The following transcript is provided by YouTube, mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode click HERE.
[Music] foreign [Music]
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[Music] welcome to scaling up H2O the podcast
where we scale upon knowledge so we don’t scale up our systems I’m Trace Blackmore the host of scaling up H2O and
I’m also Trace Blackmore certified water technologist and I know there’s so many
people out there that are thinking about getting their certified water
technologists designation but oh my goodness I’ve got to sign up to take
that examination and folks I know that is stressful I also know there are so
many other people out there that could be cwts but they lack the confidence to
sign up for the exam so if I am talking to you I’ve got something for you and
that is go to scalingup h2o.com forward slash Academy that once again that’s
scaling up h2o.com forward slash Academy and you’ll see that we are starting to
put out some of the best water treatment training classes in the industry I love
water treatment training and it’s always been a dream of mine to be able to do
training at a larger scale and allow people to get trained on their own terms
when they have time to do it so this is a self-serve when you can do it option
but one of the courses we’ve put out actually two courses we put out the cwt
practice exam course now this is a confidence building course designed to
give you a little taste of what some of the questions may be on your examination
and give you some confidence so you can sign up to take the examination now if
you go to scaling up h2o.com forward slash Academy you will see we have a
free version of this course now this free version is me going going through
the awts explanation of what you have to do to get a cwt I just simply work
straight through the handbook and they have 10 sample questions in the handbook
and I work through those 10 sample questions with you so you get a kind of an example of what you’re going to get
for the paid course now I would love it if you went ahead after that and signed
up for the paid course that is a 100 question examination that my staff wrote
to help give you confidence around the cwt exam it allows you to take the exam
and then I work each question for you so you can see how I came up with the
correct answer I also give you tips and tricks on how to logic your way into
better answer choices and then I give you resources so you can learn more
about the topics on the questions that you need some help with all of that is
at scaling up h2o.com forward slash Academy I hope you sign up today and I
would love to shake your hand the next time I see you and congratulate you on
getting your certified water technologist designation Nation let’s face it there’s so many
people out there that do not have clean readily available resources to just go
straight to a faucet and get water and on average people have to walk six
kilometers to go to and bring back water and it’s not even water that many of us
would even consider drinking if we had a choice so folks there is a global Water
Crisis and there’s so many things that we do in industrial water treatment to
conserve water but here’s something that you can do up and above that on May 20th
this year team World Vision is having their Global 6K why is it a 6K well I
just told you it takes the average person to go get water and bring back
six kilometers of walking when they don’t have that readily available to
them and just think how long it takes to walk six kilometers think about the roads that they have to walk on for
those six kilometers so it’s taking kids out of school it’s allowing people to
get harmed along those roads perhaps some even get stolen in the human trade
all these horrible things can happen and just think just by having a water supply
right there in their Village it so improves so many areas of the quality of
their lives and you can do that by working with Team World Vision and it’s
a 50 donation and that will buy your ticket for the global 6K and they can actually bring one person drinking water
for that fifty dollars it’s amazing what they can do they really have this down to find out more about this you can go
to scalinguph2o.com forward slash 6K and you will find that on May 20th you can
do this 6K from where ever you wish now my company my team is going to a park
and we are all going to celebrate this together and we’re doing this to celebrate one that we can do something
about this crisis two we are in the Water Treatment Community and normally
we’re just working with our customers and in the capacity of industrial water
treatment well this gives us a special day to celebrate being in the industry and work within our team to just
celebrate being a team to work with ourselves and let us know that what we do is so incredibly valuable so you can
join team scaling up by going to scalingup h2o.com forward slash 6K and
also while you’re there if you decide you want to sign up your own team you can simply click that page and do all of
that there as well wouldn’t it be cool to have your company do the 6K together
now maybe you’re in a company that you have people all over the world well
that’s okay you can still do it together virtually and create hashtags and share
all the things that people are doing on May 20th so I hope you will join me and
so many other water traders in joining in the global 6K again that’s May 20th
so scaling up h2o.com forward slash 6K
Nation also so much going on we like to tell you about the things that are going
on in the Water Treatment Community because maybe there’s something close by that you can learn and meet people at so
let’s talk about what’s going on April 24 through 28th in Washington DC well
that’s water week and this is the goal to bring water treatment professionals
together around the country to advocate for federally elected officials and key
policy makers to ensure that they understand the importance of having access to Safe reliable affordable
drinking water so if this is something that interests you we’re going to have all of this information on our show
events page also perhaps you are in Shanghai China June 5th through 7th well
AquaTech China and Shanghai is going to be hosting the water quality
associations where they are offering a trade show for where industry
professionals come in to see an overview of products and services of the world’s
leading companies when it comes to water quality all of this information will be on our show events page and then the
final thing I’ll talk about is the 10th International Water Association membrane technology conference that’s going to be
in St Louis Missouri at Washington University July 23rd through 26 hosted
by the International Water Association this is all about membrane technology so
if this is something that you are in and you want to learn more about you can go to our show events page and we’ll have
all of that for you there Nation as you know we’re always trying to bring
technology and new things that you can do at your accounts so today’s interview
is all about technology and how you can be there when you’re not there here
[Music] my lab partner today is Justin Nichols of opt connect Justin welcome to the
scale it up H2O podcast hey Trace thanks for having me today looking forward to this absolutely well
you and I met at the awt convention in Vancouver Canada what a great place that
was yeah it was awesome it was there with one of my colleagues we had a lot of fun great venue great show it was our
first time actually exhibiting at awt and we’re really excited for Grand Rapids uh coming up later this year
awesome I’m excited about that one as well and I hear it is going to be very
well attended yes uh I’ve been hearing that as well we had a great show last
time so I can only imagine what even more attendance will look like well for the scaling up nation that is
just getting to know you what do you want them to know about Justin Nichols
yes so I work for a company called opconnect and I manage our industrial
Water Market So within opconnect we have about 32 different vertical markets that
we provide Wireless managed services for Via cellular uh my background is in
storm water and wastewater treatment and I’m kind of applying those 20 plus years
of working for oems and in civil engineers and being boots on the ground and with this Twist of Technology
hopefully helping solve some pain points that users may have when they’re trying to wirelessly monitor or manage a system
I will say I truly believe that pretty much everybody is going to move to
wirelessly managing their systems to remotely managing their systems I know a lot of companies including ours will not
do water management plans unless we have remote monitoring on there because it takes so long between the time we get
testing back and to the time we can actually do something about those test results so I have no doubt that the
entire nation is thinking how do I get this done how do I overcome all the
objections because sooner or later we’re probably going to be on site less because we’re going to be able to do so
much more remotely so before we get there there are some terms that always
get thrown out and I’m not sure if everybody understands them so these terms are the internet of things and
machine to machine communication so what do we need to know about those yeah absolutely that’s great question so
the internet of things or iot uh basically encompasses everything now uh
when it comes to remotely monitoring or managing any type of of equipment uh so
really it’s just leveraging different technology that we have available that’s that’s way more cost effective now to be
able to implement really on any type of remote Hardware using controllers and
sensors and it really allows us to manage those sites without needing an
operator on site or human to human interaction or even human to machine interaction and just leveraging all this
technology to be able to do it autonomously perhaps wirelessly provide more analytics more feedback and and
really allow the end user that’s trying to scale a connected solution to be able to do it more efficiently and more cost
effectively when it comes to machine to machine Communications the the acronym is M to M so you might hear that a lot
this is an end-to-end connection or M2M hardware and really what M to m means
it’s it’s low data lower bandwidth types of applications a water treatment
controllers being one of them where yes we need a connection to the internet to
be able to remotely Monitor and manage these controllers but we’re not pushing a lot of data back and forth and so it’s
not high speed video it’s not streaming 4K Netflix where you need speed and bandwidth and and a lot of those other
terms that you might have heard with 5G it’s trying to create a very steady
reliable connection to the internet for lower bandwidth lower volume data
machines like water treatment controller so we get that a lot at some of the jargon iot M to M and yeah it’s really
simple things and it can mean the different things to to different people but that’s basically it
one of the biggest issues I think we face as anybody who has a business these
days especially in the water treatment industry is the shortage of the labor
pool and we’re just not finding people to enter the industry like we have in
the past and to me it just makes sense what do we have to do with the person
what can we do with the machine with your experience and working with other water treatment companies what are some
of the things that we should just not be doing as industrial water treators on
site and we should get technology to do for us yeah absolutely I think when we kind of
look holistically at the water treatment Market probably only you know 20 maybe
30 percent of controllers out there are getting connected in some capacity to
the internet that could be over cellular that could be locally via Ethernet from the facility or Wi-Fi and so we have a
very low amount when we look at those totals just for internet connectivity
compared to what the greater number of controllers are that are out there and so the more we can leverage this
technology and connect to the internet in in any capacity that’s suitable on site
the less we have to roll trucks uh and so that’s kind of generic too across all
Industries you have remote equipment that doesn’t need a full-time operator if you’re in a service industry and
you’re rolling trucks then you’re losing money you know we’re able to leverage technology that can do a lot of that by
sitting at a desktop or even accessing that information on your phone reporting analytics such items like that that you
don’t need to have a physical person on site manually taking these data logs or recording information and so when we
look kind of generally at the market it’s really about maximizing the overhead that you already
have so you’re able to with with your current employee base not necessarily
have to find new people to come in and and go from site to site but you’re
going to be able to Monitor and maintain more sites with the same number of of full-time employees or part-time
employees that you might have with that you’re going to be more cost effective your service contracts potentially are
going to be worth more because you’re not going to have so much cost related to managing those sites with a full-time
or even part-time employee having to roll a truck there you’re also going to be able to potentially manage more sites
so you’re going to be able to create more revenue for your business being able to leverage some of these remote
capabilities once again without having to have that employee go site to site so
when we look at this you know kind of generically you know the more we can leverage technology to do a lot of what
we used to do 10 20 30 years ago on site the more valuable those service
contracts will be and the more systems you’re going to be able to manage so it’s not new for a controller to be
able to hook into the internet but what has always been an issue is now the
communication you have to have with the customer so one you either hook an ethernet cable up to it and now you’ve
got to go through their Network and they’re never happy about that and now it gets involved and you’ve got to
figure out all these security protocols and I believe that’s actually how Target got hacked I was an HVAC company I think
yep through their HVAC system they were able to access you know all the credit cards employee information and so it’s
really just identity theft that that’s happening coming through a secondary system by piggybacking on their local
network so a lot of people are just saying no you cannot get on my local network and now that means we can’t
monitor this device and then others are saying okay well maybe we can have a
cell phone plan for the controller let’s talk about each one of those how should
we be having this conversation with our customers to make sure they’re getting one the best information from us and it
allows us to get that information from the machine so we don’t have to roll trucks as you say
yeah exactly and and we’re seeing this you know throughout all the different markets that we manage connections we
have about 500 000 connections that we manage uh through Verizon and at T and
like I said before about 32 markets that we’re in right now some markets have adapted very quickly to this and in
years ago but we’re seeing it like you mentioned with Target uh any of the big box chains now they say great you can
have a water treatment controller or any type of equipment on our site and remotely monitor it but you’re not using
our Network anymore you have to bring your own network to the game uh and and I think we’re seeing this starting to
happen maybe not as quickly as we’ve witnessed in other markets but we’re starting to see it in water treatment and so really there’s a couple of
different ways to access the internet as I mentioned before it’s either through local available Network on premise
through Ethernet or through that locations Wi-Fi or to bring your own private connection via cellular and so
so when we started adopting you know internet and controllers you know years ago this isn’t something new like you
had mentioned those types of networks were much more readily available the idea of well the Network’s already there
I can hook up to ethernet I can hook up the Wi-Fi it’s quote unquote free we’re not seeing that anymore if the location
was allowing you to do that they’re saying hey you’ve got to get off our Network and you’ve got to figure this out and so cellular becomes you know the
easiest most reliable cost-effective and secure way of bringing that own private
connection to a site that you don’t own but your equipment has to be there you have to operate it and you need to
leverage those remote capabilities with that you’re also talking about I.T
departments you mentioned that you know previously so let’s say you have a hundred sites that you manage and you’re
currently using either their Ethernet or their Wi-Fi you’ve just inherited 100 it
departments with varying levels of capability ability and customer service and so now they’re in charge of your
network that keeps your equipment online inevitably there’s going to be a problem you’re going to have to roll a truck to
that site to try to fix it yourself or you’re spending countless hours on the phone trying to work with their I.T
Department figuring out what the problem is and how to bring it back online and so as we move forward and when we dive
deeper into the internet of things it’s just not the most economically cost
effective or reliable way anymore to connect to the internet because you’re having to rely on other people to manage
your connection that you need to maintain your service contracts or or maintain your equipment on site so if we
decide that we’re going to move from connecting to the the local network
that’s there to a cellular device does that mean a brand new controller is it
just plug and play and what we already have what equipment do we need yeah typically it does not require a a
new controller I say that with you know a grain of salt it depends on how old that equipment is on site but typically
you know all of the major controller manufacturers now provide different ways
for their end users to connect and so they have the ability to either plug-in ethernet use Wi-Fi or utilize
the cellular device most Plug and Play cellular routers they require an
ethernet connection so you’re actually creating a hardwired connection via standard RJ45 ethernet cable from the
cellular router into the controller most of the controller manufacturers have that present already kind of as a base
on their on their equipment some in other markets it’s an add-on module that
you purchase but it’s available and it’s easy to do so typically as long as you have that ethernet based connection
you’re going to be able to plug in a third-party cellular device and bring that own private secure connection to
your sites just last week we had an issue with one of the controllers we had online it was
hooked up to their remote internet service and they decided that they
didn’t need the port opened anymore that they had opened for us probably about 10 years ago they didn’t know why they did
that and then it just stopped working so stuff like that has to happen all the time yeah all the time uh and and so
having different port forwarding commands you know different firewalls locally uh we’ll get this all the time
too where hey I’ve been using you know my the ethernet available on a site and
all of a sudden I can’t connect it anymore well the the local site changed their permissions their I.T Department changed their security protocol and so
that’s something that happens all the time as well is you’ve connected one way for a long period of time but then that
that local Enterprise that business changed how their connection is set up and so now all of the equipment that you
have has to be reconfigured and provisioned again and so you know all this just leads to you know time which
equals money so the more time we’re having to spend configuring this being
on site to troubleshoot the less money you’re going to be able to make or or get upside down potentially in some of
these service contracts it it’s not always hours that you can bill for so being able to provide your own
connection being able to manage that connection or have a partner say like opconnect that is even better that helps
you manage that connection allows you to focus on what you do best and you don’t
necessarily need to be a tech Wizard or I.T professional so walk us through that
process say we’re talking about this customer that just we had the issue last
week and we decided you know what we’re just going to have a sell contract and
we’re going to manage that ourselves we’re going to take them out of the equation what do we now need to do we’ll
get something shipped to us how do we install it how do we set it up what is that look like so there’s a couple of
different ways that you can deploy cellular the one that’s probably most common that we’ve seen in the industry
and other Industries is to just go out and do it yourself so you are you know
acquiring and purchasing your own third-party cellular device you’re then working with a carrier or a mvno which
is basically just reselling services and you’re Contracting with them in in buying data and kind of chopping that
data plan up across your portfolio of devices now with that you know you’re in
charge of your own troubleshooting your activations your provisioning like I
said if there’s different port forwarding commands or security features that you need to enable to allow that
communication you’re kind of doing it all on your own you’re doing it yourself and that might be very feasible if you
have a limited number of connections there’s other companies out there like opconnect that provide and manage
service so they’re doing that for you and so you would simply just call all them up and order a device they’re going
to have the hardware they’re going to activate it they’re going to provision it for you if you’re on site and you’re
having issues they’re going to have tech support that you can then call in so once again you don’t have to become that
local expert you know hey I’ve moved away from the ethernet that’s available on site but now I’m having to manage my
own cellular solution and do it myself and that can be that can be cumbersome especially when we get into some of
these larger organizations that have hundreds or thousands of sites that they manage it’s taking you out of your your
main role you’re a water treatment service provider or company you’re not necessarily a cellular internet provider
so possibly looking at a managed Service Company allows you to leverage you know professionals within that that company
leverage their knowledge their expertise and that allows you to do what you do best and focus on your your main
business and not managing and maintaining a cellular network so if I now have the device the
controller hooked up we have a cellular plan I’m still going to the controller
manufacturer’s web page or whatever they had set up for me to access it what you’re talking about is if I have a
hundred systems out there I can see at a glance everything that’s going on whether they’re online or not if there
are any issues and if I have any questions I don’t need to dig that up it’s all once one site
exactly and so yes you are leveraging the platform the app the web page that
the OEM controller manufacturer has that’s going to be your Remote Management site for all of your
controllers if you’re leveraging technology like opconnect has with managed Services we’re going to provide
a dashboard called Summit that’s going to take a deeper dive into all of the
cellular analytics of each individual device so you can look at it from your account on a whole how many devices do I
have how many are online how many are offline and then you can you know dial into an individual device and see how
that device is interacting you know providing numbers for signal strength signal quality data consumption location
IP addresses some of this information that’s not always readily available from
the oems platform they’re really good at designing the platform to manage their equipment but not necessarily giving you
that deep dive into the wireless connection one of the issues I’m sure everybody’s
had is something’s working great and then we lose a signal and let’s face it we put these things in the basement and
all sorts of places that aren’t great for signals what do we do about that yeah and so there’s a couple of
different things that we can talk about here there is new technology that’s out especially when we’re looking at
cellular technology that really lends itself well to markets like water treatment where you have controllers and
basement operations or in congested City environments and then there’s also the conversation of you know is this the
best site to use cellular and obviously I work for a company that you know manages Cellular Connections and a lot
of times that works but there’s absolutely sites where you know cellular is not your best solution and so while
we’ve talked about possibly having you know moving away from ethernet it’s not avoidable sometimes sometimes you’re in
super remote areas where you’re 20 30 miles from from a cell tower in the mountains Etc and you just can’t get a
sell signal out there and so you may be forced to leverage you know that local available Ethernet or Wi-Fi on premise
there is a site that we were working on in in irrigation different Market but
very similar into in terms of machine to machine Communications iot leveraging control panels for you know remote
monitoring we were working on the Border Station in San Diego and talk about just
a ton of congestion with different Wireless technology and being on the
border of the USA and Mexico and trying to get cellular to work and we got it to
work but it wasn’t consistent we weren’t providing you know what I felt was a good value to our customer and I was
very straightforward and said hey you know we can keep going at this and and try leveraging different Signal Boosters
and antennas but this may be that you know one time out of 10 or 99.9 chance you know where cellular or
doesn’t work well and we need to kind of Leverage other technology so you just mentioned signal boosting
and antennas so we’ve got that controller that’s in the bottom of the building in the sub basement there’s no
cell phone signal there but if we can get it outside we can get a sell signal
how do we do that since we obviously can’t move the controller yeah so one of the things that we
typically like to do is move the cellular device with the antenna so the longer the antenna lead is that connects
to the cellular device you actually get a degradation in Signal quality there’s
very little to no degradation in Signal quality or strength with a longer Ethernet cable so if we have the ability
to run 100 200 300 foot ethernet cable even we can move the device and the
antenna to a location that maybe has a better signal strength there’s also new
technology that we can leverage and so something that you know the listeners out there may or may not be aware of is
cat M1 technology or ltem and so this is
considered new 5G technology what’s really cool about it is it actually works on both 4G and 5G carriers and
their antennas and so basically we’re kind of future proof right now in terms
of providing technology you know if 4G sunsets like we just saw with 3G which
I’m sure a lot of people out there have had headaches with trying to get their 3G devices uh to get back online with
new equipment we’re kind of in this sweet spot of okay you know if we get eight or ten years probably more out of
4G we’re gonna get you know at least 15 years out of the current 5G infrastructure and so deploying cat M1
right now will probably outlive the controller that it’s hooking up to and
so when the carriers came out with cat M1 or ltem they took a look at the
internet of things and some of these machine machine M2M Communications and said hey not everything out there needs
this super high speed high bandwidth type of signal to communicate obviously
we have a lot of those now with security video cameras and and streaming but
controllers and water and Wastewater are low bandwidth they’re low data and so
they recognized that and said okay let’s create this new low bandwidth lower frequency technology called cat M1 and
let’s move all of these machine Communications down from this high bandwidth high frequency high speed that
our cell phones and stuff are on and put it in this dedicated band and so really what we’re able to do is is leverage
lower frequency and so if you think just kind of in terms of of frequency the lower the frequency the longer the
wavelength is you know the further away it will work from its uh you know origination point so a cell tower and
the more penetration strength it has so you keep mentioning you know these controllers are in the basement building
operations room cat M1 technology has about three times the building
penetration strength of regular 4G or even that high speed 5G on your cell
phone so if you’re in the basement and you don’t have a signal on your cell phone that doesn’t necessarily mean that
there’s technology out there that still won’t work and so we have really been pushing this cadm1 technology at
opconnect we have a product called the Milo Duro that utilizes cadm1 technology with Verizon and at T and I would say 99
plus we’re able to Plug and Play that technology in a location that has had
unreliable technology or quote unquote their cell phone doesn’t work that sounds fantastic everybody
listening to this is probably wondering if this is a service contract they’re going to have to eat the cost how do
they prove an Roi now that they’re going to have to buy not only the equipment
but they’re also going to have to pay for a cell plan yeah there’s a couple of ways that you can do it the most common way is is a
more typical capex type of plan where you’re purchasing outright the hardware and obviously you know you’re going to
have a a multi-year return on investment from the you know acquisition cost of
Hardware there’s also Opex pricing out there as well so once again opconnect
provides both and so customers can actually rent the hardware from us so
think of it almost like Comcast cable versus DirecTV DirecTV you have to purchase everything Comcast cable or
whoever your local cable provider you know they are also a managed service you’re typically renting the hardware
from them and there are certain advantages to that so the first one is you don’t have this huge Capital
Equipment cost up front you’re able to have a lower kind of monthly bill that you can just roll in to your service
contract but yes it is going to be a cost that maybe is not currently baked
in if you’re not wirelessly or remotely connecting or if you’ve been leveraging
a local network via Wi-Fi or ethernet cellular costs have come way down uh
this was one of the you know kind of impacts or or reasons why years ago uh
there wasn’t as much widespread cellular adoption is it was expensive but data
plans costs have come way down especially when we look at lower data controllers like water treatment
controllers typically you’re using 50 to 250 megabytes of data a month which is
very very low uh and so the cost for that sometimes can range anywhere from
you know 10 to 20 bucks a month so it’s not huge cost that has to be baked in
but it’s definitely something that you know we encourage our customers to say hey this is no longer an option anymore
I can’t provide this same level of service by Rolling a truck out daily
weekly monthly and that cost now is going to go up so when we look at costs of rolling a rock you know on a daily
monthly type of or weekly frequency versus the cost of fixed cost of having
a cellular data plan the cost of a data plan is going to be much less than you know the overhead of
uh having to pay that employee windshield time and cost of rolling a truck what that Roi is is always a
magical number uh we do have an Roi calculator that we can plug in you know a bunch of data to and kind of Leverage
that to give a rough idea but it really depends too on you know what the cost is the cost of New York City versus Salt
Lake is going to be much higher to roll a truck or to deploy services so there’s a lot of different factors it’s hard to
come up with you know a generic Roi but happy to engage kind of on a one-on-one
level to help understand what those costs are what’s one of your biggest success stories in the water treatment industry
yeah so we’re fairly new to the water treatment industry so about two years ago we started looking at other markets
so kind of a quick history of opconnect we started in the early 2000s we were
provisioning you know old dinosaur 3G Telecom routers and hooking them up to
ATMs way back then an ATM at a 7-Eleven or a gas station was on a landline so it
was on an old phone line and they said hey you can’t be on our phone line anymore and so all these ATM deployers
had to figure out how am I going to deploy my ATM at this location without using you know the gas station or the
7-Elevens phone service anymore and so we started doing that as an option to connect under a different company and
then in 2009 the option to connect outgrew the parent company that was an ATM service provider and we became
opconnect we then quickly started you know kind of diving into other commercial retail transactional markets
that were required payment for their equipment to to work so you know uptime reliability has always been Paramount
with opconnect and so we’re kind of built on the financial markets with uptime and security but we’re able to
push those in the newer markets like water treatment so like I’ve said we’ve only been in the in the water treatment
industry for about two years and we have a couple of large service providers that we’ve been working with that you know in
a matter of a year have converted you know several hundred three hundred plus devices uh in the field and so that’s
been a great success and really a lot of these have been in major you know large
cities that we talked about like Chicago New York City where it just is not
economically viable to roll a truck and I also think covid had a lot to do with
that hey you’re not allowed on premise anymore well how am I going to do this how am I going to provide my customers
the value that they need if I can’t even have an employee on site so covet actually helped quite a bit hold the
adoption curve over in water treatment and other markets but yeah we had tons of systems that weren’t able to connect
in downtown locations in New York City because the you know the 4G cellular
service just could not penetrate the building there’s also congestion so when
I talked about cat M1 being on a different band a different frequency you know we’re operating in a lower
threshold where all the cell phones say in New York City are so we just have congestion that we’re dealing with it
might not even be building penetration but it might just be there’s so many wireless devices that are trying to
connect to the network at once that these devices aren’t getting priority so simply putting them you know moving them
from a standard 4G LTE connection uh which is you know definitely the base standard right now in a lot of markets
and putting them into this newer cadm1 technology has alleviated both of those pain points not having to deal with
congestion in a city environment and then being able to get that cell C signal into an environment where
traditionally you can’t get it as you were meeting with members of awt in Vancouver what was some of the
feedback that you were getting what were some of the concerns some of the questions yeah we had we had a great show it was
our first time like I said uh exhibiting at awt and we had a lot of just water
treaters from you know all over the country you know in the U.S and even Canada because it obviously was in
Vancouver I think we got a good a good amount of Canadian professionals there as well and you know the biggest problem
and pain point that we heard was you know unreliable sell signal and not
having necessarily you know the tech support to be able to to support devices so if they’re doing it themselves or
working with just a provider that provides hardware and then activation well what happens when that doesn’t work
on the back end and so as I’ve kind of stated you know throughout our conversation today we’ve done a lot with
provisioning our technology and having that back end customer support to alleviate just a lot of the common pain
points of single carrier connectivity it’s either Verizon or at T you know our devices are on both and they
automatically switch carriers based on signal quality so it’s it’s we’re leveraging iot we’re leveraging
autonomous behavior of our devices on premise so you don’t have to do anything or or you don’t have to know which
provider you need you know does a water treater have the tools to understand if they need Verizon or at T probably not
but really it’s the customer service if and when something fails whether it’s Hardware or Carrier related is there you
know a customer support agent a tech support service that’s going to be able to troubleshoot so you’re not having to
spend your time doing that uh those were really two of the biggest pain points that we heard in really getting kicked
off that local network hey I just got kicked off what do I do you know how do I do this uh well let us help you do
that if you could only get one point across today what do you want that point to be
yeah so the one thing that I would want to get across is is just leveraging the
internet leveraging technology that’s available whether it’s you know local with Ethernet or Wi-Fi or bringing your
own private connection like cellular leveraging the technology and bringing that adoption curve forward you know in
other markets we see near a hundred percent adoption of Wireless or
on-premise connectivity doesn’t always have to be cellular doesn’t have to be Wi-Fi but we’ve seen almost near a 100
adoption of service providers oems whoever is deploying the technology
having the monitoring capabilities not having the roll truck so yeah I can’t I
can’t stress it enough or you know the awt members out there or the water treaters in general to to look at
technology and if you don’t understand it reach out to companies like opconnect or other companies that this is all we
do and you know let us partner with you on that so we can help provide the best technological solution for your
controller and for your company and if someone does want to reach out to you how should they do that yeah so uh happy
to provide my contact information but the the easiest way is we have on our website
www.opconnect.com there’s a little Orange Box on the top right that says contact us you can put in your
information uh there’s a notes section where you can add a message you can say Hey you know I heard you on the scaling
up Podcast or uh met yeah awt or I have a water treatment controller and then
also on the bottom right we have kind of a live chat you’ll see my colleague Rob ramage uh his portrait there you can
actually live chat with Rob and he’ll answer any basic questions you have or once again say hey I heard you on the
podcast how do I you know learn more about this and either you know our inside team or Rob will get me connected
with you awesome and we will put all that information on our show notes page to make that easy as well well thanks
for sharing all this information with us I’ve got a few lightning round questions Before We Say Goodbye are you ready for
those yeah let’s do it all right so if you could go back to your very first day
doing what you’re doing right now what advice would you give yourself yeah that’s a that’s a great question so
what I’m doing now I it’s totally different than what I spent the majority of my career in so you know as I say
before you know I spent 20 plus years in kind of on the OEM side designing and
managing you know Wastewater and storm water treatment systems and so I think I
got in my own head a little bit oh my gosh I’m now talking about this different technology and iot uh and I
felt like I had to be this expert in iot but really you know I think the reason
that we’re having success in some of these connected water markets is you know the experience that I had the 20
years before understanding what the users are going through I had issues connecting technology 15 years ago when
cellular wasn’t as uh prevalent trying to figure out how we’re going to remote manage some of this stuff hey phone
lines are expensive how are we going to do this now and so if I was able to go back two years from now and and say hey
Justin you know don’t it’s so bogged down in kind of the details of iot you
know leverage your knowledge your connections Leverage The the professionals that I work with to help
fill in the blanks I I probably wouldn’t have been as stressed out those first couple of months
what are some of your favorite books yeah so I read a lot of um blogs now I’m
not reading as many books so reading a lot of blogs about different you know Industries trying to learn more and more
about the industries that we’re connecting to and and learning more and more about the equipment that we’re
trying to connect to to become a little bit more of an industry expert on what our customers do and not just on what we
do but one of the last books we read we actually read it as a sales organization at opconnect and it’s called The Power
of moments uh and it talks about all these different experiences you know
that aren’t even close to what we do you know at opconnect on a day in and day out basis but it’s really understanding
the customer experience and if you can understand the customer experience you’re going to be able to provide more
value to that person or that Enterprise so good read if you haven’t read it before Hollywood’s always listening to the
scaling up H2O podcast to figure out what the next big movie is going to be so when they hear this who do you want
playing Justin uh that’s an easy one I’m gonna go with my man Ryan Reynolds I think he’s
hilarious we’re about the same age so yeah I’d go Ryan Reynolds on that we’ll add a little bit of Comedy into the
water treatment world and he owns a cellular company doesn’t he he does yeah he does so I think that’s perfect we’re
connecting all the dots there you go my last question if you had the power to talk to anybody throughout history who
would it be with and why this is going to sound really corny but I would probably go with my father in
the late 80s so back in like 1987 he kind of went off on his own and developed a new product for on-site
Wastewater leech field technology and I think it would just be really awesome to
go back when he was having those first conversations and you know talking to
you know customers and contractors that were having all these pain points to to be a part of that conversation and
understand his process better on you know how he basically developed what’s become the standard in leach field
technology I think that would be pretty cool so I’m gonna give a shout out to the old man there well Justin I want to thank you for
coming on the scaling up H2O podcast sharing your knowledge with us and probably saving a lot of travel time and
a lot of water treaters lives yes absolutely it’s been a lot of fun uh thanks for having me and looking forward
to connecting everyone next year at awt [Music]
Justin thank you information Nation let’s face it as we
get more clients as we get busier and as technology becomes better we are able to
do so much more for our customers without actually being at our customers
locations so there is just so much that you can do now with remote monitoring
and there’s so many tools out there that make that monitoring so much easier so
you can get more done and you’re more prepared when you get on your customer’s
site so all that valuable time you spend is spent on the right thing so we try to
bring shows like this to you so you can continue to expand all the knowledge you
have about technology so thank you so much for introducing Justin to me this
of course came from a scaling up Nation member and that’s how we get so many
ideas that’s how we get so many guests that you you out there in the scaling up
Nation let my great team here at scaling up H2O know who you want me to interview
what shows you want me to write what questions you have so thank you so much
for that also since I’m into thinking I’m going to thank James McDonald for making us a little bit smarter each and
every week so here is a brand new installment of periodic water table with
James hello and welcome to the periodic water table with James where we think
and learn about water chemistry drop by drop please use your week to search online ask your colleagues or even pick
up a book to learn more about each week’s periodic water table topic if you do at the end of the year you’ll be 52
water chemistry smarter so let’s raise the water table of knowledge together and get started
today’s topic is alkalinity
alkalinity is an important concept to learn it can be both simple and complex
at times what is the definition of alkalinity what chemical species can make up
alkalinity our pH and alkalinity the same or different
how are they related what is a dissociation curve in regards to various forms of alkalinity versus pH
how does the level of alkalinity impact the solubility of other chemical elements
how is the P alkalinity test different from the M alkalinity test or total alkalinity
what units are used to express these test results do you test the oh alkalinity or do you
calculate it or both what chemical species are typically represented by each of these tests
what can interfere with an alkalinity test remember knowledge is power and taking
the time to learn more about water chemistry each week will help make you a force to be reckoned with
be sure to post what you learn to social media and tag it with hashtag water table23 and hashtag scalingup H2O I look
forward to learning more from you well thank you James you know phosphate
is one of those things that is really tricky for industrial water treaters to
grasp and I did an episode Way Way Back in 2018 it was episode 46 and was all
about phosphate testing and I did a mythbuster style phosphates uh steri pin
test I think I even talked about the different types of phosphate but I’m thinking it’s probably overdue for me to
talk about phosphate again so stay tuned as I bring you another episode of
phosphate I’ve had a lot of people ask me about that so that is on the list like I said we figure out what we are
going to talk about because we talk with all of you so thanks again for going to
scalinguph2o.com and going over to our show ideas page or you can leave us a
voicemail with what your idea is or you can ask me a question that I might answer on the air Nation I want to thank you for
listening to scaling up H2O of course the best the favorite podcast for the
industrial Water Treatment Community of course you are part of the scaling up nation and I will have a brand new
episode for you next Friday we try to do that each and every Friday so you have a
new episode each and every week Nation I hope you have a great week and take care of each other
[Music] why do we call our Mastermind the rising
tide Mastermind well I know you’ve heard me say before a rising tide raises All
Ships that’s one of my favorite quotes because it’s so true the better we do
the better somebody else can do and vice versa that’s exactly what the rising
tide Mastermind is it’s our members helping other members to achieve success
and to get there further and faster to find out more about the rising tide
Mastermind go to scalingop h2o.com forward slash Mastermind
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