Cat Pumps began with a pump its inventor’s boss called too expensive
William Bruggeman designed a longer-lasting pump, watched his employer scrap it as too expensive, and built a Minnesota company around it instead.
Minneapolis, MN
In the mid-1960s, the pump in a self-service car wash was treated as a disposable part. Many washes kept a 55-gallon drum out back. When a pump quit, it went into the drum. When the drum was full, the whole barrel was thrown out.
“The pumps at that time were relatively inexpensive and reached 500 psi, but they only lasted 100–200 hours and then were thrown away. They weren’t worth repairing,” Steve Bruggeman told Cleaner Times in 2018.
His father, William L. Bruggeman, set out to build a pump that would stay out of that drum. His employer decided the design cost too much and dropped it. Bruggeman believed in it enough to sell it himself, and in January 1968 he started Cat Pumps. When the company marked its 50th anniversary in 2018, it was a family-owned business with Steve, the founder’s son, as president. Steve counted the family then in its third generation in the business.
The company’s story turns on a stubborn engineering bet: a pump that cost more up front would pay for itself by not breaking. Fifty years later, Steve was still making the same argument.
Before Cat Pumps existed, William Bruggeman worked as a project engineer for a small pressure washer manufacturer in St. Paul, according to the company’s published history. In 1966 his employer put him on a project to design a longer-lasting pump. He came up with a triplex piston pump built on a uniflow design, which the company would later patent.
Finding someone to make it was harder. As Steve told the story to Cleaner Times, they could not find a manufacturer in the United States, so the search moved to Japan, where several companies were interviewed. On his last appointment, Bruggeman found one that built agricultural spray equipment with similar manufacturing methods. The two sides refined the prototype, and by mid-1967 they had a finished, tested pump. The pumps of the day lasted 100 to 200 hours. The prototypes ran for more than 2,000.
They also cost more than 50 percent more than other pumps on the market. Bruggeman’s employer judged that too expensive for pressure washers and scrapped the project.
Bruggeman saw it differently. He believed the pump would save money over its life. Steve recounted what his father did next: “He went back to Japan and said, ‘If you manufacture it, I’ll sell it.’”
By then Bruggeman had become friends with the Japanese firm’s chief engineer, and 20 pumps were built in the firm’s model shop. In January 1968 he began promoting the design, mostly to car wash manufacturers, because they had the biggest pump problem. Some pressure washer makers were interested too.
The new company rented an old trucking warehouse near the University of Minnesota. The first 100 pumps arrived in a large crate, and the delivery driver told them to bring over a forklift. “Since there was no forklift, they found a couple of pipes and rolled the crates into the warehouse on those,” Steve told Cleaner Times.
Bruggeman took to the road with his pump. The company’s history describes its first significant order: an equipment maker agreed to buy if the pump could last 30 days without breaking down. It went well past that mark without needing service.
The name came from that durability. The pumps were sold as “the pumps with nine lives.” Steve said there was more to it. “In addition to having nine lives, they were also thinking of the power of wild cats, like lions and leopards,” he told the magazine. A marketing friend, he added, had found that companies whose names started with “c” had a high rate of survival.
What made the pump last was inside it. Most pumps of the day used two pistons. Bruggeman’s used three, which cut down on pulsation, and it used a different seal design. Water flowed between a stationary inlet valve and a floating piston, cooling and lubricating the cup packing. The two-piston pumps were greased and leaked a little from the start. The Cat pump had no external leakage.
“We patented that design, and no one has copied it,” Steve told Cleaner Times.
The first model, the 400, was built from 1968 to 1972. It was rated at 4 gallons per minute and 700 psi, according to the company. In 1972 Cat Pumps opened a branch in Belgium to serve a growing European car wash and pressure wash trade. Its first international location carried a full line of inventory along with sales, technical and service support.
In 1975 the company put a sales office on wheels. The “Catmobile” was a demonstration vehicle fitted for live pump demonstrations and training on products and accessories, part of a push to expand sales across the United States.
The next big change came in 1976, when the company introduced and patented the forerunner of a plunger design. “Instead of the cup moving, the plunger is moving back and forth with stationary packing,” Steve told Cleaner Times. The change allowed pressures up to 3,000 psi, and he said it drew more companies into pressure washing. Cat Pumps had about 20 employees in Minneapolis by then and another 15 overseas.
In 1978 came a double-seal pump with a solid ceramic plunger. A low-pressure seal behind the high-pressure seal kept the plunger lubricated. Steve said in 2018 that most pressure washers still used that design. The seals were made of a material the company developed and chose to keep to itself.
“We developed an exclusive material for the elastomer seal material, but we didn’t patent it because we didn’t want to tell what it was,” he told the magazine.
In the early 1980s the company built a new 106,000-square-foot facility in Blaine. It was later expanded to 149,000 square feet and still served as headquarters decades later.
From there the company grew well beyond the car wash. In 1992 it began building custom power units, skid-mounted packages of 10 to 75 horsepower that came complete with pumps, bases, drives and controls, built to a customer’s specifications. In 2000 it bought Ram Pumps, a British maker of complete pumping systems for the petrochemical and desalination industries, which took Cat’s range from 75 horsepower to more than 600.
By the 50th anniversary, Steve counted more than 1,000 pump models, with flows up to 240 gallons per minute and pressures up to 10,000 psi. The company had about 100 employees in the United States and 75 overseas. Its pumps had found work in seawater desalination by reverse osmosis, mist cooling for computer server rooms and power-plant gas turbines, hydro excavation for utility work, central cleaning systems in food processing and high-pressure carpet extractors.
Through all of it, the company kept working with the same Japanese manufacturer that helped launch it. “We have stuck with them because of their quality control and attention to detail,” Steve told Cleaner Times. He said the warranty rate was close to zero. The two companies had grown together, he said: “They are in their fourth generation of a family business, and we are in our third.”
The original argument, that a better pump earns back its higher price by staying in service, also set limits on what the company would build. Steve told the magazine that Cat Pumps had chosen to stay out of the cheap end of the market.
“A pressure washer for a homeowner might only last 50 hours, and that may be all he needs,” he said. “We don’t compete in the low-end market, even though there might be a large volume of sales, because we’re not willing to put our name on a product that doesn’t have exceptional service life.”
He had evidence close at hand. Two weeks before that 2018 interview, he said, a customer still running a model 400, a pump built no later than 1972, called looking for repair parts. “There are still some model 400s in service that have been used for almost 50 years,” he told Cleaner Times. “That is quite an improvement for those who were throwing a pump away every 30 days.”