History Of The Pool Cleaner

Now that I am starting to reflect over my past 69 years of active duty as a pool guy. Many of my friends have told me that I have seen a lot of history in our industry and that I need to start writing them down. With this in mind, Joe & Marianne Trusty and Carol Gigliotti of Pool Magazine have asked me to put down some of my pool history that I experienced over my career.

In 1955, my father decided to move his family from Oakland, California to the rich open spaces of Contra Costa County just a few miles away. At this time, there was starting to become a migration from the inter cities to the new suburbs in the country. Much of this was driven by the Post War GI Bill that all of our returning soldiers received after fighting in WWII. The GI Bill basically gave a serviceman low interest government loans to buy a new home.

This migration and the hopes for home ownership created a huge building boom as America started to get back on her feet, post-war. My dad was one of those returning soldiers after fighting in the Pacific Theater and being discharged in Oakland, California. My dad wanted something better for his family and the attraction of moving to the fast-growing suburbs along with being part of the building boom of those suburbs, had an important attraction for my father.

He moved us to a little town that was 15 miles east of Oakland and what seemed like a whole new world. The weather was warm during the summer and a perfect place to not only raise a family in the country but also to start a new business in an almost unheard of industry, the swimming pool industry. Up to this point, only the very wealthy could afford a swimming pool. However, all this was starting to change as young families started to move to the suburbs and they realized that the weather was perfect for a fast-growing family of Baby Boomers. Now with a new home that the GI Bill allowed these young families to buy, there began the development of the front and backyard.

My father was one of the early pioneers who had the vision and the ability to do something about it. He started his pool company just prior to us moving to the little town of Lafayette, California. Little did he know that this little town of 2,500 people at the time was going to become the center of growth of our industry. Now I’m not saying that the pool business started in Lafayette, however, it was at this time in the 50’s that American families all across the country were starting to experience the same revolution of young boomer families wanting to seek a better life by moving to the suburbs and all the lifestyle that came with it. These young families had a lot in common with each other besides many returning from WWII, taking advantage of the GI bill, having several young kids or Baby Boomers along with wanting a better way of life.

As the new neighborhoods or track developments started to spring up everywhere in our area, we started to see more and more families wanting to enjoy their backyards with their growing families and friends. It was at this time the weekend BBQ with your Weber BBQ became one of the most essential tools of anyones backyard. This outdoor California Lifestyle then found itself wanting more as people could afford more.

Enter the backyard swimming pool and all the enjoyment and entertainment that it brought to our families. My dad was on the ground floor of this movement. Back in those days, his swimming pools cost $2,000 all in. Of course it’s all relative when you realize what a gallon of gas costs ($.26) or what those first track homes in the suburbs cost under $10,000 for a 3 and 2 with a garage. The beauty of those starter homes is that the lot size was big enough for a modest 15×30’ pool with a little decking.

Landscape design and construction was very modest. There weren’t too many landscape architects and most were busy designing those large estates that could afford their designs. So the early years of the industry were very modest and builders such as the Anthony Brothers in Southern California catered to those fast-growing suburb homes by selling pools based on the financing more than the ability to build a pool. As Anthony Pools was taking a commanding lead out west, other markets around the country started to boom. Arizona had the Ghiz Family with Paddock of Arizona along with the Asti Family and Shasta Pools. On the East Coast we also saw the Sullivan Pools that all of these building families started to spawn other spin-off pool builders as the demand for owning a backyard swimming pool started to grow.

Prior to the boom in the 1950’s, here in California, there were two major high-end pool builders that were building pools for the rich and famous, Paddock Pools and Landon Pools. These two builders were instrumental in the engineering and mechanical development of swimming pools. Be it the sand and gravel filters that they used or the skim filter that Landon and Paddock used to try and simplify and reduce cost in their pools.

As more and more pools were being built by new pool builders, there became this demand to help invent more and more components to help make the backyard swimming pool more accessible and user-friendly. It was about this time in the 50’s that Anthony Pools helped create the early precast skimmer with a built-in basket outside of the pool. Prior to that there was the lily pad skimmer that was a floating basket that was attached to the lily pad suction plate that bobbed up and down with the water level as water was drawn from a separate suction line. These pools also had a separate main drain suction line as well. The real custom pools that Paddock built had an 1.5” flange fitting mid way on the pool about 12” below the surface for a home owner to actually vacuums their pools using a portable vacuum hose and head. At this same time we also have the Pool Master Jet Vac pool cleaner that hooked on the end of your garden hose and blew water into a large bag that could pick up leaves and not plug up the pump basket. The bag were designed to filter the water jetting up into the bag along with some dirt.

These types of cleaning systems were designed to help keep the pool somewhat clean. The reality was that once you built a pool, you had to contend with the drudgery of cleaning your pool every weekend or be rich enough to afford a pool maintenance company. This need for keeping the pool clean has spawned an entire section of our industry and it came about more by chance then anything else.

It was the late 50’s and early 60’s that one of the Pillars of our industry, Andy Pansini was just finishing up cleaning his pool using his vacuum cleaner on his pool in San Rafael area in the SF Bay Area. Andy was cleaning his decks after cleaning his pool and was using his garden hose to hose things down. The phone rang and Andy dropped his hose in the pool and answered the phone. When he returned, the hose had been snaking back and forth on the bottom of the pool and the pool was spotless where the hose was whipping back and forth.

The History of the Pool Cleaner

It is said that “Necessity is the Mother of Invention”. Andy realized at that moment that if he could manage the whipping hose in his pool then he could chase the dirt down to the bottom of the pool and without ever vacuuming his pool again, he could always have a spotless pool. Andy solicited the help of a fellow inventor, Howard Arneson, that lived across the bay. Howard was a creator, inventor and part showman. The two of them came up with some interesting variations of these first prototypes. I was fortunate in the mid 60’s to actually work on one of the very first of these prototypes that looked nothing of what we see today of the robotic pool cleaner.

As time went on Andy and Howard both started their own manufacturing companies. Andy and his wife Jan had started Jandy and Howard started Pool Sweep. Both were here in the San Francisco Marin County area. As more and more backyard swimming pools were being built, there became more and more need to keep them clean so you could enjoy swimming in a nice clean pool. This need for a clean pool created a new part of our industry called pool service and maintenance companies. It was at this time I started my first pool company. After years of working for my Dad’s pool company, at 16 years old, I had my driver’s license and a truck to put my maintenance cleaning equipment and chemicals in.

I was one of the first pool service companies in our area and was fortunate enough to acquire some very high profile pools that I cleaned each week. Back in those days you didn’t have a self-cleaning pool like today, that you mostly test the water and add chemicals to, once a week. Back then every pool was on twice a week service with the first visit as a brush and skim the pool along with cleaning the basket and filter visit. The second cleaning was dedicated to vacuuming the pool so it was ready for the weekend entertaining.

It was at this time I learned a lot about the drudgery of cleaning and maintaining the backyard pool. Cleaning swimming pools gave me a great appreciation for what it took in the building end of a swimming pool to make it easier on our clients. Let’s face it, the reason people build a swimming pool is to relax, enjoy their leisure time in the backyard with family and friends. It is not to become a slave to the maintenance of your pool.

As the Jandy cleaner and the Arneson cleaner became more and more popular to adapt to a pool, I was seeing more and more builders first install a dedicated return line for the robotic sweep and eventually those same builders realized that upselling a client on the advantages of installing a robotic cleaner made owning a swimming more enjoyable for the homeowner. As the Jandy Porpoise and Arneson Pool Sweep was taking the industry by storm, an inventor/businessman, Jim Edmundson was creating his version of the pressure pool cleaner called the Polaris. The uniqueness of the Polaris was that it lived on the bottom of the pool and did both sweeping and vacuuming of the pool. It had a leaf bag much like the early Pool Master Jet Vac manual cleaner except that it  was part of the robotic cleaner and only needed to be cleaned once a week. There was one more entrance into the robotic cleaners on the West coast and that was from Sandy Campbell, who was in the Bay Area as well but soon moved his manufacturing to Redding, California. Sandy’s cleaner was called “The Letro Jet Vac”, it had some of the similar characteristic as the Polaris but it did a better job in high leaf areas.

While all these robotic cleaner wars were going on in California, over in Arizona, in the late 60’s and early 70’s, they were creating their very own cleaning systems to help battle the high sand content and debris that was plaguing swimming pools in that market. As I stated earlier, “Necessity was the Mother of Invention”.  The Ghiz Family (Paddock Pools, The Paramount System) and the Ast Family (Shasta Pools, The A&A System) both created their proprietary in-floor cleaners for their own pools in that market. They along with a friend of mine, Les Mathews (Creator of the Caretaker System). All of these three inventor families helped usher in the next generation of pool cleaning. There was one other little-known infloor cleaner called the “Turbo Clean” that I recall seeing on some of the Geremia Pools out of Sacramento, Ca. Within a few short years, these manufacturers were selling their cleaners all across the country and internationally.

For the past 40 years, I personally have designed and worked with all three cleaners. For the past 25 years, my favorite in-floor cleaner is the PCC-2000 cleaner. What is it that makes this cleaner so special to me is it’s ability to clean the entire pool as Paramount and our team design the location of the cleaner heads. PCC-2000 also has it’s patented water curtain and the MDX that is it’s debris collection system.  The robotic cleaners have their advantages in that they are a low cost compared to the Paramount in-floor system. In addition, as the design of our pools have come a long way from my dad’s pioneering days of simple, functional designs with simple filtration and no cleaners, to the designs that my son, Nicco and I are creating today with baja entries, ledges and seats throughout the pool.

We are all seeing the acceptance of engineered pools hanging off slopes with vanishing edges and “O” edge designs. These pools are so artistic that a robotic cleaner with its umbilical cord running around pool will surely take away from the beauty and artistry of the pools we are designing and building today.

What the in-floor cleaner is to me and even more specifically the Paramount PCC-2000 in-floor cleaner, is the beauty of the pool is not interrupted with the visual of the robotic cleaner. The additional circulation on the bottom of the pool that takes water from the skimmer level of the water and injects it back into the floor heads. This action creates not only bottom circulation better then any other way to circulate water in your pool, but it also takes surfaced solar heated water and injects it to the bottom of the pool so the entire pool becomes a heat storage battery for the solar heat that is collected at the surface.

More and more today our pools here in the Bay Area are safety cover pools with the spa under the cover to help keep the pool safe from small children, clean from dirt falling in the pool and energy efficient because of the passive solar heat that the cover generates at the top of the water that is pumped to the bottom of the pool through the in-floor cleaning system. Not only are we delivering a very clean pool to our clients, but a very efficient pool that cleans itself and a very artistic pool that is exciting to look at.

Our industry has come a long way since I joined in with my dad and now with Nicco, my son as the 3rd generation of our family to build well-engineered, unique designed and very efficient works of art for our clients backyard enjoyment and entertainment. It has taken 3 generations for our family to build the “State of the Art” custom pools that Nicco is now building for our company. As I stood on my father’s shoulder, now Nicco stands on mine, our family tradition has continued to advance the pool industry with our knowledge and forward thinking. It has been a wonderful journey as we all get to enjoy the rich history of our industry that has taken us to where we are today. Those early pioneers helped pave the way for the next generation of pool builders.

I will continue to add to the rich history of the swimming pool industry with my personal stories that all of us will enjoy as we discover where our roots come from.