Beat The Heat

The sun beats down on your head with such insistent heat that even hiding under the Bimini top on your pontoon doesn’t help you escape it. Worse yet, it’s like playing a high stakes game of Hot Lava when you were a kid—you can’t touch your bare feet to the deck without feeling summer radiate straight through your skin. The air around you is stifling enough to make you feel like a slump of butter slowly coming to a boil.

So what do you do, short of diving headfirst in the water and never mind coming up? How about plugging in your Mist-er-Comfort system, laying back, and letting a sheath of cool mist settle over you?

Founded in 2006 by Bill and Carol Ford, Mist-er-Comfort is an ingenious system designed to relieve people everywhere who are getting beaten by the heat. With misting applications from boats to RVs to golf carts, patios and more, these folks make keeping cool outdoors their business. 

Born Out Of Necessity

So how did the ball first get rolling? The Fords, natives of Orlando, Fla., had a tradition of watching the Sarasota off-shore boat races every summer with family. But in 2005, this 20-year tradition was thrown into jeopardy when Bill’s sister-in-law had to undergo chemotherapy treatments and couldn’t bear the summer heat. Bill made it his quest to find a way to keep everyone cool as they watched the races so his sister-in-law could still accompany them. He hurried over to the Miami Boat Show that year and all he discovered was plastic fans and a misting system with one too many zeroes on the price tag. Neither option was going to work, but the misting system got him thinking he would just design his own.

So Bill, who says, “I’m a tinkerer, have been my entire life,” toyed around and created his own compact misting system, which he installed on his boat. The whole family was able to watch the boat races together and his sister-in-law was kept comfortable the whole time.

Getting Attention

People took notice of this misting system, which hadn’t really been seen before.

“What is that?”

“Is your boat on fire? I see the mist!”

 “Is that a misting system on there? How cool is that!”

These were all common questions that had Bill explaining his setup to inquirers, before his brother-in-law jumped in and advised, “No, don’t do that—see if it’ll sell!”

So they took Bill’s original design and displayed it at the next Miami Boat Show, “Just to have fun and test it,” says Bill.

And boaters swarmed over it like kids at a Willy Wonka store going for the golden ticket. By the second day, they sold out all the stock they had brought to Miami.

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“I just remember my brother-in-law saying, ‘That’s kind of how the Pet Rock got started,’” recalls Bill. “It just caught on like that.”

So the Fords called in a favor with a buddy to bring over all the parts and pieces left at Bill’s shop. When they arrived, the team built as many misting systems as they could on the spot and took orders from that point on.

Obviously, Bill can easily say, “I knew I had a winner from the very first day we went to sale.”

Improving On A Winner

On the heels of this success came the boat builders who recognized a great idea when they saw one. At this point, the system wasn’t custom designed, so boat builders asked the Fords to make their design with a list of specific qualifications.

Bill replied, “Oh that could be very easy to do.”

So from then on the design took on features that would better beat the rigors of the marine environment, such as UV-rated and stainless steel parts.

“We learned the first year what to do and what not to do, and it worked out well,” Bill sums up.

As they continued to grow and customize the marine system, they began looking into other markets that were plagued with the same need to keep cool outdoors during the summer. The team created a product for tailgaters that plugs into the cigarette lighter of a car and creates cool mist for everyone. Pro football enthusiasts throughout the southeast and even in Washington, DC have bought this system, including many Redskins fans, and the Fords’ misting system has a presence in just about every major college fan base there is.

They also expanded into the golfing industry with a misting bar for golf carts. This bar easily snaps on and off and consists of two adjustable misting heads.

“It was really pretty sharp,” Bill says.

Back To Boats

So they went back to the boating industry with the bar design and developed a fast install system that came with its own tank and pump, so all a hot boater has to do is snap the misting bar in place, plug the tank into his DC power, and he’s sitting pretty under a fine, cool mist.

This model was especially popular and Boat Outfitters had great success distributing it throughout Orlando, while places as far as the California coast and Australia experienced similar success.

“Now,” Bill says, “we’ve got kits designed for really any type of boat, either the Bimini tops, the hard tops, the canvas tops, and the misting bar that works on all the types.”

Though they have sold plenty of misting systems to larger 50- to 60-foot yachts, they’re especially focusing on products for the smaller fishing and pontoon boats.

And the good news is, whether or not you have an onboard water source, Mist-er-Comfort has a system for that, and they’re all designed with the do-it-yourselfer in mind with simple installation that takes mere minutes.

The 2300 series simply connects to your existing fresh water tank with whatever adapter you need for virtually any boat. For those who don’t already have a water source, the 2400 series comes with its own tank.

Award Winning

And it just keeps getting better. JC TriToon Marine approached Bill and said, “Bill, your products are fantastic, but can you actually create a two-zone system, one to keep your feet cool as well as your head?”

And Bill replied, “Absolutely.” So they worked hard and in a month’s time created the two-zone 2300 and 2400 series misting systems for JC. At our PDB Days event last September this new system was honored with an innovative award on a JC pontoon for its ingenuity.

Details

So how exactly does it work? Misting systems harness the power of evaporative cooling and thermo dynamics by forcing pressurized water through very small orifices, enabling the particles to evaporate quickly as soon as the atomized water hits hot air. As it evaporates, a cool curtain of mist forms a barrier between you and the driving summer heat, lowering cockpit temperatures by as much as 25 degrees.

“It’s very, very, very interesting how it cools people,” Bill enthuses.

Thanks to very small holes the size of a human hair, the system allows half a gallon of water to push through each head hourly, so you don’t need a ton of water to feel relief.

Multiple misting zones are simply operated from a switch on the console. Each system comes with an innovative drain that doesn’t give calcium a chance to build up from sitting water, as this would clog the heads when the system is turned on again. And everything is marine-grade, so any onboard bouncing around from the waves won’t hinder their ability to function on a boat, as other misting systems have trouble with.

“So it’s a very unique product,” Bill explains. “We’ve revolutionized the misting business with this particular design.”

And it’s certainly caught on, as over 20 boat builders regularly use Mist-er-Comfort on their models and a couple hundred thousand people across the world continue to snatch up these systems.

In large part, the extent of the Fords’ immediate and growing success came down to the fact that they discovered a need that every boater has in the summertime—because, as Bill so candidly puts it, “People love to boat, but they hate being hot. We’ve solved that little need in each and every market we’ve gone into.”

The success of Mist-er-Comfort makes it clear that this is one product you need on your boat if you fall into the want-to-boat, but-can’t-take-the-heat group that so many others find themselves in.

Even aside from their success, Bill admits, “I just enjoy creating new things and looking at people smiling.”

He adds, “I guess the greatest pleasure is when I go to boat shows like the Miami Boat Show and see my product on all these boats. It’s really neat and exciting to see!”