EcoWater Brand Guidelines: Lindsay’s 1925 Softener Patent and a Marmon Company

A softener patent in St. Paul.

EcoWater dates itself to 1925. The company says that in that year its founder, Lynn G. Lindsay Sr., was issued the first patent for an automatic water softener, and it marked its centenary in 2025. When the trade magazine Water Technology toured its plant in 2014, a company product manager, Steve Wilson, told the magazine that the business began in St. Paul, Minnesota, as the Lindsay Company, and that its founder had been issued the first patent for a water treatment apparatus. A photo caption in the same article dated the company’s focus on residential water treatment to 1929, so the magazine itself carries two dates.

The company’s own history places the start of its dealer business in those Lindsay years. It links the early market for home softeners to the spread of indoor plumbing and mechanical washing machines, and says the Lindsay Company sold through dealers from the beginning — the model EcoWater still relies on.

The decades after the Second World War brought a run of technical changes, all described on EcoWater’s research and development page. It says that in 1950 it replaced older softening media with the first high-capacity resin, and that in 1955 the Lindsay Streamliner made regeneration fully automatic with an electro-mechanical timer. Corrosion-proof fibreglass pressure tanks and brine tanks followed, which the company says led to its space-saving tank-within-a-tank design.

That design matters for the brand. EcoWater calls the tank-within-a-tank concept “iconic of the EcoWater design ever since,” and it is one of the few points where the company describes the look of its products rather than their workings.

Product names in those years leaned on royalty. EcoWater says the Royal Princess and the Crown Princess, softeners that also handled iron in the water, were introduced at its 1963 dealer convention. Through the 1960s and 1970s, it says, it added a five-cycle valve and moved from electro-mechanical timers to microprocessor-based controls. Wilson told Water Technology that the company’s building in Woodbury opened in 1968.

Three brands become one, then a wireless remote.

The modern company was put together in the 1980s. EcoWater says it was bought by the Marmon Group in 1981, acquired the Water Refining Company of Middletown, Ohio, in 1983, and then united its three brands under a single name: EcoWater Systems. Water Technology gave the date and the names in 2014: in 1988, Wilson said, the Lindsay, Servisoft and Miracle Water companies merged to become EcoWater Systems.

In 2014 the president of EcoWater Systems Professional Products, Chris Wilker, described the company’s brand promise as “Clean Water. Green Future.” when Water Technology reported, in May that year, that EcoWater had acquired a cavitation-based treatment technology and its operations from VRTX Technologies of Schertz, Texas, for cooling towers and other commercial uses.

Electronics became the main thread of the product story. EcoWater says it introduced the EASE 3000 Diagnostics Demand Water Conditioner, which allowed remote diagnosis over the telephone, and that it was the first maker to use solid-state electronics to control residential water treatment products. In 2007 it introduced HydroLink, which it describes as the first two-way wireless remote for both a softener and a reverse osmosis system, and in 2014 it upgraded HydroLink so that its softeners could connect over Wi-Fi, for both owners and dealers.

The company lists its standards in the same place. It says it was the first maker of water treatment products to be ISO certified, and that it is a member of the Water Quality Association, the industry’s trade body; it also names NSF International, Underwriters Laboratories and the Canadian Standards Association among the testing and certification bodies it lists.

The current range, on its website, runs from water softeners and refiners to drinking water systems, “problem water” systems and smart-home products, with a separate commercial line. Like Kinetico’s, its website steers visitors to a free water test and a local EcoWater dealer rather than to a checkout.

Water treatment and documentation.

Water softener and filtration companies sell equipment that most customers rarely look at. A softener usually sits in a cellar, a garage or a utility room beside the boiler, and a filter cartridge hides under the sink or on the incoming pipe. So the brands in this guide put a lot of effort into the pictures around the product: a resin tank and a brine cabinet shown clean in a bright room, a cartridge photographed alone on a white background, and, again and again, a clear glass of water.

Much of the trade is sold through installers and dealers rather than over a shop counter. In North America many companies work through networks of local dealers, whose liveried vans carry the brand name from house to house; in Germany and its neighbours, plumbers and heating engineers specify and fit the equipment, and the makers run training centres and seminars for them. That makes the installer as much the audience for a brand as the household that pays for the system.

Trade fairs play a similar role. The Water Quality Association’s annual convention brings the North American residential and commercial water-treatment trade together, and ISH in Frankfurt, the trade fair for heating, sanitation and building services, is where many European makers show new softeners, filters and controls to installers and wholesalers.

The companies themselves range from family firms and foundation-owned businesses to units of large industrial groups, and several have changed hands more than once. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it now and where its equipment is made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Woodbury plant inside Marmon and Berkshire Hathaway.

EcoWater has spent more than four decades inside the Marmon Group. English Wikipedia describes Marmon as an industrial holding company based in Chicago, founded by Jay and Robert Pritzker in 1953 as Colson Corporation and renamed in 1964; Berkshire Hathaway took control of it in 2007–2008 and became its sole owner by 2013. Water Technology described EcoWater in May 2014 as “a Marmon Water/Berkshire Hathaway Company,” and the company’s website today calls it “a Marmon Group, Berkshire Hathaway Company,” a member of a group it puts at more than 180 autonomous manufacturing and service businesses. Its supplier code of conduct is issued in Marmon’s name.

Where it makes its products is documented. Water Technology, visiting in July 2014, described the company as Woodbury, Minnesota-based EcoWater Systems LLC and toured its manufacturing facility of more than 200,000 square feet, which it said houses research, product development and manufacturing. Wilson told the magazine that some staff had worked there since 1968, and that a dealer advisory board helps shape new products.

The dealers took centre stage in the centenary. In March 2025 Contractor magazine published EcoWater’s announcement of a “100 For 100” campaign, unveiled at the company’s annual convention in Poipu, Hawaii: EcoWater would cover the cost of 100 water treatment systems donated through the year to people and organisations nominated by its dealers, who would give their time to install them. The release named Bill Cummings as EcoWater’s president, and quoted him saying the company’s reputation “was built around the kitchen tables of our community.” The company’s centenary page says major announcements would run through 2025.

The company describes itself as one of the world’s largest manufacturers and suppliers of water treatment systems, backed by an international dealer network; that is its own description. Its history also mentions expansion into Canada and further European countries after the 1980s merger.

For a design guide, EcoWater shows how a company built from three older brands can settle on one coined name and keep a long patent history at the front of its story. Compare Kinetico, another dealer-sold softener maker, and Culligan. For this guide we use a deep green, a lake blue and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep EcoWater’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.