When a Pool Is a Lawsuit Waiting to Happen

What happens when you walk onto a commercial pool deck expecting to provide a service quote... and instead discover a facility that should probably be closed?

In this episode of Insurance Interlude, Steve Sherwood and Pat Grignon tackle one of the toughest situations a commercial pool professional can face: discovering serious code violations before you've even signed a contract.

Steve shares a recent experience inspecting several HOA pools where years of neglected maintenance, questionable repairs, missing safety equipment, incomplete service logs, and improper chemical handling created significant liability concerns. The discussion quickly shifts from "Should I take this account?" to "How do I protect myself if something happens before I'm hired?"

Whether you're servicing residential pools, managing commercial facilities, or growing your business, this episode is packed with practical advice on inspections, documentation, contracts, liability, and protecting both your customers and your company.

In This Episode

•  Why some commercial pools should never remain open until deficiencies are corrected 
•  The importance of documenting serious safety violations immediately 
•  When a service estimate becomes a potential liability issue 
•  Improper plumbing repairs that violate code 
•  Missing flow meters, bonding, grounding, and neglected maintenance records 
•  Why incomplete service logs can become evidence in litigation 
•  Chemical storage mistakes that can create OSHA and HazMat nightmares 
•  The importance of secondary containment for liquid chemicals 
•  Understanding the gap between inspections and signed service contracts 
•  What happens when another company is still responsible for the pool 
•  Residential versus commercial liability differences 
•  How contract renewals and expired agreements can affect legal exposure 
•  Why documentation is one of the best forms of risk management 
•  The importance of educating prospective clients—even if they never hire you 
•  Knowing when to walk away from a problematic customer

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:53

Hey everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the insurance interlude with your host, Steve Sherwood, and uh our co-host, Pat Grignon from California Pool Association. So, Pat, uh, we left off last week with a pretty serious one because we were talking about different types of inspections and stuff like that. And, you know, at the end of the day, with the inspections, I'm I'm not too worried about it because uh that's what we have insurance for, right? So, you know, we have a policy that that covers that type of stuff, and uh, you know, it's it's not that bad of a thing. But I've been coming into these weird situations lately because we do mostly online CPO classes, which for me, man, is way, way more economical and way better because now I don't have to fly to Houston and do like a 10-city run and fly to Atlanta. Like I would be gone like every other month, I'd be gone for half a month. And then you gotta buy a plane ticket, you gotta buy, you gotta rent a car. I'm staying there to kite board for a few extra days, right? So now it turns into a weekend vacation. And like now, the 40 people that we had in class is really, you know, 20 people that we had in class because we we had a good time out there, you know? So after COVID, everything went to online, and that's how we do most of our classes now. So I, you know, instead of having to wake up two hours early before class, I could literally wake up a half hour before class and, you know, be in my PJs on the bottoms and my Sherva Pool Consulting Group shirt and teach class because it's the same class, it's just online. But we do do CPO classes in person and we just do it locally here in Southern California. But a lot of the guys that we have come on board are like uh hotels and HOAs. And if you have like an engineering department or you have a bunch of HOAs and you have, you know, 10, 15 guys that are gonna come, like we'll do all 15, 10, 15 guys at the same time. And we recently had a class and it was really cool class. All the guys were like maintenance guys. I was super impressed because most of them were there 10, 15, 20, 25. Some of them were there for over 30 years. But like 60% of the guys that were there had been there for over 15 years. So it just shows me that like the company really takes care of their people and like, you know, whether they get paid a lot of money or they don't, it's you know, that's the it's the little stuff that peep that really matters and keeps people there, you know. So they all wanted me to come out, and I went out to a couple of them so far. And when I tell you that they were a fucking mess, Pat, like I walked in and I was like, You you can't have there's no pool company taking care of this. Like you're you you can't be serious, you know. So I'm just gonna walk you through some of the violations first before we we talk about like what responsibility I might have in when something goes wrong.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

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SPEAKER_00 5:11

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SPEAKER_02 5:37

Listen up, pool pros. July 31st, 2026, we will be announcing the 2026 Talking Pools podcast. Top 10 Mentors. Yes, the names of the top 10. Right now, the hosts of the Talking Pools podcast are evaluating the submissions that made it through the first cut. They do not have an easy task in front of them. Again, that is July 31st of 2026, right here on the Talking Pools. Our podcast flock it Friday episode. With that said, I would like to give a nod to the sponsors of the Mentor Recognition. Title sponsor Blu-ray XL, Title Sponsor United Chemical, Gold Sponsor Lamotte Company, Silver Sponsor, Revved Up Apparel, supporting sponsor Aqua Comfort Water Group. It makes perfect sense that these industry vendor badasses make celebrating the badasses who opted to help other individuals through a desire to lift the industry and expect nothing in return. Well, here I am saying expect the unexpected.

SPEAKER_03 6:54

In the equipment room, they had like fittings that were like uh under pressure, but you know, like the sleeves that have like the little hose clamps on it on either side, they were like using that to like join two pieces of pipe together and stuff, which is like that's a code. You know what I mean? Like you're not allowed to do that. There wasn't just like a broken flow meter, there was no flow meter. All right, no bonding and grounding to the pumps or heaters in the service logs. It's July. No one's no one's filled out anything since uh March. All of the readings that they have are literally the same number over and over and over and over again for everything except the chlorine. And then they would put in, like, hey, we put in three cups, three cups, three cups, and it's like three cups of what, dude? Did you put in three cups of fucking acid? Did you put in three cups of cal hypo? Did you put in three cups of calcium? Did you put in three cups of bicarb? You know what I mean? And like uh, how could a pool that's heated and has, you know, hundreds of residents that come to this one pool, the alkalinity just stays at 80 all the time? It's what that, you know, not every health department makes you check that, but uh like when you see something like that, you're just like, what the fuck is going on, right? So the automation system was not an automation system, it was just a parasaltic pump that went into a bucket. And that bucket said that there were three-inch chlorinating tablets in the bucket, but there was liquid chlorine in the bucket. So it doesn't matter what state you guys are in, okay? If you have an automation system, and this is what I think is kind of crazy about the pool industry SCP, Heritage, Leslie's, they don't sell secondary containment. And secondary containment is literally you have your, you know, your 15-gallon carboid of chlorine and your mixed acid and water, and like it doesn't sit on the floor, it sits in a secondary containment tank that's filled up a little bit with water. So if there's a leak, you can fix that shit with a garden hose instead of having to call OSHA and hazmat and uh, you know, about have a bunch of different violations. So I was just kind of taken back, you know, and they were like, hey, like we're gonna get rid of our pool company and we want you to take over, which I'm totally cool with. But there's like I've never taken over a commercial pool where it's been like, hey, let's start next week. It's always a month, two months, sometimes months in the making. I've I've sat on shit for a year. They call back and I'm like, You guys serious? Like, I don't even I don't even remember sending you the proposal. Like, I need to rework the proposal if that was a year ago. Um, and I'm grateful that they come back, but I know the way that this stuff works. So I sent an email and I I was very, you know, poignant with what I was saying that like this pool should be closed and no one should be using this pool. But like, is there anything else that I need to do to protect myself? And I know that you always say this, like, oh, with a commercial pool, like they're usually gonna hire another company, so it would be on that company, but like, what if there's a gap? You know, like where does that leave me on the hook? And like, the reason I'm saying this is because that whenever we go out, we always, when we do an inspection, we make someone sign something or whatever that says, hey, like, you know, releasing liability. Do I have to start doing this going out for like random, you know, I want this business and I'm I'm coming and giving you a quote, and I just find this a ridiculous amount of violations? We're not, we're not even there yet. Yeah, exactly. I was there, I was there last week. I'm going away, I'm going to see my parents for another week and a half. So I know that this isn't gonna happen in the next couple weeks. It happens now. Something happens now, something happens tomorrow. It's not implied. Correct. It's like with residential pools, it's a little bit different. Cause like uh if you're you know, if you went and did something at the pool, let's say I went and I did a one-off job for someone and we installed a pump. So they install the pump. There's really no contract for it. You know what I mean? Like we'll, you know, we'll send them like a a proposal, and I I guess you could say that that's the contract, but like they they pay that, they pay that, you send them an invoice, and you get paid, and then someone uh gets electrocuted in the pool, you know, like you are definitely getting uh put caught into that into that lawsuit. I guess, yeah, I guess you I guess the way that you and you know, I'm just thinking out loud as we're talking about this, right? Is the way that you protect yourself with that is you say, like, we're not responsible, you know, we're installing this pump and there's a one-year warranty on it. Like outside of that, you know, that warranty, basically, if anything else were to happen at this pool, you know, like we're we're not responsible. I've also had it happen where um, like we were supposed to renew the contract and like we sent the contract, but like they didn't send it back. And what I've found is that the bigger comp the bigger the company is that we work with, the more demanding they are when they need something, and the more blasé blah they are when we need something from them. So we could be like, hey, like we need this signed contract. Hey, like we need like we have to get to the point where we're like, we're not going to come next week unless you get us this contract. So what if it was like in the gap of the contracts where, like, uh, you know, I I we work with a couple cities and they never we're always like the contract expires and we're actually doing work not under contract. So does that make things a little bit different? We haven't would would it go, would it fall back to the uh to the old contract? Because I mean the old contract is basically gonna be the same shit, right? Like, hey, we had this in place, it was implied that we were going to continue. And obviously, like, look, we we had like an email that said, you know, hey, that's that's cool. Let let's go ahead, let's go ahead and do it. What's up?

SPEAKER_01 12:10

Extension. What we got an extension.

SPEAKER_03 12:12

So basically what I'm saying is we got an extension, you know, but we just didn't really know if that like puts us under the the gun at all, you know, or or not. And like what are some what are some some situations where you should absolutely you know avoid in in these types of things? Oh, you're assuming that we get paid immediately for this ship. That's another episode on itself. Again, the bigger uh the bit the more money they have, the harder it is to get the m the money from that. Is really really what it comes down to. Okay, so what I'm hearing here is you know, going out and giving free estimates to people for the most part is something that's just implied as part of the job and something that you shouldn't be afraid of or apprehensive about. You know, I think the biggest thing with that is, you know, at the beginning, you're so hungry to pay those bills that you're taking on everybody. Yeah. And everybody that calls, you go out and see, and like, you know, people you have those people where they're like, uh, it's uh it's twenty, it's twenty dollars. Can you do it for five? You know, and and that's that's why I give my price over the phone. And I've I've said this a million times before, but I use Google Earth all the time to while I'm on the phone on the first phone call, I say, How deep is your deep end? And I would send me a picture of the deep end of your pool and then send me your address. And I go to Google Earth and I measure the pool and I say, Okay, cool, it's a 30,000 gallon pool. We can charge X amount of dollars. And I just did that the other day, and we just picked up a client, but you know, with residentials, it moves really fast. You know, it was last Thursday, and now this Thursday we're servicing the pool. Where with with commercial clients, it always takes that initial, you know, visit for you to go out, and then like, are you including chemicals? Are you not including chemicals? And that's a big deal to you know think about as a business owner. So there's a lot of things to unpack with this, but uh, you know, keep going out there and making sure that you're educating people and uh you know, at least telling them whenever I leave a meeting, um, I'm usually not expecting to get it. And I always just say, like, no matter who you have service your pool, could you just please make sure that you do X, Y, and Z? And like if they have new plaster, I'm gonna tell them to use a sequestering agent and I'm gonna tell them to get a robotic vacuum cleaner. And you know, if they really want their pool to look clear, clean and clear every day to get a uh a salt cell, you know, coupled with the but like so many people have come back and said, Hey, like you're definitely more expensive than the other guys that we had come out, but like uh we just felt like you were the most open and honest with us about what was going on. So that's why I've gotten into the habit of, you know, really trying to go out there and just giving out as much education to those clients as I can, whether they're gonna come on board or not. You know, what's the worst thing? The worst thing that happens is you guys don't go into an agreement, but you know, don't also waste your time. And as you grow, you just need to be more careful about the you know, the clients that you bring on. So Pat, thank you so much for coming on with us. Guys, if you're looking for insurance, please reach out to California Pool Association. They will give you a hundred dollars off on your annual policy if you get a lot of general liability of policy. And, you know, when you look at business insurance, general liability is the thing that we usually think about and talk about. But if you listen back to all of the insurance interludes, there's so many different nuances and different add-ons and different things that you can no bullshit waste your money on. So that's why, you know, I have Pat and California Pool Association in my corner for them to be help help us navigate that thing that we're not really interested in doing. And it's a you know, it's one of those things where it's like uh we clean pools for a living, but like uh if I had a pool, like I wouldn't pay somebody else to clean it, you know, I would clean, I would probably clean it myself. And then after three weeks, I'd be like, oh shit, I hate this. And then I'd wind up doing it. So it's just, you know, how much you want to make sure that you're giving out good information. And and California Pool Association is giving out great information. So, Pat, that's why we keep you around. Uh, and thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it, man. So, guys, thanks for listening, and we'll uh we'll chat out you next week.