Buildup Barrier

Matt Trissel was a designer for Georgetown, Texas-based Cody Pools for eight years, and saw firsthand the issues calcium causes on pools and spas.

In 2013, he left Cody, and along with friend Dusty Renfro, started an oilfield service company called Four Six Services. While there, he discovered a technology being used in the oilfield he thought would work wonders in the pool industry.

“We were treating old wells, and we started to notice that running a water conditioner was working on the calcium,” Trissel says. “I had a light bulb moment where I realized that if it was working on these old wells, why wouldn’t it work on calcium and scale buildup on your swimming pool tile?”

In 2015, Trissel came up with a prototype for BroadHead H2O Conditioners, which control calcium scale by passing water through proprietary multifield magnetic technology that alters minerals to a state where scale cannot form.

He contacted Mike Church, his old boss at Cody Pools, in fall 2015 to test BroadHead H2O on the pools the company serviced. Trissel even tested it on Church’s personal swimming pool.

Before BroadHead, Church had been draining his pool every eight to 12 months to clean the calcium buildup that Texas hard water had brought to the tile. A year after BroadHead was installed on Church’s pool, there was no buildup. “We have certain areas around Texas that have bad water,” Church says. In San Antonio and Austin, they’ve been installing BroadHead with new pool builds for the last three years — he estimates 300 so far — “and we’ve yet to have anybody complain,” he says. “It’s easy to sell it to them.”

By 2018, Trissel secured distribution of BroadHead with Poolcorp, marketing the product within the pool and spa industries.

How It Works

Calcium molecules in their natural state, Trissel says, have a positive and negative charge. The more calcium and other minerals in the water (making it hard water), the more the positive calcium molecules are attracted to the negative calcium molecules, and vice versa.

However, as water passes through the BroadHead water-conditioner treatment chamber, it is subjected to a series of alternating-reversing polarity permanent magnetic fields, which interrupt the natural scale forming characteristics of hard water minerals, temporarily altering their ionic charge identity.

“In your science class in grade school, if you took the positive end of a magnet and touched it to the negative end of another magnet, they would snap together,” Trissel says. “This is calcium in its natural state. If you flipped one magnet around and touched the positive end to the other magnet’s positive end, they would push away or repel. That’s calcium molecules after they are treated in our chamber.”

Trissel says the conditioner also reduces the water’s surface tension so it’s more soluble, which in turn reverses the detrimental effects of existing scale buildup in retrofit applications, all without the use of chemicals and with no negative environmental impact. It’s also maintenance friendly and doesn’t need to be cleaned or replaced.

“The BroadHead H2O water conditioner only changes the water in a physical state not a chemical state,” Trissel says. “We are not removing or eliminating any calcium out of the water, only keeping it suspended in this state for 72 hours. Our product will not affect the water chemistry of a pool — calcium levels will still be the same after going through our chamber.” 

What makes this technology stand out is that its 85% cobalt magnet bar has two internal poles, rather than the expected north and south poles. Plumbed into the return-side of the pool, all of the water comes into direct contact with the device’s magnetic fields inside the treatment chamber.

“Years ago, some of the guys in the industry…were strapping magnets on the return side of the PVC piping, trying to get the magnet to charge through the PVC from the outside,” Church says. “But it wasn’t as effective as BroadHead because with this the water flows through [the product]. Because of that [unsuccessful product], some people were initially hesitant to use BroadHead, but the builders and homeowners [I’ve talked to] have all been happy with it.” Trissel says it’s exciting to be able to solve the scale and calcium buildup problems many face in this business.  “Everyone says it’s impossible,” Trissel says, “until they see it.”