The following transcript is provided by YouTube, mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode click HERE.
[Music] foreign [Music]
supporting the Water Treatment Community since 1990. at qualicam we say the
blender matters and here are some things that matter at quality an unparalleled
support staff we have three certified water technologists on staff to support your technical needs this means you get
the expertise you need from someone who has walked in your shoes with one of the
strongest support staffs in the industry qualikim offers support and Technical sales application and lab support to
find out more about qualikim go to scalinguph2o.com forward slash qualicam once again that’s scalingup h2o.com
forward slash quala Kim at quala Kim we know the blender matters [Music]
thank you welcome to scaling up H2O the podcast where we scale upon knowledge so we
don’t scale up our systems this is an interesting episode because a lot of people have asked for this and we’ve
actually already done an episode like this so more about that a little bit
later I am so excited because it is almost May we’re at the end of April and
May is when The Mastermind the rising tide Mastermind gets together for our
live event and that’s going to be May 23rd through 25th and we have over 60
members in the Mastermind we’ve got over six groups we’ve got a waiting list for a seventh group I’m sure we’re going to
have 10 groups before long and it has just become such an amazing Community
now four years ago when I started the Mastermind I was hoping we get a few like-minded people together that wanted
to share ideas is and help each other with issues and it has just become
beyond my wildest dreams successful and that is because of the people within the
Mastermind so they see the value of joining The Mastermind but then once they become part of the Mastermind and
they plug in it is just amazing at how
tight these groups are and how their sole purpose is to help get each other
further faster while they’re having more fun with each other and we meet every
week on a zoom call but then once a year we all get together here in Atlanta
Georgia and folks that is just around the corner I am so excited this will be the third Mastermind event that we have
had and we get together and it’s so great because now we’re in person and we
get to really enjoy each other’s company we have speakers we have workshops we
have activities and by the time all of that’s over everybody’s sad to go home
you always know it’s a good event when people are sad to leave and then they cannot wait to get back and do some of
the things that we talked about in the live event at their companies and in
their families folks we are making sure that we are all going further faster and
having more fun while we’re doing that and one of the things we are doing at
this live event is every member is giving a TED Talk you probably know what
a TED Talk is you probably listened to a few and Ted is very informative and it’s
got a format and we’ve all read the book TED Talks by Chris Anderson we’ve seen
examples that Chris has given us of TED talks and now we are writing our own Ted
talk and we are going to be giving each other their feedback to help them with
that Ted Talk and at the very end of all of the TED Talks once everybody has gone
we are going to nominate our own members to the Ted stage so who knows maybe we
will get a couple of the rising tide Mastermind members on the Ted stage and
I’ll tell you A lot of people are a little nervous they’re having to speak in front of others and I’m going to say
whenever you have that feeling inside you that you’re getting a little bit
nervous stay with whatever you’re doing because that means you are outside your
comfort zone and if all you do is stay within your comfort zone well you’re not
growing and I promise that when you get that little nervous tingly feeling it
means you are on the outside walls of your comfort zone and once you push past
that you now have a bigger comfort zone you’ve now expanded the things that you
are comfortable with and if you stay on that outer wall of that comfort zone and
you keep pushing yourself you will be amazed at the things that you will be
able to accomplish a lot of times we are our own worst critic we stand in our own
way and that is your body’s way of letting you know that you are growing so
please never run from that feeling run towards it embrace it and push through
it I know we’re all going to do that May 23rd through 25th at the live event and
Nation I always talk about the Mastermind I am a huge fan of The Mastermind I have been helped so much by
The Mastermind and so many people have been helped within the Mastermind maybe
the Mastermind is something that you need to consider and I say all the time maybe that this Mastermind is not the
right one for you but maybe there is one out there life is hard life is lonely
there’s no reason for that you can do life together with other people and they
will help you get further faster while you’re having more fun so if you want to
find out more about the rising tide Mastermind go to scalinguph2o.com forward slash Mastermind and if it
sounds like something you want to learn more about maybe you and I can have a conversation to find out what the next
step may be Nation life is short life is lonely make sure you’re doing life right
find some people to do life with it makes it so much better well some other things that might make
your life better is getting out there with all the different events that we have in the industrial Water Treatment
Community and meet new people learn new things so here are a couple of things
that you might want to check out and of course as always we have all of these things and more on our show events page
so you can go to scalinguph2o.com navigate over to the events page where we have everything water treatment
related all conferences and Expos are all listed out by date and all you
simply have to do is click and it will even put a calendar invite in your own
calendar and it will take you to the registration page so you can do everything you need from One Source
scaling up h2o.com so here are a few things the odors and air pollutants 2023
conference is taking place in Charlotte North Carolina May 16 through 19th this
is put on by the water environment Federation this conference is all about learning more about the ABCs of Odor
Control so if this is a field that you are in and you want to learn more about
and have a community to help you do it we’ll have all that information on our show events page the American Waterworks
Association is hosting their Ace 23 conference June 11th through 14th in
Toronto Canada Ace is where the water Community comes together to learn connect and Inspire to solve Global
Water Challenges we’ll have this information and more at scalingup h2o.com over on our events page and then
finally storm con 2023 is taking place in Dallas Texas August 28th through 30th
this is the storm Water Industries Premier event meant to connect stormwater managers erosion control
Specialists and engineers from all over the world at storm con you will get more
eyes on your products and services and you will get the answers that you need making sure that you get an Roi on your
exhibiting investment so maybe you have something that you want to exhibit this is the place for you to do that maybe
you have something that you want to learn about the storm water industry we’re going to have information about this on our show events page so be sure
to go over there Nation today we have an encore episode and this episode was
originally aired on March 1st 2019 episode 75 entitled the one that’s
all about corrosion coupons and I remember this day I remember before I
wrote this episode I was doing corrosion coupons and some of you may or may not
know several years ago I just was not happy with how corrosion coupons were
being reported to us I was getting numbers back and I wasn’t getting a lot
of data to really help us hone in on improving our programs so I did what
anybody that probably wasn’t thinking clearly would do and I bought everything we needed to have a metallurgical lab
well for anybody that’s purchased this equipment you know that this is not a
cheap Endeavor so I don’t know what I was thinking but we bought all this equipment and we started doing our own
corrosion coupons and we started doing corrosion coupons for other awt members
and we started looking at what the coupon was actually telling us and not
just a number but what were we learning from the coupon and we were able to make
great adjustments to our program our technicians here at our company actually
got more data from the corrosion coupons and then when we were sharing sharing that with awt members they started
sharing that with other people and now we’ve got a pretty good business in our metallurgical lab so I guess it was a
good thing but let me say whenever you’re not getting something that you need whether you decide to take issues
in your own hands or you decide to go to another vendor another provider I think
it’s important that whenever you run a test or do a coupon study or whatever it is you ask yourself what are you going
to do with the results once you get them and so many of us just simply hang
corrosion coupons in a system and we really don’t think about it maybe we look at the number maybe we do something
with it but folks everything that we do every test that we run we have something
that we can gain from that information I think if we start at where we end we
will actually do a better job at starting so with all of that when I
started this episode I saw a corrosion coupon that got mailed into our office
to our metallurgical lab and it was bent up it wasn’t put away correctly it had
rusted in transit and I just felt sorry for it so the whole premise of this
episode was I was trying to help that poor little corrosion coupon guy that was sitting on my desk that was not
shown any love whatsoever I said buddy I’m gonna tell your story so here is
episode 75 remastered digitally replayed in THX
Dolby I don’t know whatever here’s the episode folks
thank you welcome to scaling up H2O the podcast
for water treaters by water treaters where we’re scaling up on knowledge so we don’t scale up our systems hello
scaling up Nation Trace Blackmore here your host for scaling up H2O and folks I
have received so many questions around this one topic that I thought it would
be a good idea to do an entire show on this topic now I know what you’re
thinking what the heck is this topic so I’m going to relieve the suspense I have
received so many questions around corrosion coupons corrosion coupons are
one of those things that we kind of use because people say we have to use them but many of us don’t understand what
corrosion coupons are the importance of them and especially what to do with them
when you get the results folks I know this because I live this
many many years ago I remember I was told to use corrosion coupons by my
father and I really didn’t know why I just put them in the system and we got
some results and he did something with them and I really didn’t know so I
started asking and because I started asking these questions I learned that
corrosion coupons are one of the most cost effective easy tools for us water
treatment folk to use that gives us so much information
allowing us to make the system that we are treating better so I’m going to try
to share with you what I’ve learned over the past 20 plus years about corrosion
coupons and the experiences that I’ve had with corrosion coupons so you too
will see that they are a valuable tool now several years ago when I started
Blackmore Enterprises I was using corrosion coupons because I was taught to use corrosion coupons and I was
sending them off to a lab and then I would get a number back and folks that
number it told me something but there’s so much more in the corrosion coupon
analysis that can really tell the professional water treater how they can
make that system better and a number just doesn’t do that so it was at that
point that I decided that I wanted my own metallurgical lab so we could start
analyzing corrosion coupons and when we did that we were then able to see
firsthand the corrosion coupons and start developing why things happen so we
could now take the corrosion coupon data and immediately apply that to the system
so I’m going to try to share some of that with you today but if you’re listening to this show and you’re
wondering what the heck is a corrosion coupon and you’re a water treater I want to bring you along through this story
because you need to be using corrosion coupons too so quite simply corrosion coupons are little pieces of metal and
they can be any metal I did have a question come up are the only types of metals you can get on corrosion coupons
mild steel and copper no there are literally thousands of Alloys that you
can get corrosion coupons out of if they build a piece of equipment out of a
certain type of metal I promise you can find that same alloy in a corrosion
coupon so quite simply corrosion coupons are these little slips of metal that we
put into a system and they mimic the same type of metal that we have within
the system now the premise is that if we put the same type of little that the
system has in the system to analyze we can figure out what the corrosion rates
are and then we can compare that to see if we are doing or if the system is
doing acceptable or not acceptable as far as corrosion rates now do you use
corrosion coupons in all systems well if you can why not so some people will ask
you know I’ve got a chiller I’ve got this expensive piece of equipment and I’m using corrosion coupons and that but
then in a closed loop system I don’t use corrosion coupons in well folks if you are treating the water within a system
that has metal in it I’m pretty sure that’s every system if you’re not using
corrosion coupons your default is whatever that expensive piece of
equipment is that you’re treating that now has become your corrosion coupon so when that develops a problem that’s your
alert that there is a problem in the system otherwise you could use a
corrosion coupon and a corrosion coupon is a lot cheaper than that expensive piece of equipment that you are treating
and on a more proactive basis you can now see what the corrosion rates are are
within the system and again like I said see if those are acceptable or not
acceptable the great things about corrosion coupons is they’re a shorter interval than whenever that equipment
inspection is so you can make slight adjustments to your program and see if
you’re increasing or decreasing the effectiveness of the system corrosion
coupons are very simple they are pre-weighed to the 10 000 of a gram
folks if you’re wondering that is four places after the decimal so we really
want to zero down on exactly what the weight is when we start we then let that
stay in the system for a certain amount of time we’re going to talk about that in a moment and then we clean them up
and then we weigh them and then based on what the results are we’re going to change our program or we’re going to
keep doing the exact same program because now we have data from the corrosion version coupons so for those
of you that just started listening have no idea what a corrosion coupon is I hope now you can see that it is the most
economical way that you can monitor corrosion rates within the system so you
can proactively adjust your program based on the results of those corrosion
coupons corrosion coupons come in so many different shapes sizes Alloys you
name it you can find a corrosion coupon out there in fact I’m looking at a catalog where I get most of my corrosion
coupons and it’s almost an inch thick and all it is is just a listing of all
the different corrosion coupons that are available out there and I am sure that that is an abbreviated version now
chances are if you’re a water Trader like I am you probably have a couple of
go-to corrosion coupons that your company already has established they already have inventoried and you can can
just simply ask for them and put them in your customer systems so you’re going to have basically two
primary medals that you are going to use but if there is a different metal in the system that is what you need to measure
we’ll get into identifying the different types of corrosion coupons as we move
forward but when the coupon is weighed and everything is said and done it is
measured in a unit called Mills per year mils per year quite simply put is 1 000
of an inch so if you want to think of that in these terms a heat exchanger
let’s say the metal and the heat exchanger is one tenth of an inch thick
if you have a corrosion rate of 10 mils per year it’s going to take 10 years to
penetrate the walls of that heat exchanger now that’s not exactly true
and I can throw a bunch of things in there to say whether that’s will work or not but for our definition that’s how
we’re going to look at that so it’s the removal of the metal that we are trying
to protect in the system and it’s the rate in which it is being removed when you get a corrosion coupon it is going
to come in an envelope probably a brown paper envelope and you’re going to look
at this and you’re going to say there is nothing special about this envelope but actually there is one it houses your
corrosion coupon it’s got some data on it but it’s also a treated piece of
paper the envelope is treated with what we call vcis volatilizing corrosion Inhibitors and
what their purpose is and why they treat this envelope with these corrosion Inhibitors is we don’t want the
corrosion coupon to start corroding in transit we don’t want it to start corroding when it’s sitting on the Shelf
getting ready to be used we only want it to start corroding when we put it in the system so if you do not have these types
of envelopes please realize that your corrosion coupons will start corroding
before they’re in the system now the coupons will become marked and it will
have a serial number on them they’re stamped right into the corrosion coupon
and then the envelope also has that same serial number along with the envelope
has the original weight now think about that if we put a corrosion coupon in the
system and it wasn’t identified and then we bring it back to the lab and we’ve got 100 coupons that we’ve got to try to
identify we have to use the serial number in order to identify them so we
have to have the serial number and then we have to have the starting weight other water Traders have sent corrosion
coupons to me without the starting weight and then they get upset that I
can’t weigh them well I can give you a final weight but if I don’t know what the starting weight is I can’t tell you
how much metal loss between A and B there were and I can’t do my math then
and I can’t get you a number so you have to make sure when you have these envelopes that you take care of them you
store them properly and what I mean by that is you do not lose them we will also have the alloy number and they’re
different types of Alloys as I mentioned so this will have the specific alloy that’s there and then it will have the
part number itself and by the part number like I said earlier you’re going to have a specific length and width and
depth of the coupon you’re going to have a specific hole size all of that is realized in that part number so once you
know which part number that you need you can then simply just keep ordering those
over and over and over again from your favorite supplier most of these envelopes are stamped with information
that the more information that you put on that envelope the better somebody
like me who’s analyzing these coupons can help you with and they want to know the type of chemicals that you’re using
in the system they want to know the date in and the date out I can’t tell you how
many times I have received corrosion coupons that did not have this Mark folks corrosion coupons have a couple of
things that we measure one it’s the weight over a specific amount of time so
how much metal is lost from the beginning date to the ending date if we
don’t have the starting weight and when don’t have the date that that coupon was put into the system and the date that
that coupon was taken out of the system we simply can’t measure the coupon now I
can tell you how much the coupon weighs because that is our final step in the
lab but that’s all I can tell you and that’s not enough data and that is a useless coupon so if there is
information that they’re asking for on that corrosion coupon envelope the more that you can fill out the better that
somebody like myself can help you folks there are standards that tell us
what to do with corrosion coupons and specifically there are two standards ASTM G1 and G4 now G4 tells us how to
actually test corrosion coupons in the field what to do with them how to install them all of that stuff the G1
tells the lab what to do when they get those back so if you’re interested in
that I’m sure you can find those online and Nace even has some practice procedures there are a couple of other
ASTM guidelines that you can use if you’re out using a specific type of
coupon in a specific type of industry but the two I mentioned the G1 and the
G4 ASTM are the ones that we water Traders use most in the corrosion
coupons that we use when you install the corrosion coupon ideally you want to put these in a rack
that is specifically designed for the corrosion coupon and when you look up the standards that I just mentioned it
says the order in which the coupons need to go in it says the orientation that
the coupons need to go in it says the amount of flow all of that information is from those documents but I do realize
that many of us have not read those documents so I’m going to try to explain a real General approach to what those
documents say so as far as the corrosion coupons I’m not going to get into how far apart the corrosion coupons need to
be and the thickness of the diameter of pipe and then how far the corrosion
coupon needs to be mounted within that pipe like I said work with a manufacturer that you’re getting a lot
of your pumps and controllers with now I am sure that they have corrosion coupons
holders but when what they’ve done they’ve manufactured these so you will
get the same results as we were just referring to in the G4 so things that
they’re going to be doing is they’re going to make sure that we have flow between three to five feet per second and then that we have a corrosion coupon
rack that is attacked from the bottom folks I’ve seen so many orientations of corrosion coupon holders and just
realize will you get a result if you don’t put a corrosion coupon holder incorrectly or if you don’t even use a
corrosion coupon holder yes you will get a result but the closer that you can get
to these standards the more variables you’re going to be taking out of the equation and we already have so many
variables in our systems that if we can eliminate one or two or three or four
we’re going to be that much better with the data that we are collecting so what
we want to do is we want to make sure that the water comes up from the bottom and out through the top so when you’re
orienting your corrosion coupon holder that’s how you want to do that and if you think about that that makes a lot of
sense because the reason we do that is we want to purge all the air out of it then the corrosion coupon is put on a
holder and folks I have seen holders made out of metal just think about that if we have a metal coupon and a
dissimilar metal holder well folks we’ve got electrolysis going on right there that is not acceptable so corrosion
coupon holders are normally made out of plastic definitely the little screw and
nut that holds them in should always be plastic but like I said I’ve seen the
corrosion coupon holder come in it was all PVC the holder was the rack was and
then the nut and the bolt was actually a galvanized piece of metal folks you
can’t do that so just just use common sense with that so when you put them into the system you want to make sure
that they are aligned properly if they are not perfectly straight they can
touch the side of the pipes and I got to tell you when I see a weird corrosion
pattern a weird wear pattern when they come into the lab I can tell that those corrosion coupons were set up against
the sidewall of that pipe and it doesn’t allow for a good result so make sure you
get those perfectly square and those coupons need to be oriented perfectly
straight up and down not on the side and if you think about that that makes sense
too because if we lose flow in the system and we have a flat side where
things can settle on that can change our corrosion rate so we want to make sure that those are straight up and down now
there’s a lot of confusion with corrosion coupons about what corrosion coupon to put first and here is the way
you should put four different Metals in a corrosion coupon starting from the bottom and again flows coming from the
bottom going through the corrosion coupon rack exiting through the top so you would start with aluminum you would
start with a mild steel you would then put your copper in and then finally you would put your stainless steel now for
most of you that’s all you needed to know and you’re probably just going to be using mild steel and then copper so
you would put the mild Steel in first the flow would hit that go up hit the copper and then it would go out of the
system and you’re probably happy just knowing that information now me I like
to know more information about that and if you were going to take the certified
water technologist examination this is something that you need to know one you
need to know that there is a thing out there called the galvanic series and the
galvanic series tells us how metal will corrode now the lower down in the
galvanic series it says it’s more noble me meaning that it is not as likely to
corrode as a metal that is above it now the term we give to the metals on top is
we say that it’s less noble or more active so hopefully that makes sense the
higher the metal is the more active it is and we call that less noble the metals that are on the bottom below the
metals we just talked about those are going to be more noble or less active
now the way I like to remember this is Game of Thrones and Game of Thrones is
probably the most talked about show on this show so many people said that they
watched it when I’ve interviewed them and definitely I watch it as well well if you look at it and you look at
nobility all the people that are noble the Royals all that sort of stuff they’re not doing any of the work they
are sending their people out there to do the work so I remember that as more
noble means less active because the more noble you are you’re probably going to
get somebody that works under you of course I’m thinking Game of Thrones context to go out and do the work so the
person that comes to mind with this is darrenis Targaryen can you just imagine her business card now she’s the blonde
that’s on the show and she has the dragons and all that stuff so I’m going to try to get this right and for those
of you that don’t watch the show I’m sure this is totally useless for you but I’m going to try to do this for the fans
out there so here’s her complete title A Stormborn of the House of Targaryen
first of her name the unburnt queen of the Andals and first of men Khaleesi of
the Great Grass Seed Breaker of Chains and Mother of Dragons how would you want
that on your business card well folks if you just think about nobility and
nobility probably has other things or other people working for them that’s how
I remember more noble less work least Noble more work all that said to say is
that’s how we put the corrosion coupons in the system however we do it in the
line of flow so it’s kind of reversed so that’s where a lot of people make
mistakes now if you put a copper coupon in front of a mild steel coupon what
will happen is it will look like you have two copper coupons when you take them out of that duration so in order to
prevent that you want to put the most noble metal last because again it’s
through the line of flow which flips the whole thing upside down I don’t know if
I kept everybody up with that so but that’s how I remember it and that’s why they’re organized another question I get
quite a bit is how long should I keep corrosion coupons in the system and folks this is really up to you you can
keep corrosion coupons in as long or as short of a time as you want on but you
need to realize this the longer the corrosion coupons are in the system the
more that they are going to mimic the system now here’s what I mean by that the shorter the corrosion coupon during
the system the more aggressive that system water is going to be to that corrosion coupon because think about it
our job is to corrode the metal in a way where we slow down the corrosion of that
metal we call that process passivation if we put a brand new raw corrosion
coupon in that system it does not have the benefit of having that passive
coding on that that passivation so we are going to get a more rapid corrosion
rate in the first couple of days of that coupon now if we only have that coupon in there for 30 days a lot of those 30
days is going to be indicative of that higher corrosion rate so if you are only using 30 Day coupons expect your
corrosion rates to be a little bit higher than they actually are in the system so how long can you leave corrosion
coupons in the system well folks you can leave them in as long as you want to you
just have to make sure that you know the original date that you put those in there and we can run that calculation again the longer that they are in there
the more indicative they’re going to be to the system that you’re trying to gauge the corrosion rates for now
typically we’ll see timelines of 30 60 90 120 yearly coupons things such as that
and we’re talking about corrosion coupons and anything that we’re trying to improve a program the more data sets
that we have the more opportunities we have to change the program so here’s
what I like to do I like to do corrosion coupon racks that will allow me to put two of the same types of metal in there
so let’s say I’m just doing mild steel and copper I will have two mild Steels two coppers and on the very first time
that I install those in the system I’m going to put two mild Steels and two coppers in that corrosion coupon rack
I’m then going to come back in 30 days and I’m going to remove one mild steel
and one copper and that now is a 30 day exposure I’m going to replace those two
that I just took out with again mild steel and copper and then the next 30
days I’m going to come and I’m going to remove that set that I put in originally
but now it’s been in the system for 60 days and replace those and now every 30
days I now have 60 day results so that gets me a little bit more accurate and I
get a whole bunch of data points with that again the more data points that we get that are accurate within the system
the better we can use these corrosion coupons to change our program and make
or at least verify that our program is working properly now let’s say it’s been 60 days or 30 days or or whatever how
many days you want to leave the corrosion coupons in the system and now it’s time to take them out and I didn’t
mention this before but when you handle a corrosion coupon you want to make sure you’re gloved just the small amount of
oils that are on your fingers will change how that corrosion coupon will
interface with that water and I can’t tell you how many corrosion coupons that I’ve received from water traders in my
lab that I can see your perfect thumb print on there well folks that’s not a
good exposure to the water on the entire corrosion coupon surface so those aren’t
good coupons and the reason that those happen is because they did not glove themselves and those oils transferred
from their thumb to the corrosion coupon so when you take the corrosion coupon out you also want to make sure that’s
your glove now here’s a step that a lot of people miss that I can tell when I
get those back in my lab but there’s nothing I can do about a lot of people put wet corrosion coupons in that VCI
envelope that brown envelope that the corrosion coupons came in originally don’t do this because all that moisture
will continue to corrode the coupon even though it’s out of the system and when
we get it back at the lab we can’t tell if that corrosion took place in the system or when it was in the envelope so
real simple you can take a paper towel and you simply just dry it off and only put dry coupons in that envelope now
that you have that dry coupon that you did not touch in the envelope take a
piece of Scotch tape and seal up the entire back side of that envelope and
that will mean that there is no air exposure specifically no moist air
exposure that can get into that envelope where it will continue to corrode that
corrosion coupon that’s been a big issue of late and what a lot of the manufacturers have started doing because
we would get corrosion coupons that we just bought straight from the factory and it would have signs of corrosion on
them they’re actually now starting to wrap the corrosion coupons in special VCI paper and then putting those into
the envelopes that are impregnated with the volatile corrosion inhibitor the VCI
compound now if you did not fill out all of the information on the envelope now
is your opportunity to to do that again I need to know or whoever’s analyzing it
needs to know what the install date was of that corrosion coupon and what the
date was that you took that out that has to be on there we have to have the initial starting weight and then
anything else that you want to share on that envelope that will give us more
information to analyze that corrosion coupon after the exposure period is done with
the corrosion coupons that means you put them in the system you label the envelope you’ve taken them out the system you’ve finished labeling the
envelope and now you send them off to a lab and somebody like me gets them here’s what happens when they go into a
lab so when we get them we catalog everything so whatever you send us we make sure that we take good notes on and
we note that if they are Urgent or just regular coupon runs and if they’re
urgent it means we’re going to put those ahead of everything that we do if they’re just regular coupon runs then
we’re going to run those the next time we run all the coupons in our lab so
when we start to run the coupons that procedure is we photograph everything so
we photograph the front and the back of the envelopes they came in if you sent any paperwork in we go ahead and copy
that and then we take pictures of the corrosion coupons themselves front and
back before or they’re cleaned all the same types of metals then go into a
cleaning process so all the coppers go through the same batch together all the mild Steels go through the same process
together so we separate those out and then there’s a two-step cleaning process that we do one we’ve got to get all the
Organics off first now the G1 standard that I mentioned earlier it tells you how to do all this so we get all the
Organics off by putting a cleaner in to the flask that we’re using we put that into an ultrasonic cleaner and we add a
certain amount of heat to it based on that standard for a certain amount of time based on that standard and then we
rinse those off and then we put those coupons now that we’ve got all the Organics off of them in an inhibited
acid and what that inhibited acid is meant to do is to clean off all the corrosion byproducts during the exposure
period that took place on that coupon so now we’ve removed all the byproducts and we just have bare metal on those coupons
now it’s very specific in how we do that because we don’t want to remove more metal than we have to we just want to
get the byproducts off once we get it to that stage we then dry them I set them
all out flat on our bench and then we have to use the envelopes that you gave
us to identify the serial number to the coupon and then we start weighing each
coupon again down to the ten thousandth of a gram that’s very very specific and
of course that’s not your ordinary scale these are special metallurgical scales and then once that’s done we take a
final picture of what that coupon looks like front and back after it’s cleaned and then we start doing math we do the
equation to figure out how many mills per year was lost during that exposure
time and again Mills per year is one thousandths of one inch and then we go
ahead and write our reports and if it’s a regular HVAC cooling tower or process
cooling tower Chiller or closed loop system something like that the association of water Technologies has a
standard guideline that they have put into the marketplace to say this is what
is acceptable for mild steel and copper and I will make sure to have that on my
show notes page so you can see exactly what that is but I do want to explain a
little bit about how the analysis works so I’ll tell you what I’m going to go into one of the items on the acceptable
non-acceptable list those standards that I was talking about so let’s talk about mild Steel in an evaporative water type
system so anything less than one mil per year is considered excellent anything
that’s less than three but greater than one of course would be considered very good good and that goes all the way up
to anything that’s greater than 10 mils per year is unacceptable and there’s a
good range of fare range and a poor range in between that so A lot of times I will weigh a corrosion coupon and
let’s say it will come back as good and that would be a 3.1 mils per year well
now let’s say that corrosion coupon is pitted well even though it weighed to
where it said it was good pitting is never good pitting is never acceptable
so when you look at the rates on what is acceptable and what is not you have to
remember that pitting is never acceptable now here’s what pitting is here’s how I like to Define pitting to
go back what general corrosion is it’s the only acceptable corrosion that we
can have within our systems and what that means is that all of the corrosion is taking place evenly over the entire
metal surface that’s what the standards are referring to a pit means a localized
point on that piece of metal where the entire potential for that entire surface surface is taking place in that one
little pinpoint and that’s called pitting if you see pitting of any kind
it is not acceptable and typically there is a reason for pitting it might be how
the coupon has been installed it could be a flow issue it could be a water treatment issue but pitting is a sign
that something is going on in the system and I want to make sure that the scaling up Nation realizes that even though you
might get back a report that says a corrosion coupon is good or better it is
never good or better if it has a pit in it a pit is always a fail
so once all that is done in the lab the person that sent it in will receive a report and now you’ve got to take that
to the customer and explain to them what you now know about corrosion coupons now
the first thing that people want to assume is that whatever corrosion has taken place on that corrosion coupon is
uniform through the entire system and folks what I said at the top of the show
that is not true the corrosion you are measuring is the corrosion on that
coupon so that’s why you want to try to mimic that G4 standard as much as you
possibly can and the easiest way to do that is to buy a pre-manufactured corrosion coupon holder and use it and
install it properly just buying that and utilizing that properly alone will
eliminate five variables that could play Havoc with your corrosion coupons so now
you have to look at things where is it a issue issue with the operation of the
system or is it an issue with my actual water treatment program or both and then
you need to talk with a customer and if there’s never any flow on a particular system now we have all these systems
here in Atlanta where they build out all these redundancies and they just run one
Chiller and then they’ll open up a chiller and they’ll say this Chiller looks horrible your products are not
working properly to keep the corrosion down within this Chiller and I’ll look at them and I’ll say you’re exactly
right we don’t have magic products Mr customer they’re not going to go into a system that’s not running you have to
run the system in order for our products to actually go in there and by the way we get a lot of calls from customers
that don’t understand that so you want to make sure that the systems are running because it is impossible to
treat a system that is not but you’re looking at all these things and now you’re going to apply the data that you
got from that corrosion coupon to your system making a change and then in your
next exposure rate on your next series of corrosion coupons you will be able to
see what type of an effect you had on that system again I look at corrosion
coupons as a very inexpensive proactive approach for us to get more
data about the system that we are treating I will urge each and every
water treater out there that if you are not using corrosion coupons to please
consider to start using that because again the only way you’re going to know
that a problem is coming is once a problem is there there’s no proactivity
if you’re not periodically looking at what your corrosion rates are now a lot of people ask me do I prefer corrosion
coupons or do I prefer for the electronic corrosion coupon monitors and
of course the more data sets that you get the better it is but those are
expensive and The Only Name I can think of is coreater that’s a name brand and the actual systems itself have a generic
name and and I’m sure I’m going to get a bunch of calls and write-ins because I can’t think of it right now but whatever
that is what it does it every so many seconds it takes a reading and calculates that into mils per year so
you can see hundreds if not thousands of data sets over a day’s time so a lot of
times those could be Overkill in a system that’s working well where I
really like to use that is where we can do something with it so maybe we’re trying a new inhibitor or maybe we’re
trying a new buy side and every time that feeds we can now get real-time data to what happens on That Metal tip based
on that feed so I love to use those for that and then we have customers that
have very specific pieces of equipment and they want to know all that data but
I’m going to tell you a secret I run corrosion coupons even if I have those
core Raiders and again that’s the name brand I can’t think of the other thing in the system because that allows me to
utilize both sets of data to get more information about the system folks I
hope that this episode has made you think more about corrosion coupons it is
such an easy tool to use now you know the entire life of a corrosion coupon so
it’s my hope that you’re going to start using these better if you’re not using them you are going to start using them
and when you send them in to either your lab or my lab or anybody like me you are
going to get better results because you now know why we need all that information and the information that we
give you is now going to make a little bit more sense now the last question I’ll answer is what’s the difference
between all the different Labs out there that you can send corrosion coupons to and I’m going to tell you all the labs
out there are extremely good but my preference is that I want a water
treater on the other end who understands what to look for in corrosion coupons so
when a corrosion coupon comes back pitted or has something else on it there’s some sort of accelerated
corrosion on it we can ask questions of each other and you can get good data and
good answers to your questions so you can now do something to affect that I
will tell you that nine times out of ten installation issues are what I see when
corrosion coupon data does not come back proper and I already mentioned it’s not being installed on the system properly
it’s not being the right order in the system or not handled properly either
when you install them or when you take them out of the system so if you can do all of that and then work with somebody
who you can get more than just a number from that corrosion coupon from I know
that corrosion coupons are going to make you a better water Trader because you’re going to have more data about that
system folks I hope you enjoyed this special corrosion coupon pinks and Blues
skyrimination I hear from so many people that they love going back to older
episodes and re-listening in fact when I compare some of our statistics to other
podcasters that I know more people re-listen to scaling up H2O podcasts
than any other podcaster that I am associated with and they’re all jealous about that but it’s not me it’s just the
material that we have and let’s face it there’s so much that we have to learn in industrial water treatment to have a
resource like this podcast to re-listened whenever you want to bolster
your knowledge on any particular topic how cool is that and we have well over
300 episodes of content so thank you for allowing me to replay this episode I
know you will get something out of it even if you listen to it again and I hope that the next time you look at that
little guy that little corrosion coupon whatever Metallurgy it may be you now
know his or her story I don’t know what gender corrosion coupons are and you are
going to treat them with a little bit more respect and when you install them
you are thinking about the end result and that will allow you to go through
the entire process a lot better and I promise that your program will be better
for it something else you will be better for is if you listen to this 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
bromine is bromine and oxidizing or non-oxidizing antimicrobial
what is its chemical formula and how does it differ from bromide what are typical usage concentrations of
bromine how does it interact with microbes how do you test for it
how quickly should you test for Bromine after sampling should you test for free bromine total
bromine or both what is the impact of pH on bromine
is bromine more effective than chlorine at higher PHS or is the story a little more complex than the dissociation
curves would indicate how quickly does bromine act on unwanted microbiological activity
what methods are there for getting bromine chemistry into the water can bromine be overstabilized at times
with some of these methods if so How likely is this to happen and how would the system recover
how does ammonia interact with bromine and is this a concern what is bromine’s impact upon corrosion
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 James thank you once again for that installment of periodic water table with
James I know so many people are keeping up each and every week with James’s
challenges and we’re learning each and every week now maybe you’ve missed a week here or there and if you have just
go back and listen to another episode a previous episode and we’ll have all that information for you and of course we’re
keeping track of that on our show notes page so you can go to scalinguph2o.com and we’ll have all of the periodic water
table with James’s is that how you say that I don’t know which item you make plural when you say that title anyway it
will be on the web page and I have to say our staff at scaling up H2O has done
such an amazing job and they continue to try to figure out how they make the web page better for you and the whole point
is we’ve got so much content out there we want to make it easily accessible for you so you can learn more about this
field and when you learn more you’re going to do more and you’re going to do things differently and that is going to
help us all with our mission the mission here for this show is to raise the bar in the water treatment industry we of
course do that one water treater at a time and that is you that is all the members of the scaling up nation and I
want to thank you for listening to this episode of scaling up H2O we’re gonna have a brand new episode for you next
Friday until then have a great week folks