The principle: density beats distance
Route optimization isn't really about clever stop ordering — it's about which pools you service on which day. The goal is day density: Monday's pools clustered in one part of town, Tuesday's in another, so the truck spends the day making short hops instead of crossing the city. Stop order matters, but it's the second-order win.
- Map every account. You cannot see clusters in a spreadsheet. Put every pool on a map, colored by service day — the misplaced ones jump out immediately.
- Reassign days by geography. Most customers don't care which weekday you come, only that it's consistent. Migrate outliers to the day their neighborhood is serviced.
- Order the stops. Within a day, run a shortest-path order from your start point. Software does this in one click; by hand, work outward-in or trace the loop that never crosses itself.
- Protect the density. Every new account should be priced partly on where it sits. A pool inside an existing cluster is nearly free to serve; a pool 20 minutes out needs to pay for the drive — or be politely declined.
Practical ordering rules from real routes
- Anchor the first stop near home or the supply house, and make it a reliable-access pool — starting the day locked out wrecks the schedule.
- Schedule around school zones — a 2:45pm stop next to an elementary school costs 15 minutes twice a week.
- Put gate-code and dog pools mid-route, when owners answer phones.
- Leave slack on Friday for the week's skips and callbacks instead of letting them poison Monday.
Measure route health
Three numbers tell you whether a route is getting better or quietly rotting:
- Stops per day — trending down with the same pool count means drive time is creeping in.
- Miles per stop — the purest density metric; watch it when you add accounts.
- First-stop to last-stop span — a 9-hour day for 7 hours of pool work is a routing problem, not a work-ethic problem.
When software pays for itself
Past roughly 30 stops, hand-ordering stops being fun. Routing software keeps every account on a live map, reorders a day in one click, and — the part spreadsheets can't do — keeps the plan and the reality in sync as stops get skipped, moved, or added. Tadpole was built around exactly this: a map-central dispatch board where each tech's day is drawn as a route, optimized in one click, with progress ticking in live as pools get serviced.
Whether you use software or a paper map, the discipline is the same: density first, order second, and never let a new account sneak onto the route without paying for its geography.
