I’ve met all kinds of people — I mean all kinds of people — but never one that liked to clean cartridge filters. It’s part of the job, yes, but it’s messy, fiddly in a strange way — getting in between those pleats — and as pool care tasks go, relatively time-consuming.
So I was intrigued by the invention of a mass filter cleaning machine by Filter Preaux. You just place your dirty filter on the rollers and turn it on. The filter turns like a lathe, as a solvent/ cleaner is sprayed on the fabric, and then jets fire into the pleats to wash away the debris. The dirty wash-water is itself filtered (so you can dispose of the solid waste particles) and reused in the system.
The whole procedure takes about 30 seconds. It comes in both a truck-mounted, mobile unit, or as a stationary unit which would be set up at a retail store/dealership or at your service department HQ.
There are some companies that currently do assembly-line filter cleanings, where they collect hundreds of filters off their service routes, bring them back to a central garage, and clean them all at once by hand, but again, that’s a bit of a grind. Far better to just feed them into a machine and harvest the clean filters, says Lauren Womick, president of Kevin Sparks Signature Pool in Murfreesboro, Tenn.
I spoke with Womick while watching a display of the Filter Preaux system at the Expo in Dallas, where she was a presenter. She sees the machine as an efficient tool, and part of a wider strategy to keep employees by making their jobs as tolerable as possible.
“It’s a new generation of workers, and you have to meet them where they are with products that help them get the job done. And my guys really don’t want to clean cartridge filters,” she says. “They’re always complaining about that job. So if we can [use a machine like this], it takes 30 seconds, and it’s done. That’s really going to help my business.”
Another industry expert in the audience was Todd Glaser, general manager at East Coast Leisure in Virginia Beach. Glaser sees the Filter Preaux working as part of a strategy to draw customers and bind them into the brand.
“This is something that I could see us using in our store. We could offer free filter cleaning. ‘Come in, clean your filter for free.’ But a lot of those filters are going to be really shabby, in really bad shape. So then it’s, ‘Oh, you need a new filter, that thing is falling apart.’
“So it would get some people in the store, get some traffic on the weekend, and probably sell some of them a new filter.”
Beyond the savings of time and labor, the system promises to save a considerable amount of water. This magazine has spoken to service pros who said they needed 100 gallons of water to spray-clean a dirty cartridge filter in the usual manner. The Filter Preaux claims to use a small fraction of that.
In certain areas where water usage and costs are at a premium, such as the American Southwest and other dry, coastal regions, that per-cartridge difference can mean a lot. A group of service pros from Puerto Rico was at the show eyeing the system as part of a water-saving plan in the Caribbean.
“This machine only uses 20 gallons of water per cartridge. What you’re doing right now is using 100 gallons,” says Omar Falcon, owner of Falcon Pools in Puerto Rico. Falcon is a principal of the Pisciniando Podcast, a popular Spanish language pool podcast. “In Puerto Rico, where we work, you’re paying a lot for water. So if you’re using the Filter Preaux, you’re saving lots of water and saving the customer lots of money.”
Falcon says the company is planning to migrate their customer base from D.E. to cartridge, and they figure mass cleaning of cartridge filters will fit perfectly into that strategy as the number of cartridge filter pools in their base steadily increases. Especially attractive in the Filter Preaux, he says, is eliminating the mess filter cleanings make.
“Every time we clean the filter, we need to analyze where to clean it in order to deal with the debris, which is a problem.”
The Filter Preaux keeps everything self-contained, which obviates the problem of what to do with debris.
It’s new technology. And production of the machines is just ramping up, says Les Ewen, who along with Ken Jones, is a principal of Filter Preaux. Ewen began developing the idea of Filter Preaux several years ago, based on over three decades of experience in the pool business.
This article first appeared in the February 2025 issue of AQUA Magazine — the top resource for retailers, builders and service pros in the pool and spa industry. Subscriptions to the print magazine are free to all industry professionals. Click here to subscribe.
