting our company or going through the proper channels of communication in the real estate transaction is just go out there and say, you know, oh these guys are just trying to find repairs. You know, things like that. So that is a that is kind of a segue into another conversation that we could have about do hop homens pool inspectors find problems just so they can repair?

SPEAKER_04 26:28

Yeah I was going to say that that kind of is a that is a fun one because there is another myth out there and it's inspectors are out to catch people. Well it seemed like this person was taking an it seemed like this guy or gal was taking it personal. I think they were just upset the maybe the sale wasn't going to possibly go through right they were they were waiting for that paycheck.

SPEAKER_00 26:45

Well this this listing agent um I won't name any names but this listing agent um didn't really have any recourse and let me just say it this way and I I hope this is not insulting because I'm a former real estate agent there's a a question of like ethics as well in their industry that they have to abide by. Here in the state of Tennessee we have something called TREC which stands for Tennessee Real Estate Commission. And they set guidelines and statutes of how real estate agents have to abide by standards of the industry. So there's protocols that they have to go by to do their job correctly and not seem like that they are steering the deal. They have to be transparent with all of that. And I get it you know you got listing agents, you got buyers agents they're all on the side of their client and we get it. But we as inspectors as well our job is not to quote unquote catch people although when you're in the situation people feel caught. Well I mean I would that's not us.

SPEAKER_04 27:45

But I mean the thing is if you're an inspector you should be trained to find issues so that down the line I would mat I mean you don't want people to get hurt or that's right.

SPEAKER_00 27:56

That's right. And and that's the with the real estate transaction a lot of times it's it's all about money in the b the majority sense of the word it can be about somebody's commission you know that they're not getting as much for the deal. They don't want repairs to have to happen because because the seller said everything looked good so the agent now takes their side and goes well how could you find things everything's great. You know well how do you know? You know, are you an industry expert? If that's the case then I should be able to just sell the home for you too because I'm just as qualified in your area as you are in mine. Which is what we have to tell home inspectors a lot when they say a pool inspection can't be that hard then I turn to them and say well then I should be able to do the home inspection as well because I live in a house.

SPEAKER_04 28:39

Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:40

Exactly we're both just as qualified at that point. So if there's no training nobody has any standards of the industry then then yeah and that's when they start backpedaling going well I have to do so much training. And I'm like, well so do we you know in our industry.

SPEAKER_04 28:54

Well there's a lot of classes out there that you know with AI you have to be really careful. There's a lot of pop-up classes and so definitely do your research when you're looking at you know whether you're taking a class online if it's a full on demand if it's a virtual course if it's in person, do your research. Just because you're taking a class, it doesn't mean you're an expert in it. And you know as we're looking at inspectors, another big myth out there is that you know we're talking about residential, right? And so a myth is that residential inspectors that they don't need to have knowledge of pool constru of a pool construction for a home buyer. And we're talking about home buyers so what would you say to that?

SPEAKER_00 29:32

Construction knowledge is a is an area that inspectors need to know depending on the level of inspecting they're going to get into and inspections as a genre in and of itself is its own genre in the industry. You know some guys want to be pool builders some guys some some gals want to be pool service experts you know some guys want to deal with just diving ladies want to deal with just being the spa expert you know things like that. Some people want to on a storefront inspecting is its own genre which is why we talk in our class about if you think you're going to be an inspector and just offer this as a bullet point on your service of everyday activities, you're probably not going to be the best inspector option, you know, in your area. Even though it's okay for you to do that, it's it's one thing we did, but we realized very quickly if we were taking this seriously as inspectors for real estate transactions, we needed to be on beck and call for the real estate industry, which means they have so many questions for pool inspectors and they want to know what how are you qualified? You know, are you you know somebody that we really need you get you get all kind of tire kickers because you'll have the agents who'll say things like well we shouldn't really need you because the pool is brand new. You know, you'll get those kind of things. And then you'll get um people that'll say man this pool is a hundred years old we really need to have it inspected. And then as an inspector you come in thinking you're going to offer some great information that they've never had and then you realize the pool is well built from back in the day that it's way more structurally sound than the brand new pool by the guy who was building it who never went to one building class in their life. And so you show up to the brand new building you go, who built this? You're not thinking out loud you're you're thinking it though. So do do pool inspectors need to know just for a residential transaction? Well the answer is you know yes but are you going to share all that information? No, you're not because you're the most qualified candidate as a person who's inspecting for the industry. And just like a home inspector gets trained to look at all types of houses that's what the pool industry does. That's what our class does is we we train you from a federal position of how to look at all swimming pools that are residential, you know, all different types. And so that's kind of what happens at a home inspection just because they're trained to do all types of houses when they go to Natalie's house they're not going to use all of their training on Natalie's house you know because Natalie's house has certain aspects in it that let's say for instance they trained on stick bills and log homes and concrete houses. Well Natalie's house is not made of all of those materials you know and all of that but how old is Natalie's house compared to you know some other types of information just like what we said about other pools. You know because back in the day and and we get in that conversation a lot like we get real estate agents that will call us and say well we shouldn't really need inspection but the buyers want it so we're going to do it because this pulls grandfathered in well I love man the grandfathered put in the city you know when when things were built back then you know standards and codes probably didn't exist you know and now we do because we have so much more knowledge of things in our industry that can help mediate safety concerns that are just as paramount now. I mean even in you know a lot of us don't even understand the history of swimming pools in general like even why we call them you know bathing suits you know they're called bathing suits because the water vessels that were in the city people used to use them for bathing you know before indoor plumbing and things like that they had wool bathing suits that they could take and boil or leave at the facility or rent them whatever the case and we have you know those types of environments where we actually came up with one one time they were drain and these were massive bodies of water where they had certain times where people could go into them like the men could go and then the women could go.

SPEAKER_04 33:53

No I didn't know that actually I didn't know that.

SPEAKER_00 33:56

You know things like that. And not only that we have our first entrapment back then. We didn't why do we call them drains? Because we don't drain the pool anymore but back then they would drain the water vessel and fill it back up and and there was one incident where a a lady got trapped on the drain because they were draining the vessel because they commonly did it. And now we have this you know piece of equipment in the bottom of the pool this building structure you know this pass through of water you know that's being sucked into the bottom of the pool and we still call it a drain today. You know, just in that training alone education in the industry like just telling people that right now some may know that some may not know that well now that you've heard it now you're more educated. Now you're more knowledgeable. So that takes your knowledge base from what you used to know a couple of seconds ago now you know more. You know and so as being trained in the industry you know what you know the question of should I know all that information about construction my answer is going to be yes which is exactly why Watershape University exists as an accredited organization in the industry. We've got a lot of guys in the the organization that are like me, they do what they do on a daily basis in their area and now because they solely concentrate on that one thing, they become experts. And if you want me to relate it to something that I'm very familiar with, my doctoral program that I just recently stepped out of uh during the the business administration just because you get a doctor degree doesn't mean that you know everything about everything in the world. It means you are informed on that one thing and you are an expert at that one thing. Am I an expert at pool inspections? No. Is it what I do every day? Yes. I don't feel like I'm the expert at anything because I don't know everything. And for me that's the way I continually look at life. I'm I'm I'm what my wife calls me she says I have severe FOMO and I think it's ADD you know it's because I'm always wanting to know a little bit more about that about that and oh look at those people over there they look like they're having fun in their industry. Let me go learn about that you know let me let me see what that's all about. So my job as an inspector for people buying houses with pools I'm constantly training with Water Shape in the areas of building structural development rebar con I I needed it for what I thought was important as an inspector. Am I ever going to tell somebody how plaster is supposed to be poured in a pool? No, uh I'm probably not but if they ask if I'm at a backyard with an engineer and they start asking me deeper questions than surface level questions I'm at least going to have that training from the industry to say you know well Mr. So and so home buyer glad you asked that question because this is what the industry says about this structure right here. And as structures develop more and more oh my goodness man as equipment begins to develop even more and more as an inspector if you are only proficient with one brand you are limited as a pool inspector. So you do need training on lots of stuff as far as it goes in the industry.