RainSoft Brand Guidelines: A 1953 Illinois Softener Maker Sold Through Home Dealers

A softener business started at home.

RainSoft is an American maker of home water softeners and filters from the suburbs west of Chicago. The company’s own history page says John Grayson started RainSoft in 1953 in the basement of his house in Bensenville, Illinois, and that the business soon moved into its first company building in the same town. That date is backed by a dated trade report: in January 2019 Water Online, carrying Pentair’s announcement of its planned purchase, described RainSoft’s parent company as having made water treatment equipment since 1953, from a base outside Chicago.

The early years, as RainSoft tells them, were a run of products and moves. In 1954, the company says, Grayson developed its first cabinet softener, the Apollo. Growth brought a second plant in Elk Grove Village in 1957, and by the early 1960s, the company says, it had moved into its fourth building in a decade.

The later timeline on the website is about controls and drinking-water units. RainSoft dates its “Q” Valve, which it calls the industry’s first computerised control valve, to 1983; a “Classic Apollo” cabinet softener to 1984; its first reverse osmosis drinking-water system to 1985; a composite valve to 1998; and the EC4 water conditioner and the OxyTech iron filter to 2006. In 2016, the company says, it moved into a new building in Roselle, Illinois, which remains its home on the timeline. These are the company’s own dates; we give them as its account.

Dealers, tests and cabinets.

RainSoft does not present itself as a shelf product. Its website is built around one action: a free in-home water test, carried out by an independent RainSoft dealer, who then recommends a system. The contact form tells visitors that their details are passed to a dealer, and the site includes a dealer locator and product manuals rather than a shop. That model fits the description Pentair gave in January 2019, when it said the purchase would give it access to the company’s network of affiliated dealers and let it offer “turnkey water conditioning solutions” to homeowners, as Water Online reported.

The range is grouped by job. The EC5 series is described by RainSoft as its premium computer-controlled water conditioner: it regenerates according to the water a household actually uses, the company says, and sends alerts for low salt, power loss and filter changes to the display and to a RainSoft Remind app. The EC4 with OxyTech is aimed at water with iron. For drinking water the company lists the Ultrefiner and Hydrefiner reverse osmosis units, and for the wider house it lists whole-house carbon filtration and an ultraviolet unit. There is also AirMaster, an air-treatment product that shows the brand stretching beyond water.

Two retail and certification claims sit on the home page. RainSoft says it is in nearly 1,000 Home Depot stores as the retailer’s preferred water treatment provider, and it says all RainSoft systems are tested and certified under the Water Quality Association’s Gold Seal programme. We give both as the company’s statements. The EC5 page adds that the systems are designed and engineered in the United States, which is again the company’s own wording.

Taken together, the website’s pages describe a brand that meets its customers at home: the first contact is a request for a water test, the next is a visit from a local dealer, and the product is chosen for that house. The company’s product pages are short and practical, built around what each system does and which dealer can supply it.

Water treatment brands.

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.

From family business to Pentair brand.

By the late 2010s RainSoft was no longer the name of the company itself. The business that owned it was called Aquion, and in January 2019 Water Online described Aquion as majority owned by the private-equity firm Mason Wells, based outside Chicago, with about 170 employees. Its residential brands were RainSoft and Erie Water Treatment, and its commercial brands were OptiPure and ClearWater Tech, the report said. Aquion’s range at the time took in water conditioners, iron and carbon filters, reverse osmosis systems, ozone and ultraviolet units and acid neutralisers.

On 7 January 2019 the water treatment group Pentair announced a definitive agreement to buy Aquion, with completion expected in the first quarter of that year, Water Online reported. On the same day Pentair announced a separate agreement to buy Pelican Water Systems, the Florida filtration brand. RainSoft’s own timeline closes with the entry “Pentair acquires RainSoft” under 2019. Aquion’s chief executive at the time, Michael Madsen, said in the announcement that joining Pentair would let the company build on its strengths.

RainSoft still trades under its own name. Its website carries a 2026 copyright, lists a toll-free number spelled out as 1-800-RAINSOFT and keeps the dealer-led structure: a visitor asks for a test, a local dealer calls, and the system is sized for that house. The website describes those dealers as independent businesses that carry the RainSoft name locally.

The company’s history page also gives the brand a long story to tell: a 1953 start, a named first product and a run of dated launches through to the move to Roselle and the Pentair purchase.

For a design guide, RainSoft shows how a brand sold in people’s homes rather than on shelves builds trust through a test, a dealer and a plain, repeatable look. Compare Culligan, another water treatment name from Illinois, and Pelican Water, whose purchase Pentair announced the same day. For this guide we use a deep blue, a night ink and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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