Our mission
The mission of CE Hooton Sales, LLC is to develop solutions for combining polymer, mineral, or wetable powders in water without clumping or excessive mixing.
Our vision
Our vision is to lower maintenance costs and improve the efficiency of industrial processes with our product.
Our people
Our company is small and family owned, but it includes engineers, chemists, scientists, administrators, assemblers and documentation specialists. In recent years, we have put this know-how to good use and improved our product through precision testing and measurements. As a result, the Hootonanny's performance has improved considerably. We also consult with our clients, and we have the expertise to help them achieve their objectives efficiently and cost effectively.
Our history

C. Earl Hooton, founder of
CE Hooton Sales, was an out-of-box thinker
and problem solver who sold chemicals for Drew Chemical in Miami, Florida. As a
salesman throughout the Southeastern United States, he flew his own plane to
meet his customers. His wife, Ramona, helped prepare for his sales trips. One day, he gave her a polymer
mixer and told her it had to be cleaned. Polymers are sticky chemicals, so
cleaning it was a tedious process. When Ramona handed the polymer mixer back,
she said it was one of the most difficult jobs she’d ever been given. Then she
suggested they use Teflon®
instead of metal so the
polymers wouldn't stick.
That idea sent Earl back to the drawing board. He had previously designed and
tried to patent several ideas, but this one took off. His design varied from
conventional eductors in two ways. First, most eductors had a high-velocity water jet in the center of a larger pipe and the
associated venturi action/vacuum
then forms around the stream. Dry powders are then pulled into the stream but
stick to the walls of the pipes. Hooton’s design turned this approach inside out. The Hootonanny forms a hollow column of high velocity water
where the low pressure vacuum forms inside the column of water. Dry powders
then only touch the high energy quickly moving water column and not the walls
of the pipe, and no build up forms. Second,
leaving nothing to chance, he had
the nozzle that pinches the water into a jetting column made from Teflon® to further
reduce the clog potential of the device.
As a result, dry-polymer powders
no longer stuck to eductors when mixed with water. This design would save
companies maintenance costs and repairs.
When the unit first came out, Earl billed it as the non-clog polymer eductor,
because it was this new technology using Teflon® or Polytetrafluoroethylene (PFTE). They began selling it in the
United States in 1963. Later, it was called the Hootonanny, combining his
surname and the word hootenanny (an object or gadget for which there is no
name).
Jim Kreiss, a machinist by trade, helped Earl and Ramona test the Hootonanny
and fine tune the machining for some of the eductor components from the
original drawings. This association continued after 1972, when Earl died, which
enabled Ramona to keep the company running smoothly for almost three more decades.
In 2009, Ramona retired and her grandchildren formed a limited liability
company (LLC) under the same name, CE Hooton Sales. Much of the initial testing
performed by Earl was replicated and substantial refinements were made to both
increase performance and manufacturing reliability. All devices are still flow
checked today before shipping.