The following transcript is provided by YouTube. Mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode, click HERE.
[Music]
welcome to scaling up h2o the podcast where we help you celebrate industrial
water week happy wastewater thursday everybody my name is trace blackmore and
this is my favorite holiday because it is all about us the
industrial water treater and if you didn’t know there is a website for industrial water
week and it’s not very hard to remember it’s
www.industrialwaterweek.com there you go all the information that you need to know about industrial water week
and even ideas to help you celebrate and i hope you are celebrating
folks we work hard out there and we need to celebrate that industrial water
treatment professionals rock and we celebrate the first week of every
october we start out on mondays with pre-treatment boiler tuesdays cooling
wednesdays today waste water thursday and then on fridays which is tomorrow
we’re going to close the celebration with careers and if you
would like to visit all of the amazing knowledge that we have archived away in
the scaling up h2o vault to help you celebrate
wastewater thursday i recommend that you go all the way back
in the scaling up h2o time machine yes it is a delorean
and you listen to episodes 78 and 79 in these episodes kevin cope joins us
and gives us a crash course in waste water treatment
now if you know kevin you know he is an amazing artist in fact
i proudly display one of his paintings right here in
my office kevin was so kind after we did episodes 78 and 79 i normally send a
thank you to my guest kevin sent a thank you to me and it was one
of his kevin cope original paintings and kevin thank you so much for that you are
an amazing artist and here is the amazing thing his talent does not stop at brush to
canvas kevin has the same ability with his words
so if you go back and listen to episode 78 and 79 you will feel like you are
walking through a wastewater plant as he paints the entire picture for you
as he explained some of the basics that you need to know when you start treating wastewater so i
hope to help your thursday wastewater celebration you give those
two episodes a listen my staff is always looking for metrics
so we can use that to help guide us on what’s working and what we can do better
to serve you the scaling up nation on this podcast and one of the metrics we look at and it
is one of the highest ranking metrics that we have is the amount of re-listens that we get
from listeners to past episodes there is just so much information out there and
the podcast is such a convenient way for us industrial water treaters to devour
content let’s face it we’re busy throughout our day we’re driving from location to location we are in places a
lot of places where nobody else is except for us and the podcast allows us to even listen
while we’re doing our jobs and the cool thing is the information
never gets old it never expires so enjoy every episode new
and old industrial water treatment is an industry that contains a ton of stories and we all love to hear
those stories thank goodness that’s why the podcast works i love to tell those stories and most
likely you love to tell those stories the thing about stories is they’re one
of the best ways to learn because they give context because they set up in our
mind that we can actually see ourselves doing what the people are describing
just like we experience it ourselves and here today with a new story is james
mcdonald hello scaling up nation happy industrial water week
as we celebrate wastewater thursday i am reminded of a large industrial plant
that recovered wastewater for reuse elsewhere in the plant their final treatment step involved
using reverse osmosis chlorine was added upstream with a dechlorination step immediately before
the ro membrane fouling was becoming a real problem though rl capacity was being reduced and
membrane cleaning frequency was increasing the wastewater plant was under pressure to recover more
wastewater via the ro system the membrane biopsies repeatedly revealed microbiological fouling
what was going on we started our troubleshooting by reviewing the current operation
the plant appeared to be feeding the chlorine at the proper point chlorine was being fed into the clear
well which was the point of lowest chlorine demand prior to the ro system the test record showed a consistent free
chlorine residual was being maintained so far so good but was the free chlorine residual they
were testing using the dpd free chlorine test method really showing true free chlorine
or was there an interference one common interference to the dpt free chlorine test when dealing with
wastewaters and surface waters is ammonia ammonia reacts with chlorine to form chloramines which can cause false
positives in the dpd-free chlorine test could ammonia be causing a problem here
testing showed the definite presence of ammonia the ammonia was high enough that it was possible the free chlorine
readings the operators are taking were all due to monochloramine rather than true free chlorine
monochloramine was a lot weaker biosign than chlorine for this application next a breakpoint chlorination study was
conducted where known concentrations of chlorine were added to a series of clear well
samples to find the point where all the ammonia had been eliminated and a true free chlorine residual existed
the results showed the wastewater plant was nowhere near achieving breakpoint chlorination and thus having true free
chlorine residuals they simply were not disinfecting the water as well as they thought they were
this led to two possible solutions for the wastewater plant they could either feed more chlorine or
supplement with another biosign they chose to use dbnpa as a supplemental biosign due to the large
increase that would have been required in the chlorine feed with a comparatively minimal dbnpa usage
rate the plant was able to significantly increase both membrane life and time between cleanings
i like this story because it taught me not all things are always as they seem just because a piece of equipment gives
you a reading does not mean it’s true to be an industrial water treatment professional i had to understand the
test procedures and unit operations as well including what may make them behave
outside expectations i hope you enjoyed today’s story on water and equally hope you will share
one of your own on social media to help celebrate wastewater thursday of industrial water week
don’t forget to tag them with hashtag iw22 and hashtag scalinguph2o
thank you james not all things are as they seem such a true statement and it is so very true
in this industry i can’t underscore that enough in fact if you want to learn more about chlorine
there was a recent episode episode 255 where a listener wrote in actually
several listeners and asked me a bunch of questions about halogens so feel free to go back and
listen to episode 255 and just like james suggested
please share your stories with us this is a great week to share the stories that you have to not only celebrate you
being industrial water treaters but to celebrate every industrial water treater
out there and put out there your stories to help us realize that we’re not alone
we are part of a community we’re the scaling up nation
we help each other we build this industry to be better than when we found
it so if you’ve got a story share it on social media and be sure to hashtag it with iw22
and scaling up h2o also to help you celebrate this week we
have been conducting many interviews not many interviews well i guess there’s
five of them but so there’s a lot many there’s also many as they’re small
they’re small intentionally on the theme of the day so you guessed
it today we are talking about wastewater now these mini interviews are small
so you can share them you can educate people that you want to
know this information and we made it very easy for you to share who do you
share it with well you can share with your neighbor your uncle your team members your new team members your
perspective team members you get to figure all that stuff out our job is to make sure you have the
information so you can share it so now here’s the interview
my lab partner during this wastewater thursday is dave christopherson of dave
christopherson consulting dave how are you celebrating industrial water week
oh that’s a great question water and my business water treatment we
all understand it but for some reason my wife still doesn’t know what i do after 45 years of marriage and my family
doesn’t so i’m going to do the week again trying to explain that i don’t pop my heads in neighborhood
sewers and the other things that somehow they think i do well dave this is all about
the neighborhood sewers today we’re talking about wastewater so it might be confusing to your family so uh we’ll try
to clear some things up today uh thank you for joining me during wastewater thursday absolutely thanks for having me
and uh always a pleasure you and i met on the awt board and i’m just scared to
think of how many years ago that was yeah let’s not even talk about that
so with that uh you you’ve got uh knowledge in all areas of water
treatment but today we’re going to be using your knowledge specifically with waste water and we get a whole bunch of
people that listen to the scaling up h2o podcast some people have been in the industry for
as long as you and i have others have been in the industry maybe for a week so
i thought maybe we would meet in the middle and just discuss what waste water
is so if someone came up to you on the street maybe they just had a little bit of knowledge and said what
the heck is this waste water stuff how would you answer their question yeah good question water
water treatment water industry those are all really really huge fields and waste water and wastewater treatment is a
subcategory of that for sure so wastewater is i’ve got water and now i’ve got something in it that i maybe
don’t want in it anymore so i could have gotten that in there because of what i did in the bathroom i could have gotten
that in there by what i did in you know a process i contaminated it contaminated it in
you know making steel or making automobiles or whatever so waste water is water that’s been used for some
purpose and then now has some components that necessarily need to be removed if
you want to reuse that water is there a difference between industrial wastewater commercial wastewater
residential wastewater yeah for sure so a lot of times if you
think about wastewater people think about like i was talking earlier municipal wastewater
you know we’ve got um bacteria coliform sewage basically is what they’re thinking about so that’s
what municipal plants largely contend with industrial plants more of the processes
so the contaminants in that are oils heavy metals
processes like when you make glue or you make textiles or you make
you know personal care products and food you get those kinds of voices in there so there they can be addressed a little
differently maybe when you first decide that you’re going to go after a customer what do you need
to know before you start chatting with them for an industrial application for sure
very common to all your other things you want to learn as much as you can around the water so it’s not about the
water usually it’s about what’s in the water what the water is used for what kind of treatment techniques are
available so you look at all of the components the possible components of the water what’s
problematic a big thing is variability of all those components temperature you know is a
consideration so really what do you do here what are some of the
things that are going to be getting into the water and then what do you have to do are we discharging it do we have to
meet some some some compliance are we doing a partial treatment going to a municipal treatment
are we wanting to reuse it to recycle it so big picture stuff you get a big water balance what’s in there what do we need
to do and for somebody that wants to learn more about the topic of wastewater what
are your favorite places favorite books to go to i’m a little biased you talked about awt
and the board i think the awt manual is a great starting point that’s
i didn’t help write it but i i was able to edit it i was asked to edit um you know rich dason and the guys that
wrote it really put together a lot of good information so i would definitely start there i learned a lot when i went
through the editing process of it you can watch youtube’s you know if you want to see how a municipal water
treatment plant works or you know any types of processes there’s so many videos that are really good
starting point you can literally buy dozens of books on wastewater
you can get wastewater chapters from water treatment companies from awt companies from the majors there’s so
many sources but you got to start with really where am i interested am i
interested in industrial chemical physical mostly do i like the biological part it’s huge it’s just such a huge
field so many opportunities what’s something that you can share with the scaling up nation either a difficult
story that you just triumphed over a funny story what what’s a good wastewater story that
you can share with us a good wastewater story
i’m probably one of the first real waste water projects that i learned how
complicated it could be was in a in a steel mill the learning opportunities were huge
trying to recycle the water it’s not funny it is funny when you think you go into
an opportunity and then the more you dig into it the more complicated it
becomes but also the greater the reward becomes so
you know that was one of the first real projects i had where i had to do things that i hadn’t done before you know total
mass balance of the plan an ionic balance you know all the what-if questions
because there are so many processes that we’re going to be involved because if you’re recycling a water internally in a
steel mill with all the stuff that’s in it back to membranes back to ro back to processes you have to have to
do it right so i i guess it was a huge huge learning experience some of the funny parts were just trying to do pilot
studies and trying to keep yourself awake for 36 straight hours not so funny but at the end successful
well the studies always start out with jar testing what are your tips on jar testing
well jar testing may or may not be involved if you’re doing coagulation flocculation some some
treatments today they don’t even use polymers or flocculants it’s always good to know
what you think is going to work what other people have tried if you just start from the beginning every time
and have to reevaluate the best phs or changes of phs all the inorganics organics all the flocculants you could
literally spend a week or two weeks so always get advice first have a plan
before you go in there would be my advice if you’re doing jar studies because you can really get lost um and
spend days when somebody could have told you oh i know that waste here’s what you use you know so start start with now
knowledge or for advice from somebody i would suggest well dave i want to thank you for coming
on scaling up h2o and celebrating wastewater thursday with us
oh sure thank you very much for having me
dave so good to have you back on scaling up h2o to help us celebrate waste water
thursday dave like chuck hamrick was one of the first people i got the honor of meeting
when i got into leadership at the association of water technologies and as
i mentioned if dave’s voice sounds familiar he was interviewed on episode 269
feel free to go back and listen i know you will pick up something new
some of the best stories that i have found in this industry and of course you
figured it out we’re celebrating stories this industrial water week and some of
the best stories i always get is when i ask people what is something they wish they knew
when they first started in this industry here’s how sean mcgrade answered that
question hey scaling up nation this is sean mcrae
one thing i wish i would have known in the first week of being in the water treatment industry is the plethora of
information and resources there are available if you go looking for them
sean is so right if you look for something you will find it i’m amazed at
how many people don’t look how many people will look at something they’ll
say i don’t know how that works i don’t know why that is happening and they
leave it folks that’s your opportunity that is the world inviting you to learn so if
you forget those things because you have so much going on in your day keep a notebook with you send yourself a note
whatever you need to do if you need to use electronic or paper write those things down because that is your
invitation to learn something new there is so much out there
that if you care to look for it you will find it and i started off this
episode by talking about the wealth of knowledge we have right here on scaling
up h2o now if you just search the podcast through your favorite podcast
player you’re gonna find every episode out there and they are searchable however there are so many people that do
not visit our website and you are missing out because just our website alone has so much information on
there and yes you heard me right it’s not just our episodes that we archive
we do so much more we have transcripts of every single episode the reason that
we do this is we want to make the episodes easily searchable for you
just the other day i typed something in the famous google search bar
and i was trying to find something out of a particular topic and the very first
thing that popped up in my search results was scaling up h2o
now i already knew what was in that article but i didn’t know the dozen that
followed it so if you’re not at least searching google to find out information
you’re probably not working hard enough but if you are not searching the scaling up h2o website
you’re probably missing out on some very easy data for you to enhance the
knowledge that you’re looking for to troubleshoot an issue now you can do that on google even better you can go to
our search bar and it just searches our website and like i said all those transcripts are designed to make
episodes easy to find when you are looking for specific topics now while
you’re on the scaling up h2o website you can also learn about current events
i try to let you know what’s going on during most of our episodes in the water treatment industry
but you might not know this there is another way a way that you can use when you are
sitting down in front of your calendar and that’s by going to scaling up h2o.com and going to our events page
our great team here at scaling up h2o puts every event that i mentioned
actually some that i don’t mention on that events page
and it has everything that you need to know about that event you simply click on it and it has every link that you
need to find out more information it also contains a link so you can
create a calendar event without typing anything i’m so proud of my staff for
putting that together i know you are going to love that
and while you’re there there is also an updated resources page
there’s no doubt about it when we have a guest on our podcast they are very generous with their information they’re
always sharing how we can find out more about the topics that they are speaking
on but let’s face it we’re driving around we’re not taking notes on all of these speakers well you’re not but we
are and we’ve got all of that on this webpage so if you go to the
resources page you will find resources that our guests are speaking of and just
recently if you listen to episode 263 through 266 you know
august was legionella awareness month and we released a new legionella
resources page and the traffic response to that page has been amazing
we have tried to make that page the one-stop spot for you to go to find out
more information about legionella and we’ve had so many people
call us or email us saying hey can you put our information on there and if it’s
unique absolutely we are doing that so we’re trying to make it extremely easy
for you the professional water treater to easily learn more about legionella
after all the entire month was about legionella awareness you can become more
aware by simply going to the legionella resources page on the website
in fact that’s just a small amount of all of the things that we have on the scaling up h2o website and all i did was
talk about the scaling up h2o website now sean said that there is a plethora of information out there i can’t say
that word without thinking of the three amigos and i hope people out there understand that reference that being
said there’s so many other organizations out there that we help support that you
can also find information on so the bottom line is if you’re not looking to
find new information you’re just not trying hard enough that was one of the items that chuck
hamrick mentioned on episode 271 last week he said when he first got in this
industry it was hard to find new information he had to travel to places to get that
information from people because it was just stored in their head now if he was
lucky it was in a book somewhere but he had to read the entire book to figure
out where that information is i am so glad that we live in today’s world one
if you listened yesterday we have air conditioning and i would not be in the south if we didn’t have air conditioning
but we also have such great ways to easily search information and make ourselves
more developed around specific topics so we can be better water treaters when we
get in front of our customers we have more knowledge when we troubleshoot the problem the second time because we learn
new information and we got all of that experience if you don’t already know
there’s a plethora of information out there you just have to go looking for it
nation do you have a favorite way or a place that you like to go to find new
information a great way to share that with all of us and help us celebrate
industrial water week is to post that on social media and hashtag it with iw22
and scaling up h2o i know i and everybody else will be glad that you did
nation happy wastewater thursday now before i sign out and introduce today’s
encore presentation of detective h2o i want to tease you a little bit
tomorrow is not an encore episode of detective h2o
it is a brand new episode never before
heard before released only to celebrate tomorrow
careers friday and to close out the celebration of industrial water week
2022 but that’s not all there is a guest voice on this episode
that i’m sure you’ll recognize but you’re going to have to tune in tomorrow to learn more for now
here is detective h2o and the case of breaking free
welcome to detective h2o the case of breaking free
the rain ran serpentine paths down the windows of the rusty blue fort as herbert henry oxidane pi cwt set waiting
for johnny keeland to open a side powerhouse door at pork bellies processing
when the lanky man’s shaggy head popped out the water detective made a run for it dodging raindrops the best he could
get in here h2o before you melt i’m running between the drops let’s see this reverse osmosis system of
yours right this way said johnny as he snaked his way through the building like i said on the horn this ro system goes
south real fast we’ll clean it clean it good and a week later maybe two
it’s moping along begging to be taken to the cleaners again how do you determine when it needs to be cleaned
well we’re using the normalization program provided by the membrane manufacturer when the normalization
permeate flows drop by 10 to 15 percent and the pressure drops increased by 15 percent we clean
we’re barely keeping up with the permeate demand hmm can you tell me about the water you’re
processing through the our old system oh yeah we’re the largest pork belly processing plant this side of the
mississippi you see that requires a lot of water we get our water directly from
the grace noel river after filtration clarification and disinfection some of the water comes to
this ro system to make high purity water for us our silt density index is run daily
it is always spot on showing good quality water for oral membranes our free chlorine test before the ro is
also always spot on before the dechlorination step you see yet despite
my crew babying this system the membranes have to be cleaned far more frequently than we ever imagined that
can’t be good for them have you sent any of the membranes out for an autopsy to determine what is
fouling them yes three times it is always biological fouling
biological fouling interesting let’s take a look i’d like to walk down
the length of the system see the chemical feed points review your data take a look at the autopsy reports and
run a few tests myself let’s start with the walk through for the next several hours the water
detective got the scoop on the pork belly’s processing water treatment system everything appeared to be shipshape this was a well-run plant and
as far as he could tell well-designed the crew’s care and dedication were obvious
figured out the culprit yet detective not quite yet but i have a hunch
let’s go collect some water right before the chlorine disinfectant is added we’ll need a clean bucket
[Music]
after collecting the water sample detective h2o lined up several beakers with 100 ml of the water sample in each
prepared a diluted bleach solution and carefully injected different amounts of the solution into each water sample
after thoroughly stirring he started the timer in the meantime he also tested for
ammonia earlier the water detective had calculated the residence time of the chlorine disinfectant in the system from
the point of injection to the point of dechlorination just before the auro system it was 25 minutes
after this time elapsed he tested each 100 ml water sample for free chlorine then he fired up his computer barely
more than an abacus and graphed out the data lastly he smiled early seemed to find it
as a smile johnny noticing the change in the water detective’s face said i don’t know
whether to be scared or encouraged by that uh smile you’ve got going on there
are you on to the culprit definitely encouraged i may have cracked this case wide open take a look at this
i added different levels of diluted bleach to each of the water samples you saw me pour out the chlorine
concentration added increased from left to right as i had them setting on the lab counter i gave them time for the free chlorine
to react with whatever was in the water at the same time it would have in a system out there
after this time i measured the remaining free chlorine finally i graphed it out here see this curve
yes there’s a bump in the middle is that normal well yes and no
but it’s what i suspected i would see in your case when chlorine is introduced to a system it reacts with several things our desire
is for it to react with the microbes in the water first so the water is properly disinfected that way your membranes
won’t fall unfortunately there are other components in the water that can react with the chlorine even faster the typical culprit
is ammonia ammonia can get into surface waters from farm runoff and so forth when ammonia reacts with chlorine it
forms chloramines such as monochloramine a form of combined chlorine
now chloramines are disinfectant but some research shows that monochloramine may be 25 times less effective than free
chlorine at killing microbes to get the killing power free chlorine you must first react with all the ammonia after
the ammonia is gone and the chloramine reactions are at completion the remaining chlorine disinfectant you add
will form free chlorine this is called break point chlorination and that’s where the upward sloping line
starts after the hump on the graph okay i get what you’re seeing there detective h2o but i still don’t get what it has to
do with us we test our water for free chlorine every shift not monochloramine but free
chlorine it is within the control range every time that should be good enough
shouldn’t it what gives yes you make an excellent point which brings me to the second part of my story
what you see isn’t always what you get monochloramine can be a positive interference to the dpd free chlorine
test to use that means even though the sample turns pink and you think you have a true free chlorine residual in your water it is
actually monochloramine interfering with your test you don’t have the killing power you think you have in your water
which would certainly explain the biological fouling on your ro membranes and you’re sure this is happening to us
i tested the water prior to disinfection for ammonia and found it look at this level to reach break point chlorination
you need to feed a weight ratio of 8 to 1 or higher of chlorine to ammonia based
upon your records and data you’re only feeding enough chlorine to get halfway up the hump there’s no true free chlorine at all to
do the disinfection you want wow what do we do you have a few options
first you can feed more chlorine to the system to reach break point chlorination and beyond to your true free chlorine
control range second you could supplement the chlorine biocide with another biosign which is rl
membrane compatible third you could look at replacing the chlorine biocide with another one that
may be more effective considering your current water conditions there are other options we may be able
to consider as well there are pluses and minuses that come with each option we can do a thorough feasibility
analysis on each of these options let’s prove my theory first by feeding more chlorine
that sounds like a good plan detective h2o thanks for your time detective h2o suspicions were proven to
be true over the coming year as they are all membrane cleaning intervals increased from weekly to quarterly after
initially increasing the chlorine feed a disinfection feasibility study was conducted systems were piloted and
changes were made that increased the cleanings every six months detective h2o had truly saved the day once again
[Music]
in the underbelly and penthouses of the metropolis of waterville where their boilers percolate and cooling towers fog
there is one man who works tirelessly to end corrosion stop scale fight low-life
microbes and conserve water that man is detective h2o best water treater this
side of the ohio solving water problems drop by drop
[Music]
you