You get to know a lot about water when you've been in the business for 48 years!
It all began in two-story tudor-style home on Main Street in Stevens Point. The year was 1950. That year a son (named William) and a water conditioning business were born to Paul and Lydia Maher. The business began to transform the house. What once was a formal dining room became the office of the newborn water conditioning company. The garage became a plant where tanks were slung on and off the grates, being dumped and then refilled with freshly charged resin beads, to be loaded up off the ground onto the back end of stepvans and out on the routes. Paul himself went out on tank delivery, and though he may have had a paper route first, Bill was on the trucks doing portable exchange routes when he was old enough. Bill attended the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Biology, continuing to work for the family business.
The Maher Tradition is a tradition of excellence in sales and service. Water treatment is a changing industry. There's a lot more to water than H2O, and not everything, even in sparkling clear water, is healthy for people to drink. When Paul Maher opened the doors of Maher Soft Water Service, people were concerned about iron and hardness in their water. Today hundreds of homes have a nitrate-removal unit installed by Maher's, and still others have treatment for lead and copper removal, though iron and hardness are still at the top of the list for water treatment. What has changed most of all is the technology. Once steel portable exchange tanks were available. Their uses were limited, and the method required that a service person come into the customer's home to change the tanks each and every month. While often these tanks were very effective, it was difficult to create a system that would condition the water all of the time for each home.
When the automatic water conditioner emerged on the scene, it changed the face of water conditioning forever. The variety of contaminants that could be removed from the water multiplied, and each unit could be set to the requirements of the water coming into each individual home. No longer were service personnel visiting the customer's home each month; now three, six, even twelve months was more likely. Maher Soft Water Service became a francise of the WaterCare Corporation at this time, changing its name to Maher's WaterCare. The number of customers the small business was able to serve became limitless, and the customer base grew, so that today there are about 6,000 homes and businesses with an automatic water conditioner from Maher's.
At about the same time that Maher's became a WaterCare franchise, Paul retired and Bill Maher became the owner of the company, later incorporating as Maher Water Corporation. Soon his daughters Darcy and Danielle were working for the business, and later, Danielle's husband, Sam. The business moved to its current location in the Stevens Point industrial park in 1990, and recently became an authorized Kinetico dealer. Rarely has so much variety and experience been found in one water treatment company.
And so the tradition continues today. Bill Maher keeps the company active the industry community, making sure to stay up to date on the latest in water treatment technology. And the name Maher is recognized throughout central and northern Wisconsin as a trusted name in water treatment.
