Clear Comfort: Finally Chemical Free?

Few men are crueler to spa water than Steve Berens.

The CEO and founder of Clear Comfort turned perfectly good water into hot tub sludge. He fouled it up with simulated skin, lotion, salt and almond milk to mimic sweat proteins in numbers that were 25 to 50 times greater than the average spa.

“It’s like someone held a frat party in there,” Berens says. “You couldn’t see the bottom of the spa at all.”

Twelve hours later, using Clear Comfort’s hydroxyl-based sanitation system, the water was clear, and the process used no chlorine or other typical chemicals. The Clear Comfort system has been used in pools for years, but Berens recently learned it works just as well in spas. He repeated the process and got the same results eight times in eight manufacturers’ tubs, and he’s got photographic evidence and case studies to back it up.

Who Needs Chemicals When You’ve Got Hydroxyls?
Few spa owners relish buying chlorine and scooping it into their tubs. They do it because the alternative is nasty, foul-smelling water, foaming and, of course, that gunk that always seems to form around the fittings and jets.

But Clear Comfort says these “tired and toxic chemicals,” as Berens calls them, simply aren’t necessary.

Berens says Clear Comfort creates a powerful yet all-natural primary sanitizer and long-lasting residual sanitizer that continues to patrol the entire body of water long after the original bacteria, protozoa and viruses have been dispatched.

“A hydroxyl system creates a more potent oxidizer that’s safer than other oxidizers like chlorine or bromine or ozone,” Berens says. “The oxidizer is what removes the contaminants from the water. Hydroxyl is the safest, most effective and fastest oxidizer available.”

What Are Hydroxyls and What Do They Do?
Clear Comfort uses UV light and magnetism to treat not the water in a spa, but the air injected into that water after it’s filtered. As oxygen travels through the Clear Comfort system, it’s split to create individual oxygen molecules, which then naturally bond with available hydrogen molecules. When one oxygen molecule bonds with one hydrogen molecule, a hydroxyl (OH) is born. These hydroxyls, however, exist only “in a very unstable, short-lived state,” according to Berens.

During their short lives, hydroxyls act as powerful oxidizers that can do battle with even the most chlorine-resistant organisms. When they’re done, these volatile hydroxyls seek stability by bonding with available hydrogen molecules to become H2O2, which you know as hydrogen peroxide. The hydroxyls disappear, but the hydrogen peroxide hangs around, forming a potent secondary sanitizer that lingers long after the hydroxyls have cleaned the water.

Making the Leap From Pools to Spas
Introducing the Clear Comfort system to spas taps into a huge, untapped customer base willing to pay for the system’s convenience and impressive results, Berens says.

“Over 50 percent of the people surveyed were willing to spend between $2,000 and $2,500 extra on their spa to get the better water and not have to use chemicals,” Berens says.

The system can easily be retrofitted onto existing spas, or it can

be built in at the manufacturing level — a concept that will likely soon become a reality: “We are in discussions right now with several major manufacturers who are looking to integrate this technology,” Berens says.

The system can be modified for essentially any setup: Berens says he’s done everything from spas to water parks. The system injects treated air in gas form into the spa’s circulation piping. Since most spas have built-in ozonators, it’s a fairly basic transition. No water is self-managing, but Berens says Clear Comfort, which lasts for the life of the spa, comes pretty close. End users need only to manage the pH and replace a cartridge after 10,000 hours of use. The Clear Comfort cartridge-exchange program makes that process simple and cheap compared with traditional ozonator replacement, he adds.

After that, all the end user has to do is “open the lid and get into water that’s clean and clear,” Berens says. “It doesn’t smell weird and doesn’t eat up your cover, like ozonators. Our customers tell us they’re not draining and filling their spas very much at all — in some cases for well over a year or even two. That’s the biggest benefit of our system. Water stays clearer, cleaner, longer than any other technology out there. It’s better than what comes out of the tap.”