Like many others in the water treatment industry, Dave Parke insists that any water treatment device should be tested and verified by an independent, third-party certifying organization to assure dealers and consumers that the device does what its manufacturer claims it does. And, like these other professionals, the concept of “magnetic” water conditioning causes him to wax skeptical.

What sets Parke apart is that he works for a company that promotes and sells a type of system that falls under the category of “physical water treatment,” or PWT for short — a term that he believes has suffered from its prior association with questionable, unverified technologies such as some early magnetic devices.

Parke is chairman and president of Independent Water Professionals of Scottsdale, AZ, a consulting business which assists several manufacturers in marketing PWT systems designed to reduce and prevent scale formation. He and some other technology developers have been working for the past two years to establish scientifically sound, repeatable testing protocols that would gain industry acceptance for the third-party verification of some PWT technologies.

Down to business
They’ve formed a task force that has developed a definition for PWT (sidebar, next page). Most importantly, it’s working with the International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials (IAPMO), an Ontario, CA-based third-party testing organization, to refine three PWT test protocols that will be submitted within the next year for approval by ANSI, the national testing and certification accrediting organization. If approved, testing and certification would presumably occur under a widely accepted standard.

Technologically and otherwise, it’s the task force’s effort to bring what they believe is verifiable PWT into the industry mainstream and separate themselves from what the industry perceives as ineffective or even deceptive older “wrap-a-wire-around-a-pipe” technologies. Parke and others are under no illusions about the mountain they must climb.

“You can take a T-shirt, stuff it into a water system and call it a physical water treatment device, and that’s the problem,” he says. “If they don’t have third-party verification, then all they have is conversation. Don’t tell me about the great results your Aunt Mary gets with your system. If they can’t show me the [scientific] documentation, then all they’re doing is making up stories.”

The test protocols developed by the task force relate to PWT that would be used in any or all of these applications:

• Recirculation systems such as cooling towers


• “Standard” point-of-entry (POE) applications that flow to drain, such as water heaters, and


• A third standard known as DVGW 512 (relating to ambient heat systems).

The test protocol document is now in the draft stage, according to Maribel Campos, standards manager at IAPMO’s Research and Testing division. She said the plan is to complete the draft and submit it to ANSI by later this year.

Not standing still
The PWT community has faced skepticism and outright opposition from industry professionals working in long-certified technologies such as ion exchange softening. But as Parke and others in the PWT community insist, physical treatment technology hasn’t stood still.

Starting in the late 1990s, the PWT universe began to move beyond magnetics, which Parke calls “somewhat effective at the very best” under certain conditions. One newer technology Parke now promotes on behalf of H2O Bioconcepts, a Phoenix, AZ, company, involves transmission of a low-voltage, high-frequency alternating current between an anode and a cathode. Parke says it prevents mineral scale buildup and removes it over time.

Advocates of newer PWT technologies typically don’t use the terms “softening” or “softener” to describe their systems, because, they say, that would be inaccurate and misleading.

“It’s not a water softener,” Bill Wolfe says of his product. He’s director of marketing and sales for H.Q. Hometek, Inc., an Oceanside, NY-based marketer of the hydropath electronic scale-reduction technology developed in the 1990s by David Stefani, a researcher now based in the United Kingdom. It is marketed in the United States under the HydroCare brand.

Although Wolfe is not a member of Parke’s PWT task force, he has on his own sought support from the Water Quality Association and others for PWT verification and certification. “Any starting point would be successful,” Wolfe says. “We want the industry to feel comfortable selling these products.”

Non-chemical systems
Wolfe says, “It’s now time for the industry to open up their eyes to the need for this type of technology.” He points to recent efforts by regulators in California, Arizona and elsewhere to ban or control softeners and the possibility that verifiable PWT descaling systems can offer one possible alternative.

Although many companies now use the term “green” to describe what they do, the newer PWT developers say they have a good case to make on that score, because their systems are non-chemical.

Defined broadly enough, PWT technology in at least one case has moved into the mainstream: Watts, the large water treatment equipment manufacturer, is now actively marketing its OneFlow™ anti-scaling system, under agreement with that technology’s developer, Next Filtration.

Next has presented “a huge amount of scientific evidence” to Watts and others, according to Next President Steve Fox. He notes that Next’s technology chief, Robert Slovak, is respected and well-known throughout the industry as a co-founder in 1975 of Water Factory Systems, a reverse osmosis pioneer later purchased by CUNO Corp. (now part of 3M). Without using chemicals, the Next technology transforms dissolved hardness minerals such as calcium into insoluble microscopic crystals that flow to drain without attaching to water system components as scale.

Fox says that Next has participated in the task force led by Parke and strongly supports the PWT verification effort.

“We’re very aware of the many technologies that do not work and are sold to unsuspecting consumers,” Fox says. “We don’t want to be painted with the same brush” as those unproven technologies. Watts took a careful approach before investing in Next’s system, monitoring 2-1/2 years of experience in customer locations and getting feedback about its performance, according to Fox.

Before and after
Skepticism about PWT technologies has traditionally focused on the fact that the “before and after” chemical composition of the water flowing through them typically doesn’t change.

That’s a fact PWT developers readily acknowledge, but Parke says the proposed test protocols now being shepherded toward ANSI approval focus instead on examining the weight of scale buildup on system components. Any new standard would require at least an 85 percent reduction of buildup by weight, he says.

Parke says he and his task force have come a long way in the protocols development process and still have much work ahead to put PWT on an equal footing with other technologies. But whatever it takes, independent verification is the key, he says.

His advice to any technology developer: “Get the tests and get the documentation, so you don’t have to rely on Aunt Mary.”