By Kathie Stamps
In 1975, as Jaws terrified movie audiences and companies like Famous Amos and Microsoft were launched, Joe Gaskill started his own long-lasting business, Aquarius Water Refining. Yes, his Feb. 2 birthday makes him an Aquarian. “Aquarius is the water bearer,” he said.
Gaskill started Aquarius Water Refining in Riverview in 1975 and later rented a warehouse in Gibsonton. Now the company is headquartered in Wimauma. Born in Toledo, Gaskill moved with his family to Riverview in the late 1950s in his dad’s 1953 straight-8 Pontiac, towing a 30-foot mobile home. His dad, Joe “Mac” Gaskill, was a pipefitter in Ohio and “couldn’t take the winters up there anymore.”
By age 18, Gaskill was managing a Mary Carter paint store in Brandon.
At 21, he established contracts to paint houses. Then he followed in his father’s footsteps in construction and had a 14-year career as a pipefitter.
In 1974, Gaskill and his wife Cathy had a home in Riverview with well water. “It had iron in the water and would stain the showers,” he recalled. He asked three different water treatment companies to come out to the house with suggestions. Gaskill listened to their pitches, but decided to build his own water softener.
“When you’re in your early 30s, you feel like you can do anything,” he said. The third foreman offered to sell him a resin tank, control valve and salt tank for $200. Gaskill bought the equipment and installed it (after all, he knew how to put pipes together). He told his neighbor about it, and he wanted this new water softener, too, so Gaskill bought more equipment and installed it for $400. That neighbor told another neighbor and Gaskill sold the project for $450. “Then I decided I was going to go in the water business,” he said.
He went to the library in downtown Tampa and scoured through the Thomas Register, a directory of American manufacturers. He sent a letter to 20 companies across the country that dealt with water purification and softening, stating his qualifications in pipefitting and interest in starting his own business. Before long, his mailbox was “stuffed full of brochures from people wanting me to be a dealer for them,” he said. “Finally, the company I settled with was Water Refining out of Middletown, Ohio.”
The name of their product was Miracle Water. Sun City Center happened to have the equipment installed but no one to service it at the time.
Gaskill was ready to step up. “I had a business already built for me in Sun City Center,” he said. “Those people helped me build my business.”
A couple of years into his entrepreneurship, Gaskill learned about reverse osmosis. While a water softener is for working water (washing machine, bath and shower, plumbing), a reverse-osmosis system is installed under the sink for drinking water. It can also hook up to an icemaker. “Ice cubes come out crystal clear,” he said. “Just about everybody I sold a water softener to I sold a reverse-osmosis system to.”
Hard water is measured in GPG, grains per gallon, of mineral content.
Water with a grade of zero to three grains is slightly hard, 4-6 grains is moderately hard, 7-10 is hard water and anything over 10 grains is very hard. “Hillsborough County water is 17-18 grains,” Gaskill said.
Today, the family-owned Aquarius Water Refining has Gaskill’s son, also Joe, at the helm as vice president. The younger Joe’s nephew and Gaskill’s grandson, Michael, also works in the business, ensuring many more decades of
“solving water problems” for residential customers.
Gaskill is mostly retired, “but I still have my finger in the pie,” he said. “If I talk to a stranger for five minutes, they’re going to know I’m in the water business.”
For more information on Aquarius Water Refining, visit www.aquariuswaterrefining.com./
