About the Owner

Before starting Clearwater and Filtration, I spent the last 17 years or so in the environmental business–in municipal wastewater operations and wastewater laboratory supervision, as a process engineer for anaerobic digester design and operation, as well as in reactor design and process engineering for a biotech start-up. 

I’ve had to trouble-shoot pumps and various reactor systems, and their plumbing, from the scale of a few millimeters per minute to 33 million gallons a day, and have worked with many different types of filtration and absorptive media.

Prior to these career experiences I’d been a postdoctoral fellow studying deep-sea hydrothermal vent chemistry and designing/operating small reactors constructed to reproduce the high pressure-high temperature environments of the vents to study certain aspects of mineral catalysis.  My previous academic experience had been in Microbiology and Biology with a BS and MS from Cal Poly SLO, and a PhD in soil microbiology from Arizona State University. 

These past experiences have provided me a unique perspective and understanding of water filtration and treatment systems and can be very helpful in letting our customers understand the systems they are interested in for their households.   In a single system used to treat domestic well water, several water quality, aesthetic or potentially health-impacting conditions, may be present concomitantly and may all require quite disparate solutions in order to provide the level water quality desired by the customer. 

Not only is it important to understand the operation of the individual treatment system, since they all change the chemistry of the water somewhat, but also how that system influences the treatment system directly downstream of it and ultimately the domestic plumbing and the end user, because that is typically the ultimate goal of domestic water treatment – to provide a more suitable environment for the plumbing to last for as long as possible, and to provide an aesthetically beneficial product that is free of unwanted contaminants.

I think my unique background and training gives me a more comprehensive overview of how to design these systems and to make them operate effectively.  Typically the people installing the water filtration systems in our service area have been allocated to plumbers and well drillers who have taken on the business of water filtration as a means to an end: they are filling an empty niche. However few have the necessary background in what it would take to understand the nitty-gritty of what is happening in these treatment systems and how to properly trouble-shoot them.

We purchased this business from an established, highly-skilled a licensed well and water filtration technician with over 30 years of experience who trained me in the field for months because we realized we need to know what works and what doesn’t. There should not be any experimentation with peoples’ hard-earned money, what we design and install needs to work upon completion: there should be no “let’s try this to see if it works”, but instead it should be “how well would you like it to work?”.

There are many manufacturers of water filtration hardware and media out there, but until their products are field tested, and the effectiveness of the products is proven, it’s just a claim, not necessarily a fact.  Knowing and seeing the effectiveness of the systems is what gave us the confidence to move forward and help people operate their wells, storage and treatment systems to their maximum potential effectiveness.

I look forward to hearing from you!

-Pete Dalla-Betta