The following transcript is provided by YouTube. Mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode, click HERE.
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[Music]
welcome to scaling up the podcast where we scale up on knowledge so we don’t scale up our systems my name is Trace
Blackmore the host of the scaling up H2O podcast and Nation I’m going to rant at
you just for a moment I was speaking with an individual that was probably in
their early 30s and they were not taking care of themselves first what do I mean
by that they were not taking advantage of their company’s 401K most likely you have some sort of
pre-tax saving device that your company is allowing you to put part of your
income into pre-tax dollars which means that you’re putting your full wage in
without having to tax it you’re actually able to put more money in lowering your
tax burden and your company is giving you an incentive most likely where they
can match the proceeds up to a certain amount that you are putting in that just
sounds amazing in all Realms doesn’t it well you don’t get taxed on the money it’s growing tax-free you know you
probably have to pay some tax when it comes out by the way that’s the three-legged tax stool so there’s three
legs of tax whether you when you make it when it grows when you take it out and you can normally find a way to get rid
of one or two of those taxes but there’s a third one that they’re going to get you with with a 401k you get some tax
benefit like we just mentioned and you also get some free money from your
company yes I said free money that’s exactly what it is so most likely you
can put a certain percentage of your income in that your company will match dollar for dollar well this individual
that I was speaking to did not think that they wanted and the word they used
was lock up their money so they couldn’t get to it they wanted their money
available when they wanted their money so we had a conversation around this one
if your income is already spent before you made it you’ve got some things that
you need to work out because obviously we’re spending more than we’re bringing in and that is never a good situation to
put you and your family in folks that is just stressful please don’t buy anything
that you cannot afford to pay for right now and if you absolutely positively
must buy something that you’ve got to go into debt for think about it don’t buy
it right away think about it for at least a day if not a week or a month and
think about is that debt really worth it do I need it that bad if the answer is
yes after a week or a month then it’s probably something that you do need but
please do not go to debt on something on impulse and the individual that I’m speaking of that’s pretty much what they
did they saw something they went out and bought it and they were living well beyond their means and they did not want
to take any money that they could have in their pocket and put it towards their future in the 401K
we then got into a conversation that they were leaving their compensation on the table because they were not taking
advantage of that company match they were leaving their compensation on the
table they were not taking everything that their company was trying to give
them your employer is trying to help you save for your future they do that by
offering a vehicle like a 401k and then they’re able to help you fund it by
offering some sort of a company match if you work for a company that has a
investment vehicle like that please please please make sure that you take
advantage of it you’re doing yourself a favor and if you do not have a company
program like that find one of the many financial planners out there and tell
them that you want to start saving for your retirement I hope that social security or whatever’s out there is
continuing to be out there but folks we’ve got to take care of ourselves we need to make sure we pay ourselves first
and that’s the mentality that I hope that you have instead of paying something that you
don’t need that you’ve now gone into debt for don’t make that decision if you
don’t really need it don’t go into debt for it pay yourself first pay yourself
just like you would a bill and make sure that you are providing for your future
once you’ve done that then pay your bills and if you have anything left over
that’s when you can make some of those extra purchases so many people do the
exact opposite and then they start spending beyond their means and folks
that’s just not fun that is stressful marriages get broken up because because
of that and I think you can save a lot of stress in you and your family’s lives
if you just think about that in the order that I mentioned it pay yourself first then pay your bills and then
anything left over that’s that’s your extra spending and above all else if you
have a program that you can take advantage of that somebody is going to
give you some sort of tax benefit on and give you free money I think you would be
foolish not to take advantage of it so your homework if you’re not taking advantage of a program like that find
out if there is one available and what you have to do to get started and folks
if you have an issue with debt I don’t want you to be embarrassed there’s so many people out there that do have
issues with that it is so easy to get credit it is so easy to buy stuff and I
think there’s a lot of people that fall prey to that don’t feel shame of that but get out of that debt snowball and I
use snowball because one of my heroes talking about debt is Dave Ramsey and
we’re going to go ahead and put a link on our show notes page directly to Dave Ramsey’s website and he does a program
called Financial Freedom and if you are unfamiliar with that it is one of the most simplistic programs out there and
it is a very easy way for you to start using that debt snowball to your
advantage to start paying off some of those debts and then making sure that you can get yourself out of debt and I
have to tell you because I’ve been there when you start getting rid of debt and
you know where all your income is going and you are in total control of that it
is just a different type of living and it is so much less stressful than
worrying about how am I going to make that next payment Nation all that will
be on our show notes page again if you have a problem with that don’t be ashamed of that do something about it
and uh make sure you’re talking with your employer about those 401ks Nation
several years ago I met an individual his name is Bruce ketrick senior and
just an amazing individual he was on the show a couple of weeks ago and Bruce has
just been one of my mentors throughout my water treatment Journey there was
absolutely no reason for Bruce to help me as much as he did but I asked him and
he said yes and Bruce has taught me so much he has helped me when I started
building out my facility and I wanted to know what he wished he did when he built
his facility and I got all these ideas so I could start building out my
facility in a way like I’ve already done it before and I learned from his
mistakes and his triumphs so we had a lot of things that we wouldn’t have done had I not spoken with Bruce before we
built out this facility same thing with lending Bruce has been a tremendous
Mentor with me on how to put water treatment products together my father taught me my core
knowledge of water treatment but my dad never Blended he never owned his own
company he worked for somebody and we just simply placed orders and those
products came directly from the factory to our customers and he wasn’t able to
tell me anything about that so a lot of trial and error on my part and a lot of
speaking with Bruce and I know several of you out there have asked me questions at awt seminars about blending or some
people I even work as their technical director and they have issues trying to build a product for a customer and all
the components will not go in and there’s a right order and a wrong order and some things require high pH some
things require low ph and a lot of these things I have learned because I’ve
messed them up but also a lot of them I’ve learned because I’ve got people that I can ask questions to so I thought
many of you probably have questions whether you blend or not how do you actually get all of the secret sauce
that arrives in that 55 gallon drum that you ordered for your customer so here is
Bruce and I talking about blending
I’m here today with Bruce ketrick senior of Guardian CSC and we’re going to be
talking about blending blending is this Mystic Voodoo out there how did our
juice actually become to be the juice that we are using at our customers
account so Bruce welcome back to the show well thank you that’s very kind of you you
did so well we had you back so you’re going to be a regular segment in the show no I’m just teasing you you look
like you were getting scared there don’t don’t worry I was getting scared but that’s all right Bruce I know I came to
you years ago and you helped me when I first started formulating my father was a brilliant water treater but he did not
do anything in formulating and you were one of the first people that got me
started in that you told me a couple of key things some things to look for and I
think the biggest piece of advice you gave me was it was as much as an art as
it was a science so I’ll start off with that let’s say we just started a a
company and we need a product line where does somebody start with that
well unfortunately if you’re in that situation you have to go to a Toller and hope they have a generic product line
for you to start with after you’ve had some experience and understand what products work in your area because it
changes by water obviously you need to take a look at the basics of how to blend obviously you just need a tank
with a mixer you need Quality Water to be your batch whether it you have good
water you just need to soften it or whether you need to be out of the water make sure you’ve got high quality water and then from there you really want to
look at the system what are you trying to do with the system is it scale control is it corrosion is it both is it
which how does the water cycle up and then take a look at the different raw materials and say
I can use a validate here I can’t use a live date there I I need High dispersancy I was a pvdc with a stable
product for discharge or I can have a little orthophosphate for corrosion control with HTTP or I’m not using an
oxidizer and I use atmp you have to look at pretty much reverse engineering you
kind of say to get what I want I want so many parts per million of this raw material this dispersant I have iron so
I want to go with an amps or an essay you know a cell phone group I have to have an azol of some sort so if it’s low
PH I’ll use vzt if it’s iPhones polytriazole I can use a copper bullet
up to about neutral it works really well which is a blend of them and you figure out the PPM of each one you need and
then back it into the formula and then once you back it into form you to say okay how do I make that go together
that’s where the art form comes in an example I have a product which I’m using
say pbtc uh as my phosphonate I’ve got a term polymer so it’s a real strong aams essay
so I’ve got good cleaning it’s going through a cooling water I’ve got Hazel in it but I want a little more phosphate
well because I’ve got so many different materials with sodium I have to look at a potassium well the potassium used is
dkpp Tetra potassium pyrophosphate you don’t just blend that in
tkpp solubility is 3.16 percent at cold water it’s 40 percent at 190
degrees so the art for there is you take that you make a 20 solution with hot water
subtract that water from your basic water blend and then you add it in once it’s solubilized it’ll stay soluble
but if you try to blend it in cold you may get it in suspension it’s just going to fall out in 24 hours
you have to look at if I’m using liquids or powders if I’m using powders I have to realize there’s
anti-caking agents in most powder especially nitrites costs and things like that because they absorb moisture if they do to prevent them from having a
brick they put an anti-cage kicking agent it could be a calcium it could be a silica it’d be something like that
those will flock out once you blend your product because silica’s absorbed
becomes six to ten times their volume well if you filter that out it’s not a
measurable amount but you can see it in the blend so if you’re making something like that the
art form there becomes you make your blend it looks perfect you set it over
to the side and let it settle for 48 hours and then you just run it through a basic filter to take that out so you
have a nice pure product real realistically if you get my the appearance it has no effect on a project
it will hold no effect on the pump it won’t bite it so what are you looking to do and that’s why we create different
products for different applications what’s the Metallurgy what do I have aluminum system do I have a multi-metal
system do you have a system that’s all Iron you come in a Dairy and your evaporator of cooler is galvanizing coil
and iron well you might want a little Hazel but you don’t really don’t need any so a lot
of that goes into how you blend Bruce is there any reference material that you recommend for people to look up what
different raw materials do what the solubility of the raw materials are I’ll tell you that has the formulation by Bob
cabano which is very outdated and very old still the basics of the basics you
may have to be able to cross-reference which Mayo Spurs he’s talking about is really this product now
but it it tells you what their solubilities are what they are how you put it together is up to you there’s no
one place where you go to learn how to formulate you have to look at a number of different places
and again I was fortunate that when I started uh I had a technical service director
and a technical director that did not agree with each other and I work for the technical service
director so he would send me to the lab with instructions on how to make something or to figure out something
that had never been done before so that he could stick it to Nick and come up with a product that worked
and we came up with uh the first time a military-based product was used by vets was in 88.
I created a military-based product for corrosion control for NASA in 1974. 14
years before Melinda chemistry became popular and that was because zarkowski
was Stan zarkowski who I were for uh said we can make this work and Nick said
no and so he said you go to the lab you figure it out build a cooling water loop and prove it
and we did and it had 113th the corrosion rate of all the other products
are on the market at the time so I don’t know how to start someone else I know I
got started and I know I’ve got two people here that I’m trying to teach to formulate and uh
you have to let them try and fail to learn what happens I have a young
young man in the lab that is trying to reformulate a product the last couple days and he came up with some
recommendations that were so outside the box it was fabulous and I that’s what I want and he tried a
couple they didn’t work which I knew would but you have to let them do that and then when it didn’t you sit down and
discuss it and uh I will probably say he will know what I do in my 50s and his 20s
so God bless him I remember early on I asked you a question about putting some
things together and I know you knew the answer but you said I don’t know try it and I went to lab and I tried it and it
didn’t go together and you encouraged me to well maybe it didn’t go together in the order that you put it in and uh
wasn’t the best blend I had ever come up with but it did teach me that order of
addition is everything and if you would have told me that and of course you knew
what you were doing if you would have told me that I wouldn’t have realized it but experiencing it for myself I I now
know really what that is not that I wanted you to suffer but that’s how you learn
I do the same through my people here I make them try different orders of addition I know which one is probably
going to be the best because I’ve failed so many times that I realize that’s not going to work
but if you just tell somebody something that doesn’t necessarily allow them to
learn they need to learn and then the next time you see a formulation like oh wait a minute that order of addition doesn’t
make sense because this likes to go in an acid State and I’ve just put the caustic in and now I’m
in an outlet State that’s not going to go in or this has to be an alcoholic state so it has to be last you know
those those are very important that we look at solubilities and then later when you grow up I’ll teach you how to cheat
and use alcohol extensions but coupling agents are a lot of fun Bruce there are
people listening that are probably never going to blend their own products but they might have some questions in the
field if maybe something happened with quality control How could somebody do a
Serial dilution and what should they be looking for to make sure they’ve got the right product
well every product has an SDS will show us what’s basically in it uh your label has anything on it that you have to list
which is still basically made ingredients and you should have information to say what the feed rate is
this should be fed 100 PPM or a thousand or two thousand or whatever you could easily take the DI water you
have in your kit that little squeeze bottle you can take a syringe and you
can make an aliquot just a simple dilution once you’ve made that dilution you take your di 900 and you can run the
different metals or the different phosphonates or the different azols that azolosopher
because you have to UV digestion on it but you can run some of those things and see is this what it should be you know
why why is this number a third of what the number should be what’s going on
a lot of times the problem you have is the product came in and it was dark brown and now it’s lighter brown and you
go oh there’s a quality problem that’s not a quality problem your different raw materials will vary in certain level of
Darkness if you want to say and it’ll change that color what you
really want to look at is the actives what are those actives that work and are they where they should be but that’s
part of what we kind of talked about Technical Training too is we say this is what these raw materials do so if you’re
having a problem and you notice that you know what you’re working with and that
problem relates to what this should be then that’s the thing you should be looking at the product say is there a
problem with this because I should not be having this problem if I have this level of whatever the raw material is
what’s the bare minimum that people need to know about their products and what I mean by this is there’s so many people
out there that know they use their x410 product they know it goes into a cooling
tower and they know that if they run a test it needs to be between this parameter and that parameter but that’s
all they know right and most people that’s the way they operate I don’t
operate that way we have a product application guide for our products and it starts with of course the numbering
system for the product the identifier the next one shows what raw materials are in it not the percentages but it
contains gluconic acid pvpc poly triazole AMS paa whatever it may be the
next one will will say the feed rate which is both the general feed rate and
we call a Target feed rate which is somewhere in the middle where you really want to be not over feet or under feed
there’s then is a kosher is it G6 is it you know that
listing so they have that and then a comment section says where this should be applied how it should be applied what
to look for and how to control it it’s controlled by fluorescein PTSA malinte
organophosphonate op whatever test is required and I feel that even though I’m
giving a lot of information to my people in the field it allows them to select a product
better and allows them to look at the application and when the system changes which they do to say whoa
that’s not going to work because I know I’ve been trained on raw materials and this one’s not going to work here so I
got to change products now I’m sure there’s some owners listening to that and they’re thinking I don’t want to
give all that information why do you choose to give that information what’s
the risk versus reward I think everyone’s opinion of what they want to do is their opinion and they
deserve that that’s fine and if they don’t want to do it I respect that I don’t have a problem with that I do it
with my people because I teach my people to a level to understand what the raw materials do
what the actions are in the system and how can I teach them what the actions are if I don’t tell them what’s in the
product to do it again they don’t know percentages they don’t know how to make it they don’t know where the raw
material was purchased from they just know the generic uh the downside is obviously if they
leave and go someplace else they’ll have information that could be critical to compete with us and
we have had people leave to date we’ve had very little loss based on that and
when it gets to the point that that becomes a critical negative we might reconsider but so far it is not there
was a cartoon that I remember seeing I don’t remember the artist but it was two managers talking and one said well what
if we train people and they leave and the other guy said well what if we don’t may stay
that’s exactly how I look at it I’ve had people leave I don’t have a lot of them do it but it happens I’ve had people go
to competitors and you know they’ll pick an account up here and there and that happens but in general it has been
anything that was real damaging to us but my real fear is if I don’t put the
best train the best quality people out there in the industry what’s that going to cost
Bruce is as we both alluded to learning means you’re making mistakes any fun
mistakes you want to share with the audience I don’t know if you want to call this fun but uh in one of our
applications we use it 18 sulfuric acid and one of my blenders decided that we
could take 66 by May so furic and bled it down to 18 rather than spend the
extra money and buy it from a commodity dealer without talking to us so if you’re a gastric generates a tremendous
amount of heat and it took our stainless steel blend tank and turned it black the
heat was high enough that the inch and a half schedule 80 plastic lines started
to Sag from the heat the pump bound and we were spraying hoses on the outside of
the tank for about three hours until the heat thinking please dear God Don’t Preach please dear God don’t leak out of
this tank I don’t know if that’s funny but I look back at it now and go this is
why we talked before we make something new we had a customer that tried to do that
in a plastic tank they were trying and it was it was just it was just a a
little mound of of blue plastic the next day oh yeah it generates a lot of heat
come on Bruce thank you so much for sharing some of your experiences with blending of course you know you can only
get better by trying it uh by by getting in the lab figuring out what doesn’t
work I think that’s where most of my educations come from all my failures you know eventually I got something right
but I learned a bunch by what didn’t go right and of course I had somebody to
guide me along the way and that was you so thank you for that well thank you very much let’s try to
Nation as I said I owe a lot to Bruce ketrick senior he has just been an
amazing person in my life and Bruce thank you for all that you do and all
that you continue to do Nation here’s some events that you might want to mark
on your calendar the American Chemical Society is having their meeting and Expo
on August 21st through 25th that’s going to be in Chicago Illinois and this is
where they get together to share ideas and Advance scientific and Technical
knowledge there are a lot of Chemists in our industry and several of those chemists are members of the American
Chemical Society so this is something that you want to find out more information about please go to our show
notes page and we will have that for you also you might be interested in the
water quality Association as having their Aqua Tech trade show in Mexico that’s going to be September 6th through
8th in Mexico City so if you want to find out more about that please go to
our show notes page and then finally the association of Metropolitan water
agencies is having their 2022 executive management Conference October 30th
through November 2nd in Savannah Georgia folks if you have not been to Savannah
Georgia do yourself a favor get to Savannah Georgia it is one of my favorite places in my home state and
this conference is going to be about the water sector and how do we put best
practices when it comes to drinking water so if that’s the type of water
treatment that you practice you definitely want to check that out as always that information will be on our
show notes page Nation we always want to think a little bit further than where we
are now and to help us with that is James McDonald for a brand new thinking
on water with James welcome to thinking on water with James
the segment where we don’t give you the answers we give you the topics and questions for you to think about drop by
drop now let’s get to it in this week’s episode we’re thinking about the oxidation reduction potential
or orp first what is an orp what is it measuring
why are you trying to control it next what can impact orp can pH temperature
and or type of oxidant impact or appear readings can you pick an orp number off a chart
that will accurately maintain a Target oxidant residual or does the orp set point had to be
determined for each system based upon tested oxidant residual levels how frequently does the orp probe need
to be calibrated take this week to think about oxidation reduction potential or orp be sure to
follow hashtag tow 22 and hashtag scalingup H2O share your thoughts on
each week’s thinking on water I’m James McDonald and I look forward to learning more from you
James thank you for that and for all that you do in our industrial water
treatment World by the way industrial water week is going to be October 3rd
through 7th so make sure you mark your calendars for that we’ll have a brand new episode for you each and every day
that week and I’m hoping that you will hashtag all your pictures to social
media so we can share in this celebration Nation I’ll have a brand new
episode for you next Friday in the meantime take care of yourself take care of your customers take care of each
other and I will have a brand new episode for you next week of scaling up H2O
[Music] Nation almost two years ago I started
the rising tide Mastermind we have over four groups and a waiting list for a new
group folks it is wildly successful and what I mean by that is that we are able
to process issues together and get new ideas about how we solve the issues that
we all face day to day in ways that we might not have come up with on our own
folks look into the rising tide Mastermind to see if it is right for you by going to scalingup h2o.com forward
slash Mastermind if what you see looks interesting schedule and appointment with me and we will see if the group is
right for you and you are right for the group