…and How Technology Can Help Pool Business Owners
It’s 2022, you can watch your Amazon delivery truck progress on your phone, you can track your pizza order from the time it’s submitted to the time it is in the hands of the pizza crew and finally out the door and on the way to your house. You can even control electronics in your home while you are 30,000 feet in the air over the Atlantic Ocean!
We live in a world today where every part of our day is touched by technology and that concept has made its way to the swimming pool industry in a big way. The advancement of things such as artificial intelligence and machine learning coupled with cross-industry pollination of ideas and manufacturing breakthroughs have set the stage for some big technological breakthroughs that are here to stay and bring pool care into the 21st century.
Let’s look at four pieces of technology that represent that paradigm today and how they can help pool business owners.
Sutro
Sutro’s innovative testing cartridge is at the center of what makes it superior to other fully automated testing solutions. Sutro took a concept used in the medical industry for genetic testing called microfluidic dynamics and adapted it for use in a fully contained and automated testing robot.
Sutro’s use of microfluidics allows for drastically reducing the amount of water and reagent required to perform pH, free chlorine, and total alkalinity testing. It also brings the benefit of precise repeatable testing.
Having repeatable results means that Sutro can use machine learning to analyze your water and predict the impact of weather events, parties, chemical additions, dilution et cetera and tell you what to do to keep your pool looking great and make sure you have clean water.
HASA
HASA is known for their superior chlorine and pool chemical products, but they also have a very cool product called the HASA Liquid Chlorine Feeder (HLF). It uses simple fluid dynamics to provide a steady stream of chlorine while the pump is running to make sure that your pool always has sanitizer.
The HLF makes your life easier by ensuring that you have a steady source of sanitizer without the additives that you find in chlorine tabs. The idea of a tank for holding chlorine is pretty simple, but what’s unique about the HLF is the ability to store and distribute chlorine in an UV protected container that also allows for dilution and flow control with no complicated pumps or controls devices. With this protection and flow control, you can stretch the time between refills and rest assured that the water is getting the right amount of sanitizer needed to keep it clean without adding calcium or stabilizer.
This year HASA and Sutro announced a partnership to take the HLF to the next level and move from “dispense” to “sense and dispense”. By using Sutro to control the HLF and adjust the flow based on real-time test data, the HLF will be able to adjust the flow as needed.
CamerEye
We have all heard of artificial intelligence (AI) in movies and books, but CamerEye is bringing it to your backyard to protect pool owners today. AI is used in many industries from quality control monitoring of assembly lines, modern drug research, and even interpreting and generating legal documents.
CamerEye is a camera system that monitors your pool. What’s unique about CamerEye is that it uses AI and not simply motion detection like other devices. This allows it to use a “smart fence” to target specific things such as humans (pets coming in 2022) so that alarms are not triggered by sliding deck chairs, flying pool toys or any other number of random motion events that cause motion detection cameras to provide false alarms.
Even more impressive is that it also uses AI to detect signs of swimmer distress to alert you more quickly that someone is in trouble before they are in a full drowning event.
Skimmer
Running a business is hectic, especially a service business with super tight margins and competition. This is where Skimmer has made a niche for themselves in the pool service industry by applying the enterprise resource planning concept to pool service software.
Skimmer provides a fully integrated suite of services that allows pool service businesses to manage everything from scheduling/routing, service route documentation, and invoicing all in one cloud based solution. It’s available on PC’s and on phones so that technicians can have all the info they need at their fingertips and it helps with planning and management of supplies and accounts.
If you own a pool store or service company, embracing technology can help you make more money by lowering your costs, making your business more efficient, and increasing customer satisfaction through improved service and add on sales.
Technology is changing the pool industry, and those who embrace it will be the ones who succeed. By using tech to streamline operations and improve customer service, businesses can not only improve their bottom line but also build ever so important trust and loyalty among their clientele.
For more information, have a look at Ravi Kurani explaining the future of technology and how these 4 examples can help you improve your business: