From Modest Beginnings

WaterSaver’s history goes back to the early 1900’s, when Samuel Kersten Sr. founded a small plumbing contracting business in Chicago. Although an orphan with little formal education, Kersten was a streetwise, shrewd businessman with an exceptional mechanical aptitude. By the late 1920s, he had built his plumbing company into one of the largest contracting firms in Chicago.

While successful in the contracting field, Kersten Sr. was an inveterate “tinkerer” and drawn to the world of inventing and manufacturing. He spent years working on a variety of plumbing-related products, obtaining twelve patents on his inventions.

His major interest was in developing a new, higher quality faucet. Dissatisfied with the quality of available faucets, his would incorporate two unique features. First, all of the working components of the faucet would be incorporated into a self-contained cartridge. The faucet body itself would thus have unlimited life. Second, the cartridge would have an adjustable orifice to control the flow of water through the valve. This volume control device—the “Water Saver”—would eventually become our namesake.

While Samuel Kersten Sr. was working on “water saving” faucets, his son Samuel Kersten Jr. was called to serve his country in World War II. Samuel Jr. served with distinction in the U.S. Army, rising to the rank of captain and leading his unit on D-Day in the landing at Omaha Beach. Returning home from war, Sam Jr. was typical of his generation. Shaped by his experiences, and fiercely proud of his accomplishments, he was eager to resume his career and personal life after a four-year hiatus. The two Kerstens made the decision to close the contracting company and form a new company to concentrate exclusively on manufacturing the new faucet line.

At first, they offered a line of commercial and institutional faucets. However, they met with little success, for they were trying to sell a high-quality, premium priced product in a commodity-oriented market. Through a series of coincidences, Sam Kersten Jr. got an exposure to the laboratory field. He immediately perceived that there was an opportunity to sell his products based on their higher quality. He therefore introduced the “WaterSaver” line of laboratory faucets and valves.

Big Break

Progress was slow. In the early years, the company consisted of little more than a handful of people and a few machines bought at war surplus auction. Sam Jr. went to trade school to learn how to operate a mill, a lathe and a drill press. He would make sales calls to sell his products and, if he was successful in getting an order, he would return to the factory and literally make the faucets himself. On Saturday afternoons, he would load a four wheel hand truck with the week’s production and wheel it down the street to the train station for shipment to his customers.

The first real break came in 1952, when the E.I. DuPont Co. embarked upon a construction program at the Experimental Station in Wilmington, Delaware. WaterSaver products were specified for this work. DuPont’s requirements took the company six months to complete. But completing this project for such a prominent user gave the company credibility in its industry. The revenue from the project enabled the little company to buy some much-needed machinery and raw materials, and WaterSaver was launched into its future.

Serving the Laboratory Market

Since the early 1950s, WaterSaver has specialized exclusively in manufacturing products for laboratory use. We are the only US company to be so specialized. We believe that our success is based upon our single-minded focus on the laboratory marketplace. Our products provide the performance and durability demanded in the lab environment. Our manufacturing plant has been set up solely to produce lab fittings. For our competitors, a lab fitting is a “special,” often consisting of no more than an assembly of outsourced parts. For WaterSaver, it is what we do every day, crafted ourselves with our own hands.

In addition to offering laboratory faucets and valves, we also offer a comprehensive line of emergency eye wash and shower equipment designed for the needs of the laboratory environment. These products are produced by our sister company, Guardian Equipment. Guardian was formed in the mid-1970s with the goal of producing the highest quality emergency equipment. Today, Guardian has grown to become one of the largest manufacturers of such equipment in the world.

The Future

Our continuing focus is to enhance and expand the value that we provide our customers. To do so, we concentrate on:

Quality.Our products must continue to represent the highest standards of quality in their performance and durability. The name “WaterSaver” must remain synonymous with the highest quality laboratory service fittings.

Product Innovation.Today’s emphasis in lab design is on flexibility and mobility. Lab fittings that are connected to building services can be an impediment to the needed flexibility. WaterSaver has responded with a series of fittings designed specifically for the needs of the “flexible lab,” including service manifolds and quick connect fittings that provide complete freedom to reconfigure the lab.

Global Sales.WaterSaver products are now marketed, sold and installed all over the globe. To support our increasingly international customer base, we have established a global sales presence. We operate a sales office in Mexico to support the Latin American market, in England to support the United Kingdom market and in Singapore to support the Asian market. In addition, we have agents in Scandinavia and the Middle East. We are positioned to provide support for users literally across the globe.

Global Manufacturing.For most of our history, all WaterSaver products were manufactured in their entirety in Chicago. That changed in 2005, when we established a second manufacturing plant in Monterrey, Mexico. Our Monterrey facility is a smaller version of our Chicago plant, where we manufacture component parts for our product line. These components are then shipped to Chicago for finishing and assembly into the completed product. We established this plant in order to (i) provide us with much-needed additional capacity, (ii) assure that a catastrophic loss or work stoppage would not prevent us from servicing our customers and (iii) lower our manufacturing costs.

Speed.The current business environment demands speed in everything we do. From processing orders to shipping our products, we are faced with ever-shorter time frames. We have invested heavily in plant and equipment to assure that we have the capacity necessary to meet the ever-shorter lead times our customer expects. Flexible manufacturing cells, computer aided design and computer numerically controlled machine tools enable us to manufacture the product configurations we need in the time frame we have to do so.

Continuous Improvement.While the costs of raw materials, energy and health benefits are climbing dramatically, our customers demand stable pricing. The only way to meet their expectation is to continually become more efficient. We continue to invest heavily in new machinery, reexamine our business processes and streamline everything we do to take costs out of our operations.

WaterSaver - Deck Mounted High Flow Water Valve