New Orleans, LA

A New Orleans pool feed earns its keep in storm season

A pool company here owns the answer to a question the whole metro asks every summer, and hardly anybody publishes it. When a storm has a name and the yard has to be secured, should the pool be emptied. The answer is not obvious, getting it wrong can cost a homeowner the shell, and a feed is exactly the right place for it. The rest of the calendar is just as local. Streets on a parade route are gone for weeks at a stretch, the equipment pad stands up off ground that holds water, and plenty of the contractor content circulating online was written under a system of law Louisiana does not use. What follows is how we would build a feed out of those facts.

Whether to empty a pool before a storm is the post this metro needs and never gets

Storm preparation advice circulates here every season, and the pool paragraph in it is usually missing or wrong.

Ground with a water table this high does not treat an empty shell kindly. A pool with nothing in it is working against the water underneath, and an owner who drains one to be careful can end up with the opposite of careful.

Publish the general case before the season starts rather than during it. What usually happens with the water level, what to do with furniture and the cover, and what happens to the equipment on the pad and the power feeding it.

Keep the water and the equipment separate, because they are separate problems. A shell that stays full behaves one way. A pump, a heater and a panel standing in a yard that takes water behave another, and most of the advice going around confuses the two.

Then post it again the week a storm is named. Pinned, short, with a number somebody will actually answer. Nobody is scrolling back far enough to find the version you published in May.

Parade season takes the street away, and your build calendar has to say so

For weeks in late winter, an address on a route cannot receive a truck at all.

A concrete truck, a spoil trailer or a crane needs a street to stand in. On a route Uptown or through the Garden District, that street belongs to somebody else for a long stretch of the winter, and the parking around it goes with it.

Every builder here works around it and almost none of them mention it publicly. Meanwhile buyers are picking start dates and hearing nothing about the weeks that are simply gone.

So publish the calendar. Say which stretch of the year your crews cannot reach an Uptown address, why that pushes a spring start earlier than people expect, and what the crews are doing instead, which is usually work in Metairie, on the West Bank or across the lake.

It reads as competence and it does a quiet second job. A homeowner who understands the constraint signs in the fall rather than calling in February and being told to wait.

The equipment stands up off the ground here, and buyers from anywhere else argue about it

In a yard that holds water, the pad is a structure rather than a slab poured on grade.

The pump, the filter, the heater and the panel do not sit on the ground in Orleans Parish or Jefferson Parish the way they do in a dry market. They go up on a stand, the Entergy feed comes to them at height, and all of it costs money a homeowner did not budget for.

It is also where a cheaper proposal beats yours, because the other number left the equipment on the ground. Show the pad on camera, say what the height is for, and show what the same equipment looks like in a yard that has taken water once.

The logic runs through the rest of the yard. Decking, a fence line, anything wooden standing in ground that stays damp, and drainage that has to get off the property rather than merely out of the pool.

None of it photographs well and all of it is why a serious proposal here reads higher than one a buyer found online. Explaining it in a video months earlier is cheaper than defending it across a kitchen table.

The contractor video you were about to repost was written for a different legal system

Louisiana runs on civil law, so trade content made anywhere else can be wrong here rather than merely vague.

Stock explainers about contracts, liens, property lines and what a neighbor may object to circulate constantly in this business, and they were all written under common law. The vocabulary is different here for a reason. A servitude is not quite an easement, and property held by a married couple is not held the way it is one state over.

So the rule for a feed in this metro is simple: do not republish somebody else's paperwork or legal content, however well it is made. The polish is what makes it risky, because it reads authoritative in a market where it does not apply.

Make your own instead, about your own practice. What your agreement covers, what happens at each stage of a build, what your company does before a machine moves. Describing how you work is always safe and it is more interesting than a general explainer anyway.

The same caution covers ground conditions. Advice filmed for a builder digging dry sand does not survive a Mid-City lot where the water arrives before the excavator is finished, and reposting it teaches your audience the wrong thing about your own market.

The general craft, who films, how often, and what should never be answered in a comment in any market, is written down once at /industries/pool-construction/social-media.

Questions we actually get

If we tell people not to drain their pool, are we talking ourselves out of work?: You are talking yourself out of the wrong work. The job you lose is a drain that should not have happened. The job you win is the call in the following week from somebody who found a straight answer in your feed while everyone else was posting a storm graphic. Draining and refilling is a line on a service ticket. A shell that moved because it was emptied at the wrong moment is somebody's ruined yard, and being the company that warned them is worth considerably more than the ticket.
Parade season takes weeks out of our calendar. Do we admit that publicly?: Yes, and early. Everyone in Orleans Parish already knows what happens to a street in the run up to Mardi Gras, so pretending your trucks are unaffected reads as either dishonest or out of town. Publishing your real working calendar turns a limitation into a reason to sign in the fall, and it moves the conversation about start dates to a point in the year when you still have slots to offer rather than a waiting list to explain.
Should we film the water coming into the excavation?: Film it. An open hole with water rising in it is the most convincing thing you can show a buyer in this metro, because it explains the pumps, the schedule and a line on the estimate all at once. What you should not do is present it as drama. Show the water, show what the crew does about it, and let the ordinariness of the response do the persuading. A homeowner in Lakeview or Gentilly who has watched that once will not panic when it happens in their own yard.
A national pool account posts great videos. Can we repost them?: For plain build footage, sometimes, with credit and permission. For anything about contracts, permits, property lines or what a neighbor can do, no. Louisiana runs on civil law and the vocabulary in those videos does not carry over, so a well made explainer can be confidently wrong for your audience. The same goes for anything about ground conditions, because guidance filmed in dry soil does not describe a dig in Mid-City or Gentilly. Make the local version yourself. It will be watched more anyway.
Do we really need to explain why the equipment pad is raised?: Every time. It is the most common place a cheaper competitor's number beats yours, because that number left the equipment sitting on the ground. A short video showing a pad at height, the feed coming into it, and what the same equipment looks like in a yard that has taken water once will do more for the proposals you send than another finished pool at sunset. It also gives your estimator something to point at instead of arguing about price on the phone.

What is different here

Residential pool safety requirements sit in state law, but the permitting path, setback rules and barrier inspection practice are administered locally, so what a homeowner actually experiences varies by municipality. Safety features are a legal requirement rather than an upsell, which is worth reflecting in how a quote page is written.

More Pool Construction & Renovation marketing in New Orleans

Social Media Strategy & Execution for other New Orleans industries

Pool Construction & Renovation Social Media Strategy & Execution elsewhere

Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

Talk to us about social media for pool builders and renovation contractors in New Orleans

Tell us what you are working with and we will say what we would do first, and what we would leave alone. A real answer, not a pitch deck.