Rossmont was a trailblazing Italian aquarium pump maker that literally made waves with their innovative Mover pump and complimentary Waver controller. Unlike pretty much all other controllable pumps in the aquarium market, Rossmont’s Mover pumps use AC power instead of DC, cutting down on the need for a secondary power supply and the cost associated with them.
On its own the Mover is a great, strong, wide flow propeller style powerhead but once plugged into the Waver controller it turns into a full blown controllable and programmable water mover. On the surface this was a great marketing strategy to get users hooked on the power of the Mover pumps and upsell them with the Waver controller but unless you were really committed to the platform, the pump is affordable but the controller was expensive by comparison.
Despite the overall cost of two Mover pumps and a Waver controller being substantially cheaper than comparable pairs of controllable water pumps, the market never really responded to this value proposition. Rossmont’s most recent offering was the Skemer that uses a similarly controllable AC needle wheel pump to power the protein skimming but the pricing wasn’t competitive and the lack of buttons and app-only controllability of the Waver forced users to log into their phones to access any kind of control or program.
We received news of Rossmont’s demise and subsequent liquidation through Italian court documents indicating that the company had been dissolved. This is a real shame because Rossmont really tried to make original products with creative engineering but it was just a little bit too late to command a reasonable value and marketshare, in an aquarium industry that is both very mature and oversaturated with rebadged cheap Chinese products.
We still regularly use our Mover MX4100 propeller pumps for their ease of use and strong flow from a pretty small package so we’ll be sad to see Rossmont exit the aquarium market but hopefully their pumps and molds will resurface among the Italian hotspot of pump manufacturing. The Movers are very durable, reliable pumps so you wouldn’t be remiss to stock up on some of the larger models and we’ve heard that some of Rossmont’s distributors will be honoring the three year warranty, while supplies last, but this will vary by country and the respective distributors that sell Rossmont’s remaining stock.