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The Pool Envy® Podcast goes beyond surface-level swimming pool advice to examine the standards, systems, evidence, and professional judgment behind pool construction, safety, operation, and failure.
Hosted by Jason Davies, a licensed swimming pool contractor and independent consultant, the show explores pool code compliance, construction defects, inspections, workmanship, water chemistry, equipment, litigation consulting, and expert-witness issues through real-world observations and practical explanations.
Created for pool professionals, homeowners, property owners, attorneys, and anyone who wants to understand not only what happens in a swimming pool—but why—each episode helps listeners ask better questions, recognize meaningful evidence, and distinguish confidence from informed judgment.
Pool Envy® — Standards, not suggestions.
From the job site to the code book, this is a Pool Envy Podcast where licensed pool professionals speak up. Code, compliance, craftsmanship. Hosted by Jason Davies. Licensed across Wisconsin, Florida, and Texas. Your deep end starts now.
Jason Davies:Welcome to The Pool Envy Podcast. This week, I installed tile, and that probably sounds like an unusual place to begin an episode about human behavior. But stay with me. We're working on an existing swimming pool, and because of the type of work we're doing, we're not always mixing an entire bag of thin set mortar at once. Sometimes we need a relatively small batch.
Jason Davies:When you start doing that, the things that are almost inconsequential with a full bag suddenly deserve a little more attention. We weigh the powder. We carefully measure the water. And before portioning material out of the bag, we homogenize the dry product. That was something the manufacturer's technical support people specifically recommended.
Jason Davies:Think about what happens to a bag of material before it ever reaches a job site. It gets manufactured, blended, bagged, palletized, shipped, vibrated down a highway, moved around a warehouse, loaded again, unloaded, carried on to a job site. Maybe it spends some time standing upright. Maybe it lies on its side. Maybe it gets opened and closed several times.
Jason Davies:Different constituents can settle. If we mix the entire bag, eventually everything in that bag ends up in the mixing bucket. But if I reach into a larger bag and portion out five pounds, I'm assuming those five pounds are representative of everything that was originally blended together. So we homogenize it first. That's experience.
Jason Davies:But it's also reading the label, calling technical support, understanding the product we're actually using, and paying attention. Then we had a batch come out like soup. We measured it. We had already begun using the same process. We knew what the material normally looked like.
Jason Davies:And this particular batch simply wasn't right. That's an interesting moment in construction when that happens. We already mixed it. We already spent the time. Material costs money.
Jason Davies:We're standing there ready to work. You can almost hear the sentence, it has to get on the wall. No. It doesn't. We threw it away.
Jason Davies:And I kept thinking about that bucket because experience mattered. Experience was part of what told us the material was behaving differently. But experience didn't give us permission to override what was directly in front of us. It did the opposite. It told us to stop.
Jason Davies:And somewhere between throwing a batch away and mixing the next one, I started thinking about how often we get that backwards. Not just in swimming pools, probably everywhere. Experience matters. If someone has spent thirty, forty, or fifty years building swimming pools, installing tile, working with concrete, plumbing systems, electrical systems, or whatever their trade happens to be, I want to hear what they have to say. There are things you learn only by physically doing the work.
Jason Davies:You recognize patterns. You know how a material normally behaves. You hear when a pump sounds different. You notice when something doesn't feel right under a trowel. You've seen failures.
Jason Davies:You've watched products change. You have context. That matters. But experience and evidence do different jobs. Experience helps us recognize what deserves attention.
Jason Davies:Evidence helps us determine what is actually happening. Somewhere along the way, those two things occasionally get positioned against one another. A manufacturer says something. Someone responds, Well, we've always done it this way. Okay.
Jason Davies:But maybe what you've always done is perfectly acceptable. Maybe there's another approved method. Maybe the written instruction doesn't address the exact condition in front of us. Maybe technical support has additional guidance. Fine.
Jason Davies:Let's find out. But we've always done it this way does not end the inquiry. It tells me something about your experience. It does not necessarily tell me whether that experience remains applicable to this product, this installation, this requirement today. Products change.
Jason Davies:Codes change. Standards change. Instructions change. Our understanding changes. Sometimes that thing we've done for twenty years remains exactly right.
Jason Davies:Sometimes it doesn't. Experience should make us better at recognizing the difference. It shouldn't make us afraid of discovering one. And I think that's where things get interesting because sometimes a technical question stops being technical. It becomes personal.
Jason Davies:Maybe a homeowner asks, Why was this installed this way? That could be a completely legitimate question. But sometimes the contractor hears, you don't know what you're doing. Those are not the same sentence. Once the question becomes a perceived attack on identity, the conversation changes.
Jason Davies:I've been doing this thirty years. Everybody does it this way. You've been reading too much on the internet. You don't trust me. Go run to a Facebook group.
Jason Davies:Maybe. But we still haven't answered why was this installed this way. Homeowners can do exactly the same thing. A contractor may provide a legitimate technical explanation, but the owner has already concluded something must be defective. Now every explanation sounds like an excuse.
Jason Davies:Every qualification sounds evasive. Every disagreement confirms the conclusion they already reached. Everyone starts defending themselves, and the pool is still sitting there waiting for someone to answer the original question. Humans are remarkably good at this. All of us.
Jason Davies:Once a question begins to feel like a statement about us, it becomes much harder to deal with that question actually asked. And that is where facts become personal. Swimming pools give us an unusually good laboratory for watching this happen. Pools touch a lot of disciplines. Electrical, concrete, hydraulics, gas, tile, waterproofing, chemistry, structural work, mechanical systems, and everybody brings experience.
Jason Davies:Everybody has a preferred way of doing something. Everybody has seen something work. Then an external source enters the conversation. A code requirement, an ANSI standard, a manufacturer instruction, a measurement, a test result, physical evidence, and suddenly our experience has something independent to interact with. That's one of the reasons I like standards.
Jason Davies:Not because standards eliminate judgment. They don't. Not because codes answer every question perfectly. They don't. Not because manufacturers are incapable of making mistakes.
Jason Davies:Of course, they are. But these things give us something outside ourselves, something we can juxtapose against habit, something we can juxtapose against memory, something we can juxtapose against, I've been doing this for fifty years. And sometimes that juxtaposition is uncomfortable because now it isn't simply my experience against yours. Now there's a third thing in the room, reality. Code, compliance, craftsmanship.
Jason Davies:Those have been underneath this podcast from the beginning. And the more I work around them, the less I think of them as three versions of the same idea. Code gives us requirements. Compliance asks whether what actually occurred satisfies those requirements. Craftsmanship is where the person enters.
Jason Davies:Skill, experience, judgment, and humility. The last one probably doesn't get enough attention. Craftsmanship sometimes means knowing exactly what to do. Sometimes it means knowing enough to realize I need to stop. I need to check that.
Jason Davies:I remembered that differently. Let's call the manufacturer. Something here isn't behaving the way it normally does. That isn't a lack of experience. That may be expertise doing its best work.
Jason Davies:We didn't discard the mortar because we lacked experience. Experience was part of the reason we knew to discard it. There's a substantial difference. And yet experience can become part of somebody's identity. I'm the pool builder.
Jason Davies:I'm the tile guy. I'm the concrete guy. I'm the expert. I'm the person everyone calls. That identity may be completely earned, but it can also make new information uncomfortable.
Jason Davies:Because now learning something doesn't simply mean I learned something. It can feel like I was wrong. And sometimes, if I was wrong about this, what does that say about everything else I've done? Maybe nothing. Maybe the product changed.
Jason Davies:Maybe the requirement changed. Maybe the conditions changed. Maybe you misunderstood something. Correct it and keep moving. Being wrong about something is not necessarily evidence of incompetence.
Jason Davies:What somebody does after better information becomes available tells me much more. And this creates an interesting juxtaposition in almost every technical industry. Some of the most knowledgeable people I've met are remarkably comfortable saying, I don't know. And some of the most vociferous voices in the room seem almost incapable of saying it. That interests me.
Jason Davies:The most vociferous person is not necessarily the most informed person. Sometimes they are, sometimes they know exactly what they're talking about, but volume doesn't establish that. Visibility doesn't establish that. Confidence doesn't establish that. And occasionally, the person most invested in being perceived as an authority as not the person most interested in doing the uncomfortable work required to become one.
Jason Davies:There is a difference between wanting somebody's knowledge and wanting somebody's position. If you want the knowledge, you ask questions. You listen. You study. You make mistakes.
Jason Davies:You change. You learn from the people who know something you don't. If you want the position, visibility can start becoming more important than development. You want to sound like the expert. You want the vocabulary.
Jason Davies:You want the recognition. You want the audience. You want people to look at you the way they look at somebody whose work you admire. But intimidation and apprenticeship are not the same thing. One says, I want to sound like that person.
Jason Davies:The other says, I want to understand what that person understands. And learning something from another person requires us to temporarily accept a difficult fact. They may know something we don't. For some people, that's exciting. For others, it can be threatening.
Jason Davies:I don't know whether that comes from insecurity, competition, jealousy, status, or just something else. And honestly, I don't need to know. The motive isn't really the important part. What happens next is, did somebody engage with the information or dismiss the person? Do they investigate or did they become increasingly vociferous?
Jason Davies:Do they want the answer? Or do they want to retain the position of the person who already knows the answer? The desire to be perceived as an authority can become stronger than the desire to become one, and relevance is not experience. The problem becomes even more interesting now that artificial intelligence can give almost anyone the language of expertise. And I say that as somebody who uses technology.
Jason Davies:AI certainly can be useful. Research tools can be extraordinarily useful. They can help organize an idea. They can identify something worth researching further. They can improve communication.
Jason Davies:But we are entering a period where it has become incredibly easy to sound knowledgeable. You can produce a polished article about construction, a technical explanation, a discussion about codes, a sophisticated looking post about standards, an essay about expert witnessing. It can sound wonderful. None of that tells me whether the person writing it has actually done the thing they're describing. That doesn't automatically make the information wrong.
Jason Davies:It changes the question. What is it based on? What source? What experience? What evidence?
Jason Davies:What methodology? And what happens when the conclusion gets challenged? Can the person explain it? Can they defend it? Can they modify it when better information becomes available?
Jason Davies:Because fluency and expertise are not synonymous and I suspect that distinction is going to become harder to see and much more important. Maybe there's another reason the mortar bucket stuck with me. I could give you a very polished explanation of thinset mortar. Water to cement ratios, slake time, polymer modification, ANSI classifications, coverage, substrate preparation, all of that can matter. But at the end of the day, this week, I was standing besides a bucket.
Jason Davies:The material looked wrong. No amount of eloquent explanation was going to make the bucket less wrong. Reality has an irritating quality. Eventually, it shows up. There's another behavior I've been thinking about.
Jason Davies:Someone does something, another person objects, a rule gets enforced, a boundary gets enforced. Maybe an independent organization looks at that circumstance and makes its own decision, and suddenly the story becomes, look what you did to me. Now we've changed subjects again. We started with, what happened? And somehow arrived at, how dare you notice what happened?
Jason Davies:That can become manipulative. But I wanna be careful with that word. Not every defensive reaction is calculated manipulation. People get embarrassed. People get angry.
Jason Davies:People become afraid. Businesses feel threatened. People want to protect their reputations. We all protect our self image. But whether their response is deliberate manipulation or ordinary defensiveness, the behavioral pattern is still worth recognizing.
Jason Davies:Someone asks, was this authorized? And the response becomes, why are you causing trouble? Somebody asks, did this meet applicable requirement? And the response comes, you're trying to make us look bad. Someone brings an issue to an organization capable of making its own independent decisions.
Jason Davies:The organization takes action, and now all of the attention moves to the person who raised the concern. Okay. But what happened to the original question? A consequence can be unpleasant without making the person who identified the underlying issue responsible for creating the issue. The reaction may be genuine.
Jason Davies:It may even be understandable. It still doesn't answer the question, which gets us to drama. The swimming pool industry has plenty of it. Probably every industry does. Some industries may simply wear better suits while doing it.
Jason Davies:But pools have an interesting culture. Big, huge personalities, long careers, people with enormous amounts of legitimate knowledge, and people who have repeated one process for so long that repetition itself has become proof. People are confident, and sometimes people who are extremely vociferous about making certain everybody else knows how confident they are. Someone has 20,000 followers. Someone has a room full of people agreeing with them.
Jason Davies:Someone says they've built 3,000 swimming pools. Someone says they've been doing this since before you were born. Okay. I get it. What does the evidence say?
Jason Davies:Popularity isn't evidence. Being offended isn't evidence. Confidence isn't evidence. Longevity standing by itself isn't evidence, and drama is certainly not evidence. Sometimes the most responsible technical answer available is painfully boring.
Jason Davies:I don't know. Let's check. Let's call the manufacturer. Let's measure it. Let's read the standard.
Jason Davies:Let's find out that response probably isn't going viral. It has a reasonably good chance of getting us somewhere useful. We see a version of this in our online swimming pool group. The premise is fairly simple. Education, technical questions, codes, standards, chemistry, construction, workmanship.
Jason Davies:Every once in a while, somebody becomes irritated because the answer gets technical. It's Facebook. It's not a college course. Correct. It is Facebook.
Jason Davies:Concrete does not know that. Electricity does not know that. Water chemistry has no idea what application you opened on your phone. A suction hazard does not become less serious because you're reading about it between vacation pictures and a dog video. Reality does not become less technical because the conversation is casual.
Jason Davies:That doesn't mean every answer should become a dissertation. Some questions have simple answers. But if somebody asks a technical question, why deliberately make the answer worse because the platform is informal? Sometimes that's where I begin to suspect the disagreement wasn't really about the answer. The person wanted validation.
Jason Davies:Those are different things, and the Internet is very good at providing validation. If one group doesn't give you the answer you wanted, another one probably will. Keep moving. Eventually, you can find people who agree with almost everything. Now we have consensus, or at least something that looks like consensus.
Jason Davies:20 people agree with me. Great. Did any of them investigate it? Consensus has value when people evaluate reliable information and independently reach similar conclusions. A collection of people repeating the same assumption is something else entirely.
Jason Davies:Maybe it's popular. That still doesn't make it true. There is a question I wish we asked ourselves more often. What would change my mind? Not, what can I find that proves I was right?
Jason Davies:Not, how do I win this argument? Not, how do I make this person stop questioning me? What evidence would actually make me reconsider? If I think an installation is defective, what would make me conclude that it isn't? If I think a contractor caused something, what evidence would make me reconsider?
Jason Davies:If I think a homeowner has no legitimate complaint, what would make me decide that they do? If I interpret a requirement one way, what better information would cause me to revise that interpretation? If the answer is nothing, then I'm not sure we're investigating anymore. We may simply be protecting a conclusion. An opinion does not become stronger because it is incapable of changing.
Jason Davies:Sometimes it becomes insulated. That may feel satisfying. Technical work has very little use for it. That idea matters to me professionally. Sometimes the question becomes more consequential than something being argued about online.
Jason Davies:They become claims, disputes, occasionally litigation, and I think the same principle has to survive the change in stakes. Facts should test an opinion. An opinion should not need protection from facts. If reliable information changes, sometimes a conclusion has to change too. That doesn't mean every new piece of information overturns an analysis.
Jason Davies:It means the objective should remain the same. Understand what actually happened. The mechanics of a particular forensic analysis depend upon the facts of the matter, the evidence available, the applicable requirements, and the questions being asked. I don't need to go farther than that here. The principle is simpler.
Jason Davies:If reality disagrees with me, reality wins. It has to. And I don't want this to sound as though I'm standing outside the pool industry pointing at everybody else. I'm in it. I'm human.
Jason Davies:I like being right. I get irritated. I've misunderstood things. I've made assumptions. I've reread standards.
Jason Davies:I've called manufacturers because something didn't make sense. I've changed plans in the field. I expect I'll do all of those things again. That's why the word correctable interests me. Maybe that is one of the characteristics we should value more when we talk about expertise.
Jason Davies:Not simply how much does this person know, but what happens when they're wrong? What happens when somebody brings better information? Do they become curious or defensive? Do they investigate or attack the person who asked the question? Can they say, that's interesting.
Jason Davies:Let me look at that. A person willing to say that may ultimately know considerably more than the most vociferous person telling everybody how much they already know. There's another side to this. Not every challenge deserves hours of your time. That's something I've had to learn too.
Jason Davies:A legitimate challenge is valuable. Someone disagrees with my reasoning? Fine. Explain why. Show me the source.
Jason Davies:Bring me something I haven't considered. Maybe they're right. That can improve the answer. And then there are interactions where the apparent objective is the interaction itself. The argument, the response, the screenshot, the attention, the drama.
Jason Davies:At some point, I stopped confusing engagement with value. Sometimes a conversation ends. Sometimes in a moderated group, somebody gets removed, not because disagreement is prohibited, because nothing educational is happening anymore. There is a difference between someone challenging an idea and someone simply trying to provoke the person who expressed it. One may teach everyone something, the other mostly creates notifications.
Jason Davies:You do not have to accept every invitation to an argument, and refusing to participate doesn't make the underlying facts disappear. So maybe this is where code, compliance, and craftsmanship come together in a way I hadn't quite considered before. Code gives us an external reference. Standards give us common technical language and methods. Manufacturer instructions tell us how a particular product was designed and intended to be used.
Jason Davies:Compliance asks us to compare those things against what actually occurred, but craftsmanship belongs to people. It requires judgment, experience, curiosity, and enough humility to accept information that may be inconvenient. Maybe that's part of what separates craftsmanship from habit. Habit says, this is how I do it. Craftsmanship asks, is this how I should do it here?
Jason Davies:Those sentences sound almost identical, but they're not. And maybe standards have another purpose we don't talk about very much. They give people who disagree somewhere to start. Instead of my opinions against yours, we can ask, what does the applicable requirement say? Instead of, I've done this fifty years, okay, we can compare side by side that experience against the current requirement.
Jason Davies:Do they agree? Instead of, everybody does it this way. Maybe they do. Is everybody doing it correctly? That still won't eliminate disagreement.
Jason Davies:Codes require interpretation. Standards require context. Facts can be incomplete. Sometimes the evidence simply does not support a definitive answer, but at least reality has somewhere to enter the conversation. That's a considerably better place to begin than deciding who has the largest resume and awarding them the argument.
Jason Davies:So the next time a technical question becomes strangely personal, maybe there's a simple reset. What was the original question? Before the comments, before the phone calls, before somebody got offended, before everybody selected teams? What did we actually want to know? What are the facts?
Jason Davies:What requirement applies? What evidence do we have? What are we missing? And what would change our minds? Sometimes the answer favors the builder, sometimes the homeowner, sometimes neither.
Jason Davies:Sometimes the answer is simply we don't know. There isn't enough information. That is still an answer. Uncertainty does not need to be repaired with manufactured certainty just because certainty sounds more authoritative. The pool industry doesn't need less experience.
Jason Davies:It needs experienced people who remain curious. We don't need quieter people simply because someone is loud, and we don't need the most vociferous voice to win. We need the best supported answer. We don't need fewer opinions. We need opinions capable of surviving contact with evidence.
Jason Davies:We don't need everybody to agree. We need better ways of disagreeing. And maybe we need to become a little less threatened by the possibility that something we believed yesterday may need to change tomorrow. If the manufacturer says something different from what we've always done, figure out why. If the code changes, deal with the code.
Jason Davies:If a standard challenges our understanding, read it. If somebody knows something we don't, learn from it. If somebody makes a legitimate point, acknowledge it. If the evidence changes, let the conclusion change. If we're wrong, correct it.
Jason Davies:If somebody simply wants a reaction, maybe we don't need to provide one because drama wants somebody to win. The vociferous want to be heard. Technical work needs an answer. And whether we like it or not, reality gets the final vote. I'm Jason Davies.
Jason Davies:Standards, not suggestion.
Spyder:This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not legal advice, and it is not site specific engineering, code, or safety determination. All field conditions should be evaluated in context. Thanks for listening to the Pool Envy Podcast, where licensed pool professionals speak up. Hosted by Jason Davies, licensed across Wisconsin, Florida, and Texas.
Spyder:For more insights, subscribe and join us next time.