Rich Tarricone, owner of Aquatic Pool Systems (Sarasota, Fla.), has enjoyed a long and successful career in pool service, watching his company prosper and grow and winning the 2011 Pleatco Perfect Pool Guy award. He’s also enjoyed the pride a father feels as his son, Tim, enters the family business, but that family succession faced an obstacle: Tim’s growth as a service pro was hampered by his inability to distinguish color in water tests. He’s colorblind.
As many as 8 percent of men and 0.5 percent of women with Northern European ancestry have the common form of red-green color blindness. (Men are much more likely to be colorblind than women because the genes responsible for the most common, inherited color blindness are on the X chromosome.) So while the physical inability to distinguish between red and green on a pool water test strip is not common, it’s not exactly rare, either. Plenty of people in the field have this problem.
RELATED: Test Killers: Common Water Testing Interferences and How to Avoid Them
Enter the Lamotte WaterLink SpinTouch and the technology to analyze water samples in the field without the need for the human eye to distinguish color. “When I first heard about this I was really excited because I knew it was just what Tim needed,” Tarricone says. “My rep at Devin Cahn, Ira Hoffman, was able to arrange a Spin Touch from Lamotte. And they worked things out with SCP to also help make this happen. They just mailed us a Spin Touch for Tim to use.”
“He loves the fact that he does not have to differentiate between color shades on a typical water test — the computer tells you precise results. It’s kind of amazing, you pop this disk into the machine, squirt in your pool water, turn it on and in 60 seconds it does nine comprehensive, laboratory-certified tests. You’d need half a dozen test kits to match that, and it would take you a while.
“I’m really grateful to LaMotte for coming up with this system and solving the problem. We believe this may also change the industry so color blind techs can properly service pools now.”
