Justin - Hawaii, WaterGuru Case Study
Summary:
This story is about Justin, a Hawaiian real estate broker, building a new smart home with a large, energy-efficient swimming pool. He loves to tinker with technology and always looks for ways to improve his home. However, he’s experienced the nightmare of a green pool in the past and wanted to ensure it never happens again. He discovered WaterGuru SENSE, an automated pool maintenance device that analyzes a pool’s water quality daily and sends the information to the owner’s smartphone. With the WaterGuru app, Justin can keep tabs on his pool’s chemical balance and suggest changes to his pool service if necessary. For Justin, having more information is always better than having less, and the WaterGuru gives him peace of mind, knowing he’ll never have to deal with a green pool again. As he says, “Knowing the actual data, especially if you have kids, is really comforting.”
WaterGuru gives concerned parents a constant window into their pool, and pool servic
Intro:
The big island of Hawaii is the ideal locale to own a residential pool considering the average temperature stays between 65 and 90 degrees all year long. The thought of swimming in a pool perched on a hill in a backyard in Kona or Waimea that overlooks the deep blue Pacific Ocean while the trade winds push puffy, fluffy white clouds across the maize sky with breakneck speed, is beyond most of our comprehension. It sounds too decadent, but if you play your cards right, you don’t have to be a millionaire to afford the Hawaiian pool life and the views. In fact, home prices on the big island are comparable to and, in some cases, less than those in San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles.
Justin is a Hawaiian native, a real estate broker who lives in Hawai’i with his wife and three daughters. He is also a home automation fan and is currently building a new, smart home on his current property that will incorporate most of the cool technology features that we assume only people like Bill Gates can afford. Justin and his wife currently own a swimming pool, but they are building a new, larger replacement to match the new house. Home automation features are being built into his new swimming pool! Justin is not a millionaire, however, but rather someone who simply understands how the real estate market works, keeps his credit clean, and has a knack for tinkering with technology.
The new pool will not only trump the old pool in size and capacity but also with better energy efficiency and with full-time connectivity. Siri or Alexa will probably have swimming pool commands! The one thing the new pool won’t have over the old pool? Cleaner and safer water to swim in. That is because Justin, who works from home when he is not showing houses, often traveling from island to island in the process, is, as stated above, one of those people who is always tinkering with the things in and around his home. That includes his swimming pool’s water chemistry. That wasn’t always the case, though.
The Problem - The Green Pool Experience
Any pool owner who has experienced the green pool phenomenon can tell you it is a nightmare that often induces PTSD - pool traumatic stress disorder. Most pool owners survive the algae takeover, but the scars remain, and some of them, like Justin, have learned to take matters into their own hands. The problem is that most pool owners won’t take that proactive step and take the time to learn what is happening with their pool’s water chemistry until they have dealt with the unfortunate green pool problem. “A few years ago, my wife said the chlorine in the swimming pool was giving our daughters skin problems and worse,” Justin says. “She was giving me a hard time about it and asking me to talk to the pool service we used and see if they could fix the chlorine issue. Then we went out of town for a few weeks and returned to a green pool. it was in a horrible state. The best way to deal with it was to drain all the water out, clean it up, and start all over. It was a bummer, but I used that opportunity to put in new pumps and went with saltwater instead of traditional chlorine per my wife’s request. I also wanted to make sure that that kind of thing doesn’t ever happen again, which meant I needed to get my finger on the pulse of what was going on with the chemical balance in the water.”
The Solution
The WaterGuru SENSE – an automated swimming pool maintenance device that sits invisibly in the pool’s skimmer and robotically analyzes a swimming pool’s water quality every day. It sends that timely information to a mobile app on the pool owner’s smartphone, along with expert advice on what steps the pool owner should take to maintain a near-perfect chemical balance. Once presented with WaterGuru SENSE in an online ad, Justin purchased it right away. Though he hasn’t taken the steps to become his own pool service by managing and applying the chemicals himself and still employs a weekly pool service company, he does keep track of the daily data presented to him by the WaterGuru mobile app. The data is a window into the chemical balance of his pool and gives him the ability to not only keep tabs on the quality of his pool water, but also his pool service.
As a result, If the swimming pool needs something that the pool service is neglecting, Justin can now kindly suggest a change based on the data. It is, for him, the ultimate peace of mind.
“Just having the ability to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on in your pool is huge,” he says. “Knowing the water flow, the chemistry, the temperature, and all of that stuff before you even get in the pool gives me and my wife a huge amount of comfort. Knowing the actual data, especially if you have kids, is really comforting. For me, having more information is always better than having less in all areas of life. With WaterGuru, you literally know what you’re getting into before you get in. That, to me, is peace of mind, plus the fact that I will never have to deal with a green pool again.”
Owning the title of home automation expert has its advantages. And drawbacks, depending on who you ask.
“I mean, I check the WaterGuru app at least once a day, because the data is available to review every day,” says Justin. “I mean, I’m the kind of guy who, if I have a lot of the home automation data I can monitor on my phone, I’m checking that stuff all the time. I’m checking my cameras, I’m checking the pool, I’m checking the temperature in the house, and making sure everything’s all locked up and everything before we go to bed. And so, I’m always tinkering. My wife hates it because I’m always on my phone, but then she loves having a clean pool and lights that turn on automatically when she walks into a room. I have a wife and three young daughters, and as a dad, I feel like it’s on me to make sure our home and our family are safe. Maybe I take it a little too far sometimes with the home automation stuff, but I just want to do whatever I can to make sure everything is working properly.”
