This topic comes up at just about every biannual company meeting we have had for the last 10 years. We always reach the same conclusions.
A) A well made reliable oscillator will cost nearly as much as a second pump. This will make it less attractive and result is sales so low we can't even recoup R & D in a reasonable time span. If a product cannot become profitable within 3 years it is not worth pursuing. A new pump design or skimmer housing has an investment of over a million dollars in R & D, we need to get that back quickly to develop the next big thing and stay ahead of our competition. An oscillator made to our standards would require many molded parts, even a small mold is a 10,000+ dollar investment, a big mold like a casing can be up to 100,000. You might buy a lesser oscillator from someone else, but we can't put our name and warranty on something that is just going to give us a black eye and repair headaches.
B) It is a safety hazard. The cords of pumps are PVC in accordance with safety standards for aquarium pumps. Over a period of years the cord hardens and becomes brittle, movement of the cord will cause it to crack and create a risk of fire or shock. There could be an engineered solution to protect the cord but that brings us back to A.
While we haven't given up and have a concept we are playing with, it is definitely a back burner project, we have a lot of new products on the immediate horizon that you will see this fall. Every 2 years we have an international company wide brainstorming session for new products and we usually leave that meeting with 12 or more good, feasible ideas for products and at least as many minor improvements to what we have. Usually 3 or 4 of these ideas and about as many improvements make it to production. Along the way of fleshing out these ideas, there is often a hang up, usually price or potential sales volume. It doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea, it just wasn't a profitable idea. Typically ideas that come up over and over eventually do get somewhere but we often have to wait for a third party with much deeper pockets like Siemens or GE to develop a new part or product we can implement, for example much of what we do now would have been impossible just 10 years ago because the required raw materials were just too new and expensive.
