July 2023
Tap water is now over half a dollar. My wife and I took a break from distributing USA made swimming pool heaters and geothermal supplies when we picked up some food from the drive through at Burger King today for lunch. I am grateful that she is just as happy with a sit down expensive dinner or just some take out food that we can eat parked in the car in the shade at a local park. I asked for some water when I picked up my food as it is very hot today as anyone in the Northern Hemisphere is probably experiencing and we have been running a bit dehydrated. They said now it is .55 cents for tap water. Now I know they have a to pay for a plastic cup and straw, but in the interest of the happy customer experience that should be covered. We are paying more for everything on the menu this year and they could have added a couple of cents for that. We even used the app to order saving them the labor and the time of taking the order, collecting the payment and making change. Also we didn’t sit down in the store and cause a mess that they then would have to clean up. (I seem to knock over drinks and drop food lately) We didn’t even give them trash to dispose of. In my company we do everything possible not to nickel and dime our customers. I try to cover extra expenses if possible especially if it isn’t my clients fault. I even feel guilty sometimes when I suggest a winter cover for the heatpump or a chiller for aquaculture as I don’t like to pad the bill. I then did something that maybe someone with too much time on their hands might do. I drove across the street to a McDonald’s restaurant and got a large ice coffee and a large water for .99 cents plus tax. How could I resist. They have a closer business model to mine and seem to care. I don’t really know if they care but the person who took the money and the person who gave me my drinks were both smiling and seemed happy to see me, and I felt good when I drove out. If I feel good then I am better at my business and maybe that will rub off on my next interaction with someone. If your pool is too cold or too hot and you get a swimming pool heater or a geothermal heat pump from me this week then I promise I will cover all the drinking water you can drink and I will smile and will be happy that I have you as a new friend.
Be safe out there and have an amazing swimming summer.
Best,
Marcus
PS We recycled the cups and the vanilla ice coffee was really good. 🙂
PPS In the interest of insider trading and selfish self promotion I probably have McDonalds restaurant stock in an ETF in the retirement account. Come to think of it there is just as much chance I also have Burger King in there too. So ignore this paragraph.
PPPS Burger King just offered me a $5.00 credit today on my next mobile app order. That was kinda cool of them. Thanks BK. I wonder if I can use that to order 9 cups of water?
Winter and Christmas for my Northern hemisphere friends will be here soon, and it’s almost time to close down your pool to get it ready for the next season. My Southern pool buddies can ignore this in Florida, Texas, Arizona, California, Nevada, Georgia and  To ensure your swimming pool equipment remains in good shape, here are some important steps to take. Remove accessories like the skimmer baskets, cleaners, ladders, steps, etc., from the pool. Clean everything and store them for the winter. Clean the pool and adjust the chemicals. Start by draining the filter pump and pipes that might freeze and then make sure to remove any water from the heater that could freeze and damage the heat exchanger. A wet vacuum or leaf blower helps with that. Put as much equipment inside as you can. Don’t move heat pumps as they are designed to be outside all year if properly drained. Plug lines so they don’t fill with water. Putting some pool grade antifreeze in the lines and equipment is a good idea too. Put your winter chemicals in the pool. Some people depending on location drain some water from the pool until it is below the skimmer and use a winter cover on the pool too. That is for inground pools. There are a few extra steps for above ground pools with hoses. Read your manual or talk to your pool guy or gal to be safe on anything that I said as I am more if a heater / heatpump guy than a pool guy. 🙂 Watch some YouTube videos on pool closing for your area to get up to speed faster too. There are some great local pool techs out there that know what’s best for your climate. Use them if this seems like too much of a pain.
Taking these steps will help you avoid any costly repairs come springtime. Stay ahead of the game and get your pool ready for winter today! I have a lot of my customers waiting for the last minute to close the pool too because they have my cold weather heatpumps In Washington State and Long Island New York last year we had pools at 86 degrees F in late October. Nothing beats a ghoulish tropical swim at Halloween in a cold weather state. If you are really a hardcore swimmer. I have geothermal heat pumps to get you through a winter in a cold weather state. The easiest way to use geothermal on your pool is to have a well that will pump 15 gallons per minute for a 5 ton heat pump. If you can’t do that you can bury HDPE coils and pump antifreeze through the lines. There are lots of YouTube videos on how to lay pipe. For some brands of heat pumps for January deliveries I can have your warranty start next May so you won’t lose any time, will get this years price and can start swimming as soon as the weather gets nice again and you won’t have to stress about finding an electrician or have to wait for a delivery.
PS BTW that is a Raypak / Ruud /Rheem gas heater courtesy of Raypak. That is one of my favorite brands of gas heaters if you absolutely can’t use a heat pump.
I am making up excuses lately instead of dealing with the brutal truth. Also it seems my wife and I are not communicating too well about food issues. I bought a new refrigerator and had it delivered and set up at my house while I was out of town visiting a geothermal heat pump factory to make sure they were doing everything right. That was a month ago. The refrigerator looks very nice and has some great features. It makes ice cubes and dispenses water too. I enjoy pure ice water. It is my favorite refreshing drink. I put the cubes in first and then the filtered water. When I just took water from the dispenser, I noticed that it didn’t seem very cold. My excuse was that probably the fridge doesn’t store water inside to cool it, and it is just passing through, & I am just drinking tap water at the same temperature as the kitchen faucet. Hey I am a refrigeration guy who has repaired 100’s of residential and commercial freezers, refrigerators and walk in coolers, so I should know better. I would take leftover food out to have a snack and my wife would smell it and throw it out before I could eat it. I can’t smell very well anymore. Maybe because I repaired too many ammonia refrigeration systems in 90 year old hockey rinks and dairy factories? Yes, they are still out there. Probably ammonia is better for the ozone than freon, but it is brutal on the nose when they leak. That was the second clue that I missed thinking maybe my wife nose was too sensitive and the food might have a few more days. I don’t drink milk much so I also didn’t know my wife was throwing the milk out after only a few days. She was thinking that my daughter might be leaving it out too long. Finally after being asked to buy milk too many times I saw the light & looked at the thermostat and saw the refrigerator was set close to 50 Fahrenheit. That is a tropical 10 Celsius for my friends outside of the USA. I adjusted it lower and now we enjoy 37F food and drink just like regular people. Reminds me of all the swimming pool and spa heat pump, geothermal, aquaponic, hydroponic and aquaculture service calls that I took where the only problem was the thermostat was set wrong or the heat pump was turned off. I hated telling people that news as then they feel stupid and that isn’t a good feeling as you write a bill for your labor. Now I know firsthand what that feeling is. Then I thought maybe I am slipping a bit in my middle kinda young old age? No that couldn’t be possible. I just installed a really quiet inverter variable btu condenser on my 18 year old Rheem Ruud heatpump split system. I squeezed into a nook in the crawl space next to where the air handler and a-coil was jammed with no room for my 182 pounds and changed the expansion valve and metering piston on the indoor coil so I could use 410A freon and stop using 2005’s Freon 22. That worked out pretty well so I must still have some diagnostic skills. My electric bill dropped too so I am happy.
Keep an eye on symptoms. They are your friend. 🙂
Best,
Marcus Miller Cell 360 348 7574
I am not a rocket scientist or a theoretical physicist. I have done many blog posts over the years though. They are fun to write and I feel that I am being useful giving information that might help people if they are interested in the products that I love. The idea was to promote my swimming pool heat pump and geothermal business. I have had some e-mails that suggest that I shouldn’t stick only to heat pumps and I should mention current world news or make my opinions known about subjects I know little about. I agree there is a lot of tragic events happening now: wars, political unrest, economic problems, inflation, disease, conflict, etc. I can only imagine that at this years thanksgiving dinner opinions might turn into to fights. I watch the news. My head isn’t in the sand. I don’t have any solutions. I don’t have a masters degree in international relations or political science. I am not a climate scientist, medical researcher, economist, oceanologist, sanitary engineer, religious leader or a therapist of any kind. I am a HVAC mechanic that learned everything he could about that industry and I am not going to talk about stuff that I don’t truly understand. My calling is to to make you more comfortable with warm pool water and a comfortable home in all kinds of weather. If I do that, maybe you are then better able to recharge, relax and then change the world with your skills and on the way show a little love to those who need it. That is one thing I am sure I know. We need a lot more of that these days.
Hope you have a nurturing wonderful family filled Thanksgiving and Christmas. Give your crazy cousin the benefit of the doubt when he makes an outrageous observation. He is as stressed as the rest of us and probably is doing the best he can.
Love,
Marcus
I don’t need your &$@?!%* resume. That is what a potential customer wrote to me this week while I was trying to help him. He had written to me asking for a delivered price of some swimming pool heat pump equipment listed on my website. To get him the most competitive shipping quote, I wrote back asking if he needed a commercial or residential delivery with a liftgate truck and another question to make sure this would be suitable for his application. I always do that because if someone gets something that isn’t proper for their project, then nobody is going to be happy. I then said that I once worked in his area so that I was familiar with his conditions and weather. Soon I received an e-mail back from him with a one line response saying that he only wanted a price and not my resume. So because he said that I didn’t give him either and now unfortunately everyone loses. Funny in way too as his LinkedIn profile was attached to the e-mail with all his business information. It was actually someone that would have been a good business contact for me as I need his type of services. Needless to say he is now the last person I would reach out to if I needed that type of service. I don’t know if something negative is in the air this week more than normal, but I then I followed up with someone who had asked for my free advice to help them plan their large geothermal heat pump project. I innocently sent them a text asking how the project was going? I was doing my job following up and caring about people who have reached out to me for advice. Then, I got back a text saying, “Stop texting me.” Now I have a pretty thick skin and have seen much worse in my time on the web, but this week’s hostility surprised me a bit. Half of my business is educating people for free about swimming pool, aquaculture and geothermal heat pumps. Most people disappear because they never do the project, it is not in the budget, their circumstances change or they pay much more and buy locally. That is fine with me. Tom Hopkins taught me years ago that if you make one sale in ten calls, then each phone call was one step closer to the ten. Hey, it can’t hurt to be polite though. I buy lots of stuff too. If you seem nice, have a good reputation and are knowledgeable about your product then I am an easy sale. Especially If you have your profile on LinkedIn, then it is in your best interest to be nice. If you engage me and I am trying to help you then maybe just say thanks for the information and then disappear. We are all in this together and at the end of the day experiencing a little courtesy makes it all worthwhile.
Best,
Marcus Cell 360 348 7574
Some swimming pool contractors are heroes. One of my pool buddies that installs my swimming pool heat pumps was asked to resurface a pool that after 20 + years looked really bad. He hired a subcontractor that he had used for years to do the cement work. They drained the pool to condition and then resurface the walls. The drain was plugged while they worked. Then before the job was completed, they didn’t visit the site for a few days, and didn’t open the main drain. It rained very hard during that time and the water table rose under the pool and popped it out of the ground, destroying it. Pools turn into big boats when the water table gets too high and the pool has no water in it. The company that was responsible for opening the drain washed their hands and refused to take responsibility. My buddy then tried to collect from his insurance company. He had paid for pool popping coverage for many years and thought that his foresight was finally going to pay off, as now he really needed help. The insurance company refused to pay for some technicality. To pay for the new pool my buddy who is at a retirement age, raided his IRA retirement money to pay for a new pool out of his pocket and that guaranteed that he would have to work for a few more years to make back the money. I am sure it was close to $60,000.00. I didn’t want to torture him asking for an exact number. He had to tear up the pool and lawn to make it like new. That was some Florida pool magic. I think they kept the old Gulfstream HE125RA heat pump that was still working well. He is a stand up guy who took care of business and took responsibility to make things right, without having to get sued or waiting to sue someone else or dragging his feet while he looked for money or just disappearing, like I have seen over and over on other big jobs. I get calls every week from a new pool customers who are trying to finish a pool that somebody else started and then abandoned. They are learning real fast what parts they need and I try to help them if I can but I am mostly a pool heater, Aquaculture and Geothermal guy. Not sure what the lesson is here. It is good to hang out with honorable people. Standard advice I would say; don’t just take the cheapest quote without researching who you are doing business with and getting as many referrals and finding as many reviews as you can. That wouldn’t have helped my buddy but if you can at least check if your contractor has current insurance and sit down with them and see if you like them at least. If you want to know about me you can Google the words “heat pump” and my name to see what I have been up to. If you need a swimming pool heat pump from Key West to Haines City and from Haines City to Pensacola please let me know.
Be safe out there.
Best,
Marcus Miller Cell 360 348 7574
Everyone knows that I love swimming pool heat pumps. Because of their economical operation, it has allowed pool owners to swim more in comfortable water temperatures at a reasonable cost. Lately I have been fighting some customers on the best way to use the technology. When I first got on the web in 1999 selling swimming pool heat pumps, aquaculture / hydronic / geothermal and air conditioning & heating equipment most of my customers were engineers and pilots for some reason. We had great conversations and for the most part they took my advice and from the feedback I have received they have been happy for more than 20 years. As swimming pool heat pump got more popular in the early 2000’s my customer base shifted to just about anyone who owned a pool and was cold. I felt more like an educator then a guy selling stuff as we did a lot of explaining and teaching about the best way to heat a pool. I just spent a week with a mechanical engineer who wanted to redesign the established technology and make the most efficient heat pump in the world by combining a pool heater with solar, and heat sinks, and some geothermal boost that will make the pool and the home more efficient. He was going to bury pipes in the ground combined with expensive high temperature solar panels, geothermal heat and cool for the home and geothermal and solar to heat and cool the pool. Eventually I lost him in what he was trying to do. I have seen just about everything in the field and have created some interesting combinations of technology for the fun of it at some point. Just for fun is the key as if it broke I could fix it or replace it for little money and I didn’t have small children at home in case I wasn’t around. I didn’t think it was possible to create a system that I didn’t understand. He did it though. When I told him the the temperatures that he was suggesting were to high for a heat pump and that it would blow the pressure controls he ignored me. When I suggested it was too complicated and that it is never a good idea to combine the home heating and cooling system with the pool he didn’t agree. You don’t want the pool part of the system to disable the home heating system if it fails in January when it is below zero outside. Pools can be trouble if the PH gets out of balance. That is why I like pool heaters that are made out of titanium. He was going to combine copper with chlorinated pool water and you can do that but you have to be on top of your chemicals, PH and dissolved solids. You can’t set it and forget it. So after 10 long emails he said goodby and told me he was going to create this new combination system on his own. He didn’t say he was going to take any of my advice and he didn’t want to buy anything from me either. BTW I love guys who think out of the box, but they also have to listen to others if they are going in a direction that has obvious reliability problems. I had a buddy in the early 2000’s who was a heat pump genius. He designed, manufactured and promoted a pool heater that heated and cooled the pool, heated and cooled the house and also heated the domestic hot water. I thought at the time that he had just made the world a better place. He declared bankruptcy a couple of years later. Service guys in the field had a hard time working on them and many wouldn’t even touch anything that wasn’t common. I see that more the last couple of years than I ever had in the past. Established experienced mechanics sometimes even refuse to work on brands that they don’t sell. I would fix anything my customers asked me to fix. That is what a mechanic is supposed to do. I even fished alligators, snakes and frogs out of pools and fixed some lawn mowers and kitchen sinks for my customers and I hate to fix sinks. So the more complicated you make your system the harder it will be to repair it if something happens. I know of mechanical contractors who for their own home design amazing systems to squeeze another 10% efficiency out of their equipment. I saw some great ideas. I even used a couple. They are not worried about fixing it as they can fix anything. The problem is that sometimes they don’t live forever and they have a spouse and kids at home with no onsite genius to fix anything and when the system fails nobody will touch it and the surviving family has to replace everything at a time when money might be tight or not even available. I have seen that personally. Don’t leave your family with a ticking time bomb. The efficiencies on geothermal and swimming pool heat pumps are better than they ever have been. A simple properly installed high efficiency system is usually the best way. Also simple has a better chance of not needing any service. I was at an international pool show recently. It seems that the Chinese manufacturers are going in the other direction. I saw some really cool stuff. There was a pool heat pump that heated and cooled the pool and inside the heat pump was a water pump and filter with a salt chlorinator too. It was web enabled and a couple of other functions that I forgot too. Who do you call when it breaks? There was also pool heat pump that was also a gas heater. That might solve a few application problems but who is going to work on it? I guess it depends on what part of the country or world you are in. In some places a gas guy will work on part of it. Some places a HVAC / refrigeration company. Some guys will be able to do both and in some areas their licences won’t allow them to do both. Pool contractors will be stressed too as the customer will blame them for everything. Then later if a control that affects both systems fails they will blame each other and the customer will pay for 2 or 3 service calls. Ugh. Don’t get me going about refrigerators with wifi, inventory control and TV screens in the door or the 1980’s technology where they combined TV sets with VCRs. Whatever they are. Keep it simple and keep components separate and chances are you will have the most chance of having the least issues. Keep in mind this is coming from a guy who has a history of making stuff more complicated and have seen in the real world that it can cause more stress than benefits. Hey even I can change. 🙂
Wishing you the best as always. Marcus
Text me on my cell if you want to do something out of the box. I’ll either help you or rain on your parade. 360 348 7574
I have received quite a few questions about Chinese swimming pool heat pumps from my customers who are price shopping. There are some that are being sold for less money than an American manufacturer can afford to build them. There are even some American manufacturers who are putting their name on Chinese heat pumps. The Chinese factories make them in big bunches like bananas and then ship the heaters 6000 to 9000 miles in a tightly packed containers to the USA, South America and Europe. Then they are shipped out from the warehouses from people who couldn’t care less about the product they are handling as most have no personal connection to the swimming pool owner, the service or install company or even the distributors that sell the heat pump. Then, when you need service there is no local service company that has a personal relationship with the manufacturer. My favorite swimming pool heat pumps are handmade in the USA with the designing engineer on site to give each a final ok before they are shipped out. You want a swimming heat pump made with love from people who care and have reputations to protect. You might even want the cell number of the distributor in case you ever have a concern or install question after hours. My next blog will be about Florida homeowners who buy a Canadian heat pump when they have 4 local heat pump factories in their backyard with lots of service guys running around. Hope all my Canadian friends don’t read that one. 🙂
Be safe and enjoy your pool.
