When it comes to finding employees to take measurements of pool chemicals and make adjustments, lifeguards are the perfect candidate. At most functioning and busy public pools, lifeguards are on duty for hours at a time, allowing them to take water chemical tests several times throughout the day. Their primary responsibility as pool supervisors means they are always nearby and often available to take water samples.
Is Pool Chemistry Testing in Your Lifeguard Recruitment Job Description?
Unfortunately, this does highlight one issue with using lifeguards to take measurements. Lifeguards have a more immediate and important job to do, protecting anyone using the pool from danger. Their primary job involves assisting those struggling in the water and administering first aid when necessary. Keeping people safe must remain their primary focus, no matter what other duties they are assigned. For this reason, making the water testing process faster and easier is imperative, as it would allow lifeguards to conduct tests while still spending the vast majority of their time focused on keeping others safe.
Automating and Streamlining Pool Chemistry Testing Makes Lifeguard Recruitment Easier
Increased ease of use and increased speed of testing would help to make the water testing process and data recording foolproof and could minimize human error. Non-digital strip or liquid testing methods are more complex and time-consuming, leading to mistakes in calculation due to rushing through testing or simple laziness. Inaccurate results or erroneous calculations could lead to inaccurate data recording, which in turn can throw off the amount of chemicals added to the pool, and therefore the chemical balance of the pool. Overcorrecting by adding too much of a chemical to the pool can be expensive, as the chemicals themselves are expensive, while also often leading to a “yo-yo” process of trying to balance the chemicals in the pool, wasting further chemicals in the process. If the chemical balance is thrown off badly enough, the pool can even turn cloudy and/or green, requiring the expensive process of draining, cleaning and refilling the pool with water and chemicals.
A convoluted, sometimes inaccurate and time-consuming testing process can lead to lifeguards neglecting the testing responsibility in favor of their primary responsibilities. Laziness or carelessness can lead to shoddy, erroneous water measuring, which will throw off data recording, and lead to chemical imbalance. Avoiding this scenario requires a modern, digital testing solution.
The Solution for Lifeguard Pool Chemical Testing
The LaMotte Spin Touch can take a single syringe of water, conduct ten water chemical tests simultaneously in under a minute, and can send the data to the Pool Shark H2O app via Bluetooth. Calculations to determine how much of each chemical needs to be added to maintain chemical balance are then conducted instantly in the Pool Shark H2O app. The pairing of LaMotte’s digital tester and Pool Shark H2O’s app does the vast majority of the work for the staff member conducting the test, including measuring the chemicals in the water, calculating necessary corrections, and recording this data in a secure cloud-based pool log.
Almost all human error is removed from the testing process by using a digital tester with the Pool Shark H2O app. The chemical data is locked once it is transferred from the tester to the app, preventing accidental modification or falsification of data. Errors in calculation are eliminated, as calculations are conducted for the user, preventing mistakes leading to the pool going cloudy or green. The speed of testing also makes the water testing process less demanding, meaning staff like lifeguards won’t have to take as much time away from the other functions of their job to test the water.
A digital testing system like the LaMotte Spin Touch is also far more intuitive for most users than other non-digital testing processes. Especially for lifeguards, who are fairly young and often even teenegers, a digital testing system is far easier to understand due to their generation’s familiarity with technology. This also means it will likely take far less time to train them using this digital method than it would otherwise take using non-digital methods, all while increasing testing speed and accuracy.
When You're Recruiting LIfeguards, They're Supposed to be...well, Lifeguards
Another issue that can arise when relying on lifeguards for pool management is that lifeguards are often not certified pool operators, and by law, in many states, they are not allowed to add chemicals to the pool to correct the chemical balance on their own. In the past, this issue meant that after manually recording the chemical levels, lifeguards would need to reach out to pool managers over the phone to communicate the data and necessary corrections. This was an inefficient practice, as phone calls could be missed, and data could easily be misreported. The Pool Shark H2O app solves this problem by immediately notifying managers via email or sms notification when a pool needs attention. Pool chemical data is displayed on the app and is updated whenever a new test is run, allowing managers to supervise every facility they oversee in real time. There is even a notification for when a pool has gone too long without a water test being conducted, which will notify the manager of the pool, as well as the staff member on duty who is responsible for testing the pool.
The LaMotte Spin Touch and Pool Shark H2O make testing pool water a quick and easy process. The ease of use provided by each makes it far easier for managers to delegate the testing responsibility to staff who haven’t necessarily been trained as certified pool operators. The speed and ease of use of the LaMotte Spin Touch and Pool Shark H2O app makes testing and calculating corrections far more convenient, allowing the entire process to take a fraction of the time that other methods take. When these tools are used, staff like lifeguards can focus more on their primary duties, and are far less likely to hurry through or shirk the responsibility of testing. Better pool maintenance and better overall chemical balance are sure to follow, pleasing managers and customers, all while saving pool owners money.
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