About the owner
Meet Pete Dalla-Betta.
Pete owns and runs Clearwater and Filtration in Grass Valley, CA. Before starting the company, he spent 17+ years in the environmental business — in municipal wastewater operations and laboratory supervision, as a process engineer for anaerobic digester design and operation, and in reactor design and process engineering for a biotech start-up.
He's troubleshot pumps, plumbing and reactor systems at scales from a few millimeters per minute to 33 million gallons per day, and has worked with dozens of types of filtration and absorptive media along the way.
The unfair advantage
A scientist's eye on every system we design.
PhD, Soil Microbiology
Arizona State University.
BS & MS, Microbiology
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Deep-sea hydrothermal vent chemistry — designed and operated high-pressure, high-temperature reactors to study mineral catalysis.
17+ years in the field
Wastewater operations, anaerobic digester engineering, biotech reactor design — now applied to your home.
"There should not be any experimentation with people's hard-earned money. What we design and install needs to work upon completion. There should be no 'let's try this to see if it works' — it should be 'how well would you like it to work?'"
Why this matters
Most installers are filling a niche. We understand the chemistry.
In our service area, water filtration is usually handed to plumbers and well drillers who took it on as an add-on business. Few have the background to understand the nitty-gritty of what's happening inside a treatment system — or how to properly troubleshoot it when something changes.
A single domestic well can carry several aesthetic and health-impacting issues at once, each requiring a different solution. Each treatment stage shifts the chemistry of the water and influences the next stage downstream — all the way to your plumbing and your tap. Designing for that whole picture is what we do.
We bought this business from a licensed, highly-skilled well and water filtration technician with 30+ years of experience who trained Pete in the field for months. We don't guess. We test, we design, and we stand behind it.
How it started
Old friends. A new kind of water company.
Clearwater and Filtration opened in April 2020 as a partnership between Pete and his longtime friends Craig and Denise Johnson — the husband-and-wife team behind Craig Johnson Plumbing, serving Grass Valley since 2004.
The Johnsons brought decades of plumbing know-how and deep roots in the local community. Pete brought the science — a PhD in soil microbiology and 17+ years engineering wastewater and biotech reactor systems. Together they bought an established water treatment business from a 30-year veteran technician who trained Pete in the field for months before handing over the keys.
Today Pete leads system design, client conversations and installations, with backup from the nine-person crew at Craig Johnson Plumbing — both businesses share an office, so a tricky job never has to wait on a callback.
Background reported by Victoria Penate, The Union.