Preventative Maintenance
We have an in-ground pool in the back yard. It’s a great thing to have on 95+ degree summer days, particularly when we’re trying to save money to keep fueling the cars. In Oregon, though, the other 364 days of the year (yes, I’m exaggerating, but not by much…) make maintaining a pool quite a hassle.
Our pool has two drains that feed into the pool filter – the “main drain” on the bottom and the “skimmer” at the top. The skimmer is one of the most important parts of the pool because it keeps the surface nice and clean. It’s also the drain we plug the vacuum hose into so we can clean the bottom of the pool.
Well, the skimmer’s broken. It actually has been for some time.
We noticed last year that it wasn’t getting very much suction. As a matter of fact, it ran dry last month and burned up our pump. Obviously, there’s a hole in the line somewhere letting in air. Rather than fixing it when we first noticed, though, we invented a series of steps to take when turning on the skimmer so we can vacuum.
- With the skimmer’s valve closed, turn on the filter and let water in from the main drain
- Once the filter has built up enough pressure to circulate, slowly open the skimmer valve
- Wait a few minutes to be sure the filter maintains pressure … if not, close the skimmer valve and start again
- If there is enough pressure, very slowly close the valve to the main drain
- Wait a few more minutes to see if the filter maintains pressure
- Start vacuuming, but check the filter every 5 minutes to make sure it doesn’t lose pressure
When we’re not vacuuming, we obviously leave the skimmer closed. It makes for an interesting day when you want to use the pool. Spend an hour cleaning it, 10 minutes actually swimming, and then another hour trying to seal the cover back up to save cleaning time the next time.
I tried cleaning the pool yesterday and our ritual didn’t work. Instead, the filter blew a bunch of sediment back into the pool and actually made things worse. Now with an ineffective filter, broken skimmer, solid layer of sludge on the bottom of the pool, and shimmering slime on the surface we’ve decided there’s a problem. I spent almost three hours today digging between the skimmer and the pump house only to discover that the pipe to the skimmer is under the concrete surrounding the pool rather than conveniently under the dirt.
In summary: we knew there was a problem last summer, but waited until this summer to investigate it. Now with a hot weekend (and guests!) coming over this weekend we have an unusable pool and a large excavation project on our hands.
Your business is probably very much like a pool – it takes hard work to run properly and involved just enough complexity to keep you and your management team consistently on their toes. Take a minute to ask yourself: when you see a problem, do you create a quick-fix work-around to ignore it, or do you invest time and energy as appropriate to repair it immediately?
Most businesses look back on their mistakes in hopes to avoid the same pitfalls in the future. My recommendation is to not look so far back that you gloss over minute issues today that could potentially swell up to inconvenient delays and costly strategic maneuvers tomorrow.
Does your “pool” have a leaky pipe? How long are you going to wait before you fix it?
[...] Preventative Maintenance We have an in-ground pool in the back yard. It’s a great thing to have on 95+ degree summer days, particularly when we’re trying to save money to keep fueling the cars. In Oregon, though, the other 364 days of the year (yes, I’m exaggerating, but not by much…) make maintaining a pool quite a [...] This is a content summary only. Visit the blog for full links, other content, and more! [...]