After finding success with The Attendant, an innovative automation system for day-to-day pool care, Poolside Tech is changing the game with The Attendant Mini, a small interface that packs just as big of a punch. Ben Forrest, vice president of sales at Poolside Tech, and Stan Reznik, chief technology officer, gave us insight into ways the new product will change the way homeowners, builders, and service providers can care for their pools and spas.
AQUA: You recently launched The Attendant Mini. How does it compare to the original product?
Ben Forrest, Poolside Tech: The Attendant Mini provides virtually all the same control features and benefits that The Attendant carried. It’s just designed for a smaller pad or a simpler system, so it doesn’t have a touch screen. Instead, it just uses the app as they do with The Attendant to set things up. It supports fewer devices, but it’s still the most sophisticated control system on the market, as it provides all the same level of support that The Attendant does.
AQUA: How can homeowners benefit from The Attendance Mini?
Stan Reznik, Poolside Tech: Pools tend to be fairly complex. Many pools have a lot of different devices to achieve your goals, one of which is to have clean water at the right temperature. What we are able to do, which is pretty unique, is take all different inputs from what could be dozens of different devices for a single pool and put it together into one product with a single point of control.
In short, the biggest benefits include advanced heating management, lighting control, and water chemistry monitoring and management. For example, our system can consult the weather forecasts to determine exactly when it needs to turn a heater on so that the hot tub is ready at five o’clock, if you ask for it. Beyond that, it can tell you how much it’s going to cost you to heat your hot tub. If it heats up a lot faster than what it thinks it should, it also has the ability to adapt and realize that something could have been measured wrong, like the volume of the hot tub.
Essentially, all the things that were in the bag of tricks for the original product are now coming to the Mini. Not only can we continue to evolve the software very rapidly, but most of the features that are getting delivered to The Attendant are going to continue to trickle down to the smaller system of the Mini. The idea behind the Mini was, “how do we create a system that is applicable to most of the marketplace and still delivers those advanced capabilities that The Attendant can do, but at a more attractive price level?”
BF: Along with that, users can understand their pool a lot more than they have been able to in the past. In terms of the water chemistry, it gives them visibility to what their water chemistry is every minute of every day. There’s no need to wonder whether it’s been serviced properly. They’ll get alerts long before it becomes obvious that something’s not right.
Purely from a homeowner’s perspective, there’s an Airbnb mode for folks that might rent their property out, or have a holiday property, or something of the kind. This way, they can grant limited access to the device per the house guests. If they’ve got an entertainment system outside, they can connect that to their Spotify account or synchronize lights to the beat of the music.
AQUA: How can builders and service professionals benefit from The Attendant Mini?
BF: There’s many things that builders really benefit from in terms of utilizing it and the functionality that they get. For example, since we support essentially any piece of equipment that graced this industry — dating back about a decade — we have the ability to install an automation system that is compatible with whatever they have. If they have an older pump and it’s still working, there’s no need to throw away any stillfunctional equipment; no need to worry about it being incompatible. There’s a massively lower environmental impact.
We’re going to be delivering new features and capabilities and future-proofing The Attendant Mini. Homeowners are guaranteed that whatever they already have is supported. Anything new that comes out is almost guaranteed to be supported as well. These are things that homeowners have struggled with historically. Many times, they had to go with whatever the pool professional recommended based on what they could make work. This took away the ability to choose what the homeowner actually preferred.
It gives them a lot more choice in the future, too — when a piece of equipment stops working, they’re not forced to replace it with the identical piece. You can think about it surrounding the pandemic. So many projects were delayed extensively during Covid because one manufacturer ran out of a particular type of equipment that everyone was waiting on. Had The Attendant Mini been around at that time, that wouldn’t have been an issue.
AQUA: How can you see The Attendant Mini opening up possibilities within the pool market?
BF: Now that we’re out of the Covid surge, builders are no longer having people knock down their doors for contracts. This is an ideal device for them to use as a point of difference within their area. We’re still a relatively small company, especially in comparison to others. But when you look at the list of features and benefits that are unique to The Attendant Mini — particularly for a client — there’s not many buyers in the market that wouldn’t find at least some of it highly appealing. If they go to a competitor and they can’t fulfill that opportunity like we can, it’s going to be pretty hard for them to convince a client to let them build their pool for the same price, minus all of the additional features and benefits that we offer with this product.
From a builder’s perspective, I don’t know many builders who wouldn’t like the access to be able to see what the water chemistry was like in every one of their client’s pools for warranty purposes. If a client comes forward with an issue, the historical chemistry levels can be accessed remotely by the builder or service company to determine if it has been a contributing factor.
From a service perspective, imagine being able to log into a homeowner’s system to check what the issue is — before you go to the job? We estimate that 20 to 30% of the time, the problem can be fixed remotely. And when it can’t, the repairer knows what they are likely to need, so it improves efficiency dramatically.
SR: In terms of the industry at large, The Attendant Mini allows for new players to enter the space. There was very little innovation in the pool industry largely because of this lock-in from the big three that prevented new companies from building cool new products. The Attendant Mini solves that. We’re constantly working with partners, both big and small and making sure that some of these cool new innovative things are now possible. We believe that the Mini is actually going to democratize a lot of things that are happening in the pool space just by the virtue of being the only open system here.
AQUA: Anything else?
SR: Another interesting feature of The Attendant Mini is that it’s going to be modular. It will have expansion modules, similar to what you’d think of with Lego bricks. You can buy one, and you can assemble virtually any size system by stacking these things together. It’s as simple as connecting two systems with a USB-C cable.
The most powerful thing about this feature is that when it comes time to upgrade your system, you won’t need to get a bigger one or replace it. Instead, you can just continue to add modules to The Attendant Mini. It’s a pretty new concept, but we’re pretty excited to be able to offer this type of flexibility.