The Shortlist Worksheet — Eight Lines, One Per Company
Print one worksheet per company on your shortlist and fill it in from documents, not conversations. A line passes only when its document exists; anything else is marked open — and open lines are negotiation, not detail. Every badly judged pool hire begins the same way: a contract signed before the worksheet was run. Run the worksheet instead: eight documents, each one protecting you from something specific.
The Eight Documents
- The sealing licensee's name and number. Protects you from the anonymous seal. Licensure is personal and public; the named sealer for your state and discipline, verified on the board's own lookup, is the one credential in the purchase nobody can edit after the fact.
- The seal map for a set like yours. Protects you from the stretched stamp. Shell, hydraulics, and site work each under a licensee of that discipline — the map shows whether the company's disciplines are a bench or a slogan.
- A written statement of current sealing load. Protects you from the invisible queue. How many live sets the sealing licensees carry, and your place among them, stated before signing — capacity as a fact instead of a feeling.
- The ground list the company designs from. Protects you from the habit shell. Soils, water table, survey, drainage — the documents the company requires before design are the soil test answered as a list, and the list is the method.
- One redacted AHJ comment-and-response trail. Protects you from revision theater. A permitted job's comments and answers, in revision order, show how the company behaves at the counter before your project has to find out.
- The revision discipline, stated in writing. Protects you from the drifting seal. How corrected sets are identified, who re-seals them, and how the seal is recorded against the revision it certifies.
- The builder terms, stated plainly. Protects you from the captured engineer. How the company takes a builder's plans and schedule — and where its judgment stays independent of the builder who sent you — in terms you can hold it to.
- A redacted close-out file from a comparable pool. Protects your pool's testimony. Permits, sets as issued, sign-offs, the record index — what the owner of a finished pool actually holds decides what the pool can prove for decades.
What a Complete Worksheet Earns
Negotiations that run as examinations instead of presentations. Companies sorted by their documented weight before fees are compared. And a hire made against documents you hold — the license, the seal map, the ground list, the comment trail — rather than against a portfolio. Before the worksheet goes anywhere: verify the license of every company it will be shown to.
Who Publishes This Directory
Published by Apex Grid Engineering PLLC. The companies evaluated and listed on this site today are the publisher's own family of brands — this is an affiliated directory, not a neutral referee. The methodology below is the standard any pool engineering company can be measured against, and it is the standard we hold our own firms to in public. Presentation order on this site is the publisher's choice and an experiment in what helps buyers decide — it is not an objective quality verdict, and no firm pays for placement. Coverage claims are limited to licensure the operator's bench actually holds, stated per state. No reviews, ratings, or project claims are published for any firm unless they can be documented — this site grades pool engineering companies against the five tests and publishes the publisher's methodology assessments; it does not publish customer reviews, and you will find none invented here.
Operated by Apex Grid Engineering PLLC. Founder & CEO: Jeremy “Chico” Mills — serial entrepreneur and USAF veteran. Jeremy is the founder and chief executive; he is not a licensed professional engineer, and no page on this site implies otherwise. The engineering behind the listed firms is performed and sealed by their licensed PE benches.