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.