Today, we’d like to introduce you to Bruce Wettstein.
Hi Bruce, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I have been a swimming pool builder since 1995, starting at Mission Pools in Escondido, California. We did not have a pool growing up, but I always wanted one, so when I got the chance to work for Mission Pools, I jumped at it (I had had various construction jobs before this, so I was used to building stuff, just not swimming pools).
I had always been told that swimming pools needed to be drained and refilled every couple of years to properly maintain them, so I did that to my personal pools once I was able to have my own, but it always seemed wasteful to me. My dad owned part of a bottled water company in the ’70s and ’80s before bottled water was as popular as it is now, so I had had some exposure to quality water at an early age, and it just seemed like some of this technology could be used to efficiently process swimming pool water as well.
I consulted with a respected Reverse Osmosis (RO) man I knew, who explained why it could not be done (RO likes to take body of water A and create a body of water B, and we wanted to take the body of water A and put it right back into body of water A but change the results! RO likes to have a constant source of water in which to create a constant end product, and we were in different water in every pool, not ideal for RO technology). I could not let this go, and the RO expert and I continued to talk until I was finally able to convince him that we could figure this out.
That was in late 2008/early 2009, and we put our first trailer in service around March of 2009.
Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
While it has not been a smooth road, it has been a very rewarding one. From being told it could not be done to getting the first trailer built and into service, which was the first hurdle. Then, to explain to pool owners and others in the industry that we could purify a pool in less than a day to better water quality standards than a drain and a refill could provide and protect the pool’s interior finish, we were met with skepticism.
The first trailer required us to stop by and make adjustments and confirm that it was running, where today’s trailers (we now build these for others and have them operating in 6 states currently) are fully visible and controllable via our phone/tablet/computer from anywhere we have signal and can connect. The struggles forced us to build a better machine and allowed us to really learn all that they were capable of (for example, we are now approved by FEMA to provide safe drinking water in the case of an emergency, something not swimming pool related and an avenue that we did not see initially).
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next, you can tell us a bit more about your business.
We are in the swimming pool business and can do anything related to swimming pools, but what we specialize in is providing superior-quality water for swimming pool owners.
Our Reverse Osmosis trailers are brought to a pool owner’s home (or commercial facility) whenever the water quality needs to be addressed, be it from hard water issues (calcium) that build up from minerals in city water to an overabundance of pool chemicals. While the norm has always been to fully drain and refill a swimming pool, our process (we call it the Puripool Process) allows us to purify a swimming pool without physically removing the water, as well as saving up to 85% of the existing water already in the swimming pool.
One of the major advantages of using us is the ability to use the swimming pool while we purify, something that commercial properties appreciate as they do not have to tell their members/guests that the pool is closed. To date, swimming pool owners who have chosen us over a drain and refill have allowed us to conserve over 100,000,000 (100 million) gallons of water in San Diego County alone (and much more if you add up all of our Service Providers in 7 states), something that we are very proud of!
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
While Reverse Osmosis (RO) has been around for decades, the ability to make it 100% portable and available to a wide variety of individuals has been left to relatively few (our Military primarily, for use typically in battle).
The concept of creating a mobile unit that we could bring to people and purify their swimming pools for them seemed like a natural succession in the swimming pool industry. As there were no suppliers or builders for these units, and because of our bottled water background, we knew that we could do this and set out to build the best possible unit. As mentioned above, we have continually improved upon that first unit and strive to build each new trailer to be better than the previous one.
While we are proud to say that each and every trailer that we have built is still in service, a few of them, changing hands a time or two, know that we must strive to improve continually. We custom order each trailer to our specifications (heavier duty axles, Rhino-lined interiors, 60-gallon fuel cells, etc.), as well as the RO units and generators required to power these trailers.
Our trailers have gotten smaller so that a half-ton truck can tow them, and our generators have also shrunk in size but not capacity. Lastly, our RO skid assemblies have seen vast improvements in our ability to communicate remotely with them. Every business needs to evolve and innovate, and we have been no different!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.purewaterindustries.com
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