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Minnesota Technology Magazine - Fall 2005
Up Front
Smart Water
Richfield-based EcoSmarte has perfected a natural—and profitable—approach to water purification.
For all the attention given to Minnesota’s love affair with its lakes and rivers, it’s easy to forget that we routinely cleanse our recreational water with toxic chemicals. Chlorine has long been the solution of choice to keep pools and spas clean and safe. But the chemical is nasty: It stings the eyes and dries the skin—and you would hate to swallow the water. According to EcoSmarte, a Richfield-based water purification company, however, chemicals aren’t the only path to clean water. The 11-year-old firm relies on basic water chemistry to provide systems not just for swimming pools, but for home and commercial needs as well. Over the course of its existence, the company has been slowly but steadily building a market for its solutions.
“We weren’t very profitable in the early years as we tried to convince people that they didn’t need chlorine or salt to purify their swimming pools,” says company president Larry Couture.
Today, EcoSmarte products purify 12 percent of all in ground swimming pools in Minnesota, or about 1,300 out of 10,000. And with 5,000 customers worldwide, EcoSmarte is about the fourth-largest non chlorine pool sanitizing company in the industry—a $200 million market. In addition to residential pools, Ecosmarte systems are installed in commercial pools from Australia to South Africa to Athens, where swimmers at the 2004 Olympic Games swam in EcoSmarte-purified water. Instead of using chlorine or salt to purify water, EcoSmarte Swimming Pool Systems generate natural oxygen from within the water. The technology electrically charges minerals so they can’t bind together, and it keeps calcium in its soft form as calcium carbonate. The process prevents minerals in the water from creating a hard scale, without chlorine, salt, or other chemicals. “The root technology is electrolysis—the ionization of water—developed by Honeywell for NASA on the Apollo lunar missions,” says Couture. “Honeywell demonstrated that ionic metals were more effective against bacteria and viruses than chlorine. This was at a time when everyone feared moon microbes.”
Now the microbes we fear are much more down to earth. “I’m a ban-the-brine environmental guy,” says Couture. “Several of the company’s owners are successful entrepreneurs who apply our base technology to just about any home and commercial water use without chemicals. That’s why we call ourselves ‘planet friendly.’”
Couture says that gaining a stronger presence in the home and commercial water purification markets is still about 10 years away. By then, he expects to have patents for a variety of technologies using the appropriate combinations of electronic oxidation, copper ionization, and filtration.
For EcoSmarte it’s only a matter of time before convincing thousands of others that the way to healthier hair, skin, eyes— and a better environment—is to “ban the brine and the chlorine.” —Mary Jones |
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