Testing water was of great interest to me and to further increase my knowledge in water technology, I attended courses and passed exams at Tintometer colour laboratory, Salisbury England. I would then be called upon by other pool companies as well as our customers to resolve any water problems that they had.

In the early stages of the construction of Thorpe Park, both myself and my father carried out service and repairs to the filtration and pumps that were installed there. During my days of servicing pools, whenever there was an electrical problem I would be sent out with my uncle, who was a fully qualified electrical engineer, to fix electrical problems with the filtration equipment. He passed his extensive knowledge of electrics on to me which has stood me in good stead. The experience I gained from him has been invaluable as I am able to design swimming pool control panels from scratch as well as all the associated equipment. My company supplies different pool control panels for several applications to the pool traders.

In my early twenties, with the knowledge and experience I had gained, my father would leave me to manage the site and tradesmen and oversee the job from start through to completion. I worked for many years for my father, which further increased my knowledge of pool installation and construction.

In 1985, I was made an offer to design, manufacture and supply a swimming pool Ionising System for a private investor who was already importing an Ionising System into the UK market. I came to an arrangement with my father to work part-time for his business so that I could turn my efforts towards the design of the Ionising System.

I saw this as a one-off opportunity to try something new in the pool industry and accepted the challenge.

I spent large amounts of my time designing and developing the first prototype for production. A key problem kept appearing, it was the design of the probe cell unit. My biggest competitors were having the same problems where only one half of the probe was active due to flow problems within the cell unit. I was convinced I could overcome and solve this problem.

With the other competitors struggling to achieve maximum efficiency from their cell units I went back to the drawing board. After years of design and testing I came up with the solution. Basically the entry and exit of the cell were important, but the breakthrough was within the cell unit itself, from originally spinning the cell unit in stainless steel (see picture) I changed to injection moulding. This made it possible to produce the cell in plastic and allowed me to introduce veins into the lower part of the cell unit, causing the water within the cell to rotate at a high velocity when water was passed through the cell unit – the answer to the problem was solved. Our probes now wear down evenly to the size of a small finger thus allowing the copper and silver ions to be released from the probe evenly, drastically improving the release of ions into the pool system with maximum efficiency.