“We’ve been intentionally ignored for years and it’s part of a strategy to keep the lid on this specific technology. But Hydrosmart is simple and it works, so it’s starting to surface regardless. Right now we’re at the tipping point.”

 

In saying this, Paul Pearce sounds a little like a conspiracy theorist, but he is flagging something we should all be considering.

 

We need ways to clean water, but we also need to be better informed about our options. In other words, in our haste to fill this demand, we might be choosing a technology that isn’t the best option. If we listen to Paul Pearce, it could well be a case that need has allowed greed in the door, and the solutions we’re being sold are expensive, over-engineered and produce toxic by-products.

 

Take salty water as an example. Let’s pit desalination and Hydrosmart technology against each other. To make the water useable - for irrigating a golf course for example - on the surface both methods achieve the necessary results, but they employ very different approaches. They also have equally dissimilar long term impacts.

 

Desalination literally sieves out the salt (remember good old osmosis?) which has to be put back out into the environment somewhere and it requires serious infrastructure as well as rugged chemicals to clean those membranes. So it’s expensive and produces nasty wastes.

 

Then there’s the other option. Hydrosmart uses resonance frequencies to break the bonds between the salt crystals (more secondary school science) so that from a growing plant’s perspective the water is no longer saline. Hydrosmart runs on about as much energy as a light globe, it’s more of an appliance than a 1 million dollar plant, and there are no by-products apart from the one you want – useable water.

 

So why isn’t this technology being popped in wherever there’s an issue with salt, or high iron, algae or scale build-up?

 

“There are too many water experts and millions to be made it seems. Our simple solution just doesn’t fit into all those corporate agendas.”

 

What’s interesting is that Hydrosmart has been chugging along for the past ten years installing its systems without disappointed clients. Users from Grant Burge, dArrenberg, Primo Estate and Haans wines through to Table Grape Growers Australia,   Cromer, Bunbury, Ballarat Golf Courses have applied the approach in lieu of highly engineered reverse osmosis to get great environmental outcomes.