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is proudly sponsored by the rising tide Mastermind the rising tide Mastermind is
one of my favorite things that I look forward to each and every week because I
get to see people that have my best interest in mind I know this because I
have their best interest in mind and when you get people together in a room
like that you can just imagine how people want to help other people if this
sounds like something you want to learn more about go to scalinguph2o.com forward slash Mastermind
foreign up H2O the podcast where we scale up on knowledge so we don’t scale up our
systems I’m your host Trace Blackmore a nation so many people have let me know how much they enjoy Legionella Awareness
Month of course that was our last three episodes we were talking about how do we become more aware around the topic of
Legionella so if you have not listened to those episodes by all mean listen to
this one but also go back and listen to those other three I think it will help
you create a dialogue with your customers to get them more in the know
about what they need to do for their systems of course you are there to guide
them but they’re the ones that need to make the decisions and they can only make proper decisions when they have the
proper information and that is where you come in now where we come in is giving
you those last three episodes and of course giving you the resource scaling up h2o.com forward
Legionella once again scaling up h2o.com forward slash legioneller where you can
start your Learning Journey on all the things that we’ve collected around
Legionella so you can be prepared to have the best conversations for your
customers some other things that will prepare you to have a better conversations is
looking at some of the events that are coming up that you might want to
consider going to so if you’re going to be in Scottsdale Arizona Around September 10th through 12th you might
want to consider going to the Smart Water Summit this is a conference all around water utilities so if this is
something you want more information about you can go to scalinguph2o.com go over to our events page one of my
favorite conferences to attend is the association of water Technologies annual
Convention and Expo that’s taking place October 4th through 7th by the way my
anniversary is October 4th we’ll be celebrating 26 years of blissful
marriage there at the association of water Technologies conference and of course that’s going to be in Grand
Rapids Michigan so if you see my wife she’s going to be there you can wish her
a happy anniversary and ask her how on Earth has she put up with me for 26
years maybe not ask her that but definitely I hope to see you there at
the association of water Technologies conference and we’re always doing something for the podcast at those
conferences and I always meet so many members of the scaling up Nation at those conferences so please if you see
me come up and say hi and I’d love to know any show ideas that you might have any guests you might want me to invite
on and above all else that you just enjoy this podcast I get inspired I
cannot tell you how much it inspires me when people tell me what this podcast means to them how they’re driving around
they feel a little lonely and then they feel part of a community because they are listening to the scaling up H2O
podcast so thank you for all of those stories on days where I am extremely
busy and I’ve got to push a couple of podcast episodes out I can’t tell you how much those words of encouragement
help me so thank you for giving those to me they are very much appreciated the
other conference I’ll mention on today’s show is the one water Summit taking place in Tucson Arizona November 14th
through 16th this is hosted by the U.S water Alliance we’ll have information about everything you want to know about
that conference on our show notes page as always all of these events and
everything that I’ve mentioned and more are going to be listed on our events Page by going to scalingup h2o.com
Nation as you know this podcast takes a village it is not just my voice it is
all of the fine people the staff that we have on the scaling up H2O podcast that
not only do the editing but make sure that you’re aware that we even have a show and post it and all the things that
get done in Pre and post-production but we also have people out there like James
McDonald who wants to make sure that he is helping us get information to you
about how we can be a better and more knowledgeable water treater every single
week that this podcast airs so here is a brand new episode 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
Alum how is alum used in a duster water treatment what is the chemical formula
for alum is this a simple question or could Alum mean different things to different professions and industries
in regards to Industrial water treatment what function is Alan performing when used how does the use of Alum impact
solids produced as compared to inorganics can Alum be used in raw water and
wastewater treatment what are common strengths of Alum used what could happen if Alum is overfed
what could be the impact upon Downstream unit operations 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 learned 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 Nation I met our
next guest through a colleague of mine and uh unfortunately we tried to record
earlier and I had just bought all of this brand new equipment folks it was
shiny it had that new equipment smell it was right out of the box and it didn’t
work so I had to work with one of the fine people that I mentioned earlier in the show of course I’m talking about our
audio engineer and we got together and he helped me set everything up properly
so we are sounding better than ever and we can actually record guests who would
think when you have a guest on the other end you actually need to be able to record them but this guest was very
humble very graceful and we had him come back for today’s interview on this brand
new equipment so Nation I hope you enjoy this interview
my lab partner is Brent Baird of instruments direct Brent how are you
today I’m doing great how you doing Trace doing very well thank you for coming on the show our second attempt we
had some technical difficulties on my end last time I guess that’s the price you pay when you upgrade equipment
that’s the way it goes always something interesting absolutely it is but uh thank you very much for uh joining us
today and we’re going to learn all things flow meter there you go how about that so I’m curious uh you are the flow
meter guy so I know we’re talking to the right person but can you tell us a little bit about your company and what
do you guys do well instruments direct is a distributor of flow meters a wide variety of
Technologies and uh it’s got an extended history in fact the uh The Baird family
has an extended history in ultrasonic technology and uh over the years my
father Dr James bear developed the technology for many of the ultrasonic level or sensors that are in the market
today for example ultrasonic tank level ultrasonic fish finders even the beep
beep beep backup on your car ultrasonic sensor he’s developed many of these things and so he’s always on the lookout
for new ultrasonic technology so back in the 70s my father traveled to
England to investigate the rumor of a new type of ultrasonic flow meter a new
track down the source who ended up being an old drunken sailor and for the price of a pint of beer he told my father this
story is it appropriate to tell you the story it’s a it’s a quick story absolutely well as you see once upon a
time there was a sailor who lived in a small sailboat and they love to sail up and down the English Coast one day he
pondered wouldn’t it be nice to know how fast his sailboat was going well back when he was in the Royal Navy
he learned a thing or two about Doppler radar technology and after a few attempts he put together a transducer
with some electronics that he towed behind his boat to monitor its speed well he was so excited that he wanted to
share his success with his friend the butcher well the butcher said maybe we can make some money on your invention so
he partnered with the Sailor and he let him use his back room in the butcher shop word spread and before long the
Sailor actually got a few orders and he realized he needed a bigger location to manufacture his flow meter he needs some
money and a location well the butcher convinced the preacher to join the team
in exchange for using the church’s basement and then the preacher convinced one of his parishioners a young wealthy
Widow for the much needed funding well it wasn’t long after that that trouble began it appears the preacher
was dipping into the poor box to cover his expenses for the weekend trips to the hunting lodge with a young wealthy
Widow when the parishioners found that out they could no longer play Bingo in the church basement so they put a stop
to this and they had the police evict the Sailor and the Butcher and they soon booted out the priest for taking holy
money withdrawals and asked for the widow she headed off the Monte Carlo to find a new husband
my father was so inspired by this new ultrasonic technology he headed back to
Chicago to make his own ultrasonic flow meter so it all started in my father’s
basement in 1977 and I was in college working nights as a disc jockey brother
Brent in the morning at wrw 91.9 FM my father was the inventor and not a people
person had no clue how to sales or marketing since I knew how to talk I was the elected mouthpiece for a new company
called dynasonics so over the next 20 years we developed many ultrasonic Technologies and in 1996
we sold dinasonics to what is called today Badger meter then I founded instruments Direct
which specializes in all types of flow meters so for the past 27 years I’ve
been producing videos and traveling the country as a as an educator and a speaker and things have really changed
uh uh with the Advent of the internet we no longer have to knock on the door to sell anything everything’s online so
somehow I got wrangled by my younger employees to get involved in social media before you know it I’m an internet
celebrity as the flow meter guy and it actually is getting kind of weird because the last conference I went to uh
one of the people in the audience said can I get a selfie of you and they said uh sure come on come on get a selfie and
and before I know it I looked up there’s a line of good old boy Engineers with baggy blue jeans waiting to get a picture with me kind of awkward but at
my age I’ll take any any groupie that I can so hence the the flow meter guys
really generated from all this online traffic uh and then I use that as an
educational tool to make my presentations so that’s how the whole thing and that’s how the title got
started I love that and your videos aren’t just hey here’s a meter let me show you how
it works I mean you get into character you have costume it is amazing all the stuff that you do yeah I have a problem
you know and the funny thing is is it’s as many people it didn’t start out that
way as you can see I enjoy talking to you and I enjoy an audience now but as a
child I was extremely overprotected child I was very shy and very introverted and this is due in part to
my mother protecting her four children like a mama bear from Evil and pain in the Boogeyman and I got praised for
whatever I did and I could go pick up a rock in the backyard and dust it off and bring it to Mom and she’d give me a hug
and and say look what he made she would take it and she would put it on top of the refrigerator for all the sea and
with all this praising you know I I developed a problem the side effect was the excessive attention was that when I
walked into a room I expected everyone to acknowledge my greatness problem I was I was more like Forrest
Gump I had absolutely no social skills when I went out into the world I got destroyed and so there’s an evolution to
get from that point there where I was afraid of my own shadow afraid to talk to you to finally getting to the point
now where I really entertain myself when we make a presentation and if you talk
to somebody for 60 Minutes 90 minutes or two hours with technical stuff even I get bored and so every 15 minutes or so
we’ll do a a humorous video clip or I’ll play a character live to kind of break
up the edge and if you want to know something’s hard trying to make an engineer laugh is very difficult
so it takes a long time and if I get reinvited to the same conference year after year now you have to top yourself
the first year they’re cold I crack a smile the second year of their laugh and so on in fact the funniest story that I
had is I talked to a group of 300 Engineers the night before he met with all the conference manager people and I
did a couple of my monologue jokes and they saw this really funny so I stand up the next day in front of these 300
engineers and do my fantastic monologue and it’s cricket cricket so then I go
into my regular routine and at the end of the conference one of the guys come up he says she says Brent that was the funniest opening I’ve ever heard and I
said why didn’t you laugh he said I didn’t know that we could yeah when you work with Engineers it’s
it’s a different life and uh so you you have to be like them you have to understand them you have to talk about
their same problems and they’re bored too so if there’s something humorous that you can do you know Monty
python-ish kind of thing you know if you say spam spam spam everybody replies spam spam spam spam so this is the world
we’re kind of in today so who if you thought that Engineers had no social media they’re slowly stumbling into this
Marketplace it’s become a viable marketing tool for us and a great relief
from me to teach technology and at the same time not boring the pants off for
you for sitting there in a chair these guys are normally running around the field doing work in the field they’re not really classroom kind of people and
uh so it kind of breaks the ice to do something like that so I enjoy it and they’re learning something and and it’s
turned to be a relatively good uh source of Revenue you know as a come company we
spend money for pay-per-clicks with Google and things like that but now we spend more time in video production and
people want to see how to do this and of course the guy might do something silly while he’s doing it but they learn
something at the same time and so it’s we’ve got a following from that so if I didn’t have young people at my building
I’d still be using the fax machine so as you’ve all say you gotta you gotta move with the times or you’re out of business
just recently uh I was part of a group and we had to do a TED talk and we read
a book about TED talks and then we had to present a TED Talk and it was all about how do we get the message that is
in our head to the other people’s head get them to follow along and entertain
them a little bit along the way but actually give them something that they could use by the time that we were done
that was the premise of what the assignment was it sounds like you’re doing all of these things I’m curious
what is your process to make sure that you get the end product that you are looking for
you know uh I have an audience here that’s a tear group and uh as an old guy
I sometimes don’t know where the line is to step over so the first thing when you involve with social media you hear only
people getting kicked out of social media because they said something wrong they didn’t mean it but they said something wrong there’s another word you
know as an older guy every month I’m told that another word I’m not allowed to say which is fine with me I just
don’t want my quest is if I’m going to make fun of making fun of myself I use self-deprivation as to make fun of
myself I never want to hurt anybody so step one we have to present information that is not offensive to anybody and
it’s the world’s changing so it’s a key point to anybody in social media so we have younger people and older people
that go through the queue of the technology we’re doing and step three when we try to solve a problem uh we try
to make little pieces of the problem as opposed to a big piece of the problem people get bored everybody watches a
video now for a minute or two and that’s the end of it so we try to make uh the training material anywhere from a minute
to uh less than 10 minutes because people get bored and then we have a list
of the objective here’s the problem this is how we solve the problem and then are there any questions from that problem so
that’s pretty much the format that we use when we do a training or video or presentation if somebody wanted to see some of these
videos where can they go the videos are be on YouTube so it’s just youtube.com
forward slash instruments direct you’ll find them there you can find them under Brent Baird under LinkedIn and most of
them are posted you’ll say what’s wrong with this guy if they’re out of context and sometimes there’s there’s more humor
than there is technology and other times there’s more technology than there’s humor and as the greatest thing I can
tell you is thank goodness for the 16 year olds on YouTube because the editing software is so easy now they could never
do this a couple years ago well I’m sure you’re going to get some more hits on those sites and uh scale animation it is
worth the trip I went there just for a second and I was just so impressed with
what I saw and uh the amount of work that of course you put into that it is definitely worth the trip there and
we’ll have all that information on our show notes page so people can find that very easily
to shift gear slightly uh let’s talk about flow meters how would you describe
to a lay person what a flow meter is a flow meter is a device that’s going to take an inventory of a process so and
our main audience is about water treatment so we’re monitoring water so why do we need a flow meter for water
treatment for example well to treat the water we need to know how much water we have to begin with to add an additive to
correct a problem so it’s to Pace the water flow so a simple version of the
water meters outside the back your house as a device that’s above ground or below ground that the city says okay you use
this amount of water here’s your bill they have to take an inventory of the amount of water that you’re utilizing in
your home your office and your building that’s a short story what a water meter is our flow meter is and they’re all
various types of designs how do we get into that well they’re all different
kinds of designs and I think the first question we ask again because you’re again your audience primarily is in the
water is what kind of water do you have and think that’s a strange question so
the first thing we ask is is it a potable water or a non-potable water potable water is a liquid that sometimes
it’s for human consumption and it meets certain requirements NSF 61 is a typical
requirement so it’s a it’s a drinking water quality that humans are going to use a non-pod of water is a water that
it’s for your industrial process that might be in your cooling tower in other processes within a facility that you’re
not necessarily going to drink and why is that an important question the flow meter that you put in the line or on the
line can that contaminate the water so the flow meter has to be meeting
clean water statuses if it’s a drinking water application so the water that you have on the
outside of your house it’s usually a brass flow meter that meets NSF 61 and
AWA drinking water requirements that it doesn’t have certain lead content in the material uh and other applications in
the food industry they’ll actually need something called sanitary so if you’re in a food facility there they won’t have
npt threads they’ll have special tri-clamp fittings on the end of it something that they can clean and take
on and off so we ask what kind of water do you have so for your audience the water that comes into the building from
the city is usually a potable water application and then when we’re inside the plant in that case there a lot of
them are non-potable water and then if you were to break down the kinds of flow meters there’s there’s it all comes down
to of course always down to economics and what are you going to pay for and in your world there the older technology of
course we just talked about a traditional City water meter which are have new tating disk or multi-jet and
Next Step would be an older technology would be differential pressure it might be an orifice plate or a pitot tube and
they’re just monitoring the temperature on the left and the right side and looking at temperature pressure differential to calculate a flow it’s
not very accurate but it’s the old method and it’s relatively inexpensive but it’s in the line
then moving up from there you’d go to a turbine flow meter or a padawa flow meter which is a device that’s like a
pinwheel that’s in the pipe that the flow turns this wheel creates a pulse and we pick up the number of pulses
after that you would go into magnetic flow meters and the magnetic flow meter is a device that works on conductive
liquids which you’ll have most of the time that creates uh it’s like a pipe with a bunch of copper wire wrapped
around the outside of it creates a magnetic curtain and when the process liquid that’s conductive goes through
that curtain they call it Faraday’s law conducts amount of current so the
electrodes on the side are kind of like a volt meter the more this conducted liquid that goes through it measures that and they’re relatively accurate but
it’s a Flange type device that’s in the line and then the next thing that we get involved a lot is ultrasonic which is a
clamp-on device that measures the flow from the outside of the pipe kind of star trekish you know you actually take
a sensor and you hold on the outside of the pipe and it measures the flow inside the liquid and they use these in medical
Industries right now to measure the flow of the blood going through your vein so it has a wide variety of Technologies
where you can use this we’re not so much in the medical industry we’re more in the and Industrial in the process control Wastewater nuclear chemical feed
water treatment irrigation that’s that’s the world that we’re mostly in but there are special equipments that can measure
a vein that’s a quarter inch in size there so it’s a wide variety so it comes back to price price and accuracy what
you’re going to use so in your world in most cases there you’re going to use a magnetic flow meter or an ultrasonic
flow meter in some cases a Padua flow meter if it’s a low budget item to tell you that I’ve got a hundred gallons of
water coming through here and I’ve got to add this amount of ounces of this processed chemical to treat this water
are there particular installation concerns that we need to be concerned
with with each one of those Styles they have certain limitations and I do a
whole presentation on Flow Hydraulics So generically speaking most flow meters
require a certain amount of straight run a pipe say between elbows the rule of thumb is if it’s a pumped flow most
flows size a pipe around seven feet per second so most flow meters require 10
pipe diameters after an elbow and five pipe damage before the next elbow that’s
generically speaking there’s some exceptions to that some of the new magnetic formulas require less or little
a straight run of pipe but for the most part that’s the industry standard for most type of flow meters so that’s a
limitation and of course then it’s the pipe size if you have something that’s in the line you’ve got a one inch line
you have to have a one inch meter if you have a 12 inch line you have a 12 inch meter so the bigger the pipe size is the
cost would go up because there’s more material the advantage of the old ultrasonic flow meter it’s not pipe
sized limited the transducers are adjustable so you could use the same sensor for a two inch pipe and a 24 inch
pipe so the price is not going to change when we’re measuring liquids we’re
talking about water but of course we can measure anything that’s flowing through that how do the meters compensate for
the different viscosities the different densities now some meters have an issue
with that and some do not so for example the magnetic flow meter has a curtain right across the pipe it really has
little effect on viscosity and then the viscosities that you’re going to use from say some of the chemical additives
they’re relatively thin if you had a really thick process like caulk going
through a pipe for example really thick gooey stuff there you’d use yet another specialty turbo meter it’s called an
oval gear and that’s what it is a couple of Gears turning around that can tolerate those extreme viscosities there
so some of the devices with moving parts will be affected by varying viscosities
and other devices will have no effect that’ll be part of your checklist and what you’re going to do and you
mentioned earlier a lot of times these meters will feed in into some sort of feed equipment so we can dose our
products not all meters have that capability so what do we need to look for if we’re looking for some sort of
pulsing meter well most flow meters that will have well not all flow meters it’s a function
if it’s an option so if you just got a traditional water meter it’s not going to have a pulse output it’ll be a reed
switch kind of output then you’d have to get one that actually has that feature a pulse output then the next step output
you would get from that would be a 4 to 20 milliamp signal would be an analog signal and they would also have a pulse
output so most of the ultrasonic and the Magnetic come with all that standardly the lesser the price the meter it’s
usually an option whether it has a pulse output or not and that’ll go to some type of a controller and the controller
then you’re going to say after a hundred gallons I’m going to trip a relay and the relay is going to dose something in
into the side of the pipe in fact some flow meters have that ability you could
program the flow meter to say I would like a relay contact after every 100 gallons so that’s another option with
some of the flow meters most of our audience is industrial water treatment and most of those individuals are
treating things like cooling towers and boilers if we talk about cooling towers many municipalities are allowing for a
diverted water credit so they’re not charging the consumer for the amount of water that’s being evaporated because
it’s not going back into the sewer what do we need to know about ensuring that
we get the proper meter for credits like that you know that’s become a popular
application uh the blowdown you get from a cooling tower many is just indicated
municipalities are interested in that and it’s a very difficult application so the blow down is basically you know the
spout that comes from a whale when it comes off there well it goes blurp in the pipe and that’s the bad application
because one the pipe’s not full then it’s really full coming out like a fire hose and it’s not full so uh the bad
news is a lot of times in written specifications they’re specifying the traditional water meter the brass water
meter what’s got a spinny around something uh and when that hits that it
overspins or underspends and does a very poor job for applications like that the first thing you need to do is put a u in
the pipe so the pipe will be full all the time so I need to put a trap in the pipe basically and that will make the
pipe full once you have a full pipe then then you can use an ultrasonic a magnetic flow meter or turbine flow
meter because that takes the concussion of the water out of the whole recipe there and everybody wants to monitor it
so the municipality is specifying City water meters in that application which do it horrendous job because it’s it’s
not designed to work in that application it’s not a full pipe and then it’s overflow on an application like that so
I do a whole presentation just on the blow down and just as an interesting story uh here in Atlanta in the top of
the CNN building a few years back they have this partially failed pipe application and we proposed to put a
trap in the line and they opted to put a weir box in there so we have giant three foot Weir boxes because it’s partially
filled to uh on the roof of the CNN building so get a high-tech organization there with low-tech ancient stuff on the
roof of the building but that’s how they monitor it in the city mandated that they have to monitor the effluent From
The Towers with something like that so difficult application at best if you have the choice put a trap in the line
then you have a whole opportunity of flow meters that you can put in the application that is great advice and you
said you had a video on that I’ll make sure I get that information for you and Link it to the show notes page for all
of our audience what are some of the biggest installation mistakes that you’ve seen with some of your meters
well every day is interesting the biggest mistake of course I said is probably lack of straight run of pipe
where they’ll basically just have two flanges and a couple inches in between it and they’ll put something like that
in there a lot of the installations are pump testing so if they go to a a new
wastewater treatment plant they’re building a substation or something like that and they’ll have a 36 or 48 inch
pipe they need to test the pump performance to sign off on a project there they’ll have a problem because
they won’t have they’re going from a wet well to through the pipe back to wet well so the water that’s going through
the pipe is highly turbulent like going through a washing machine very turbulent and no straight run of pipe and they
want the ability to validate the pump that’s always been an interesting application because the test of the pump
doesn’t actually perform the same application after they certify the pump
so if you certified the pump there’d be head pressure on the pump the line would be full and there and we wouldn’t have a
problem with flow metering so we have extremely extremely turbulent situations so sometimes we have to try different
types of meters or clamp on ultrasonic flow meters the transit time ultrasonic flow meters require straight run of pipe
on clean liquid and if they don’t have the straight run of pipe the turbulence will knock that out then we may have to try an ultrasonic Doppler flow meter
which is works like radar it bounces off suspended particles or turbulence but that’s not as accurate so it’s a very
difficult game so when they specify testing they don’t really take in in
into mind what the testing requirements are from the flow meter people so that’s an ongoing interesting problem that we
have all the time give us some straight run to pipe give us a little head pressure give us a full pipe and then you have a whole lot of choices to use
the right flow meter technology the equipment we use is getting smarter and smarter and soon Skynet will take
over the world but until that happens I’m sure there’s some great innovations that are happening with flow meters what
new features should we be looking for and what can we expect in the future well from the flow meter side of course
the best way to go is get out of the pipe and go on the outside of the pipe so that’s the magic side there and so
the technology is evolving with with the ultrasonic technology that and years ago you had a very specific about the type
of processed liquid and the how nice and clean the pipe was and it was a lot of parameters to make the device work right
and now the Technologies is moving forward too that they have autopilot functions the electronics the portable
electronics are about the size of a voltmeter and they have diagnostic screens that you don’t need to see so
the technology is such that it’s autopilot so you turn it on it does its business it is done if you were to go
actually look at the diagnostic screens behind the things you could see the thing going nuts trying to find the best
parameters to work with so I would say the autopilot functions of the devices are because of the microprocessor and
all these different methodologies with the software getting better and better every year there’s less you need to do
so we’ll take a 6 thousand dollar portable ultrasonic flow meter and to rent it to Pete the Plumber which has
never seen one before give him a one-page operation manual step one through six and he’s successful two
years ago five years ago he had to go to class for two weeks to learn how to operate the device so the user friendly
I think is the key in all flow meter technology the strive is to make it so
you don’t have to be trained technician to operate the device and you should get the same results as a professional
person that operate the device so all this great equipment you’re
telling us all these neat things that it can do how do we know it’s right how do we know it’s rice I always say
the man with the two wrist watches well the one on the right rich is right damn it and attitude does play a role
actually from time to time we first walked out with an ultrasonic flow meter years ago and hella to the pipe the
customer says how do I know it’s right you know this is Magic you’re putting of something a device on the outside of the pipe well the validated flow meter uh
what will commonly happen is they’ll have a flow meter installed in the field say it’s a magnetic flow meter and
they’ll say I’d like you to validate this so they would rent or buy or own a portable ultrasonic flow meter and go
Downstream and clamp it on the pipe if the two flow meters say the same value you’re happy camper everybody’s happy if
they don’t say the same value then we have come out with the testing device which has a current calibration
certificate just done by our lab or any other laboratory that says this flow meter is calibrated against the
mistraceable quarter percent meter and this certificate says it’s accurate so we use the piece of paper to validate
that’s better than the meter that’s in there a lot of devices that are installed wear out over time so the
biggest sin you could ever do is you say you know what I want you to replace my city water meter I can guarantee you the
next billing cycle will be higher the older the city Waters meters go the slower they get and that’s why the city
changes them out from time to time so we go into the field there you have to have credibility and I did say attitude
actually plays a role when we go in the field to test another meter we’ll say this meter is right damn it and here’s
our calibration certificate and sometimes it takes the authority nature to actually present it and again if they
don’t like it they can pull that flow meter and send it to a laboratory and they can do their own flow testing which in many cases is not a practical thing
to do so that’s why we come to the field or rent or they have their own equipment to go to the field to validate the test
equipment that’s a common question so although many meters don’t require annual calibration certificates some
government regulatory say I’d like to see your annual certificate uh that the meter’s been calibrated so it’s
sometimes just a paper trail and sometimes it actually has some relevance to the situation if forever doubting the effectiveness of
the meter and we need to troubleshoot what are some key troubleshooting steps that we all need to know about
well as far as troubleshooting steps the first thing would happen is the meter faults it stops reading what’s the
problem with that and it’s the most common it’s a mechanical device and I’m going to say there’s some mechanical failure there’s something in the line or
something got caught up on the device there if it’s an electronic device there with Meg meters or some other meters the
first thing I’m going to do is check the electrical ground some applications the environment is just so horrendous you
know when you walk past a Transformer it pulls your belt buckle towards it they have very bad Earth ground so sometimes
you actually have to go in and remove the ground wire and you’ll find that the device works better the ground’s so
noisy the ground’s causing a problem there’s filters you can add to a system like that so those are the things to
look at and some of the older devices actually are that use variable frequency drive pump controllers the vfd itself
does cause some problems with some Electronics it’s not supposed to we’ve had places where vfd drives were in a
wastewater treatment plant and it screwed up everybody’s television set for a block around so they’re not supposed to re-transmit their
frequencies but every once in a while there’s noisy environments that affect all microprocessors so that doesn’t
happen every day so and then the last thing people ask is what’s your signal strength and things like that so each
flow meter has its own list of Diagnostics but they’re user friendly enough that you can get somebody on the
on the phone from our organization or any other organization say hey here here’s my problem and they’ll say it’s
error code this and this and this and it equals this so again it’s moved to the user friendly status everything’s
getting better data loggers for example in the old days to get a Data Logger you couldn’t communicate with the cable or
Windows or anything like that a lot of the new meters don’t even use software they just save the data as a CSV file on
an SD card and you put it in Excel and you have no software so it’s becoming more and more user friendly every day
well Brent we have learned a lot about flow meters today and if somebody wants to contact you directly what should they
do well you can call instruments direct it’s instirect.com is our website uh and
our phone number is at the instruments direct for me is
888-722-5543 and if you have any educational opportunities that’s what I do is my job is to travel around as a
teacher and so if there’s some way that I can help your organization do something like that in any of the
industries we talked about let us know how we can help you out well awesome well I have a few more questions for you
just to get to know you a little bit better we call these our lightning round questions are you ready for those
shoot all right so the first question if you had the ability to go back in time and talk to your former self on your
first day as you were getting into flow meters what advice would you give yourself
well don’t live home with Mom until you’re 20. that’s the first thing then you’ll learn you’ll learn you learn life
a little bit better but I think the key is is when I got involved with the business you have to learn omano omano I
have to be like your people in the customer my first service calls I would walk out to a paper plant uh in south
Georgia and I had a blue suit on and they would take me through the paper plan and they knew I was a rookie by the
time he walked out it looked like a A Flock of Seagulls flew over top of your recovered with everything and it kind of
realized that I was not being like the customer so you have to dress like the customer you have to act like the
customer you have to work with the customer that took me many years to evolve into being just like the customer
because that’s the person they want to buy equipment from and they want to they understand and they respect your
knowledge about the technology so that I think if I could move up that time span a little better and as I got older I’d
say The Lex thing now that I’m an older guy I learned about 10 years ago is I can’t micromanage everybody
hire smart people and Surround your people with smart selfless smart people and let them do their job you want
someone to do marketing here go do it you want somebody to do sales you go do it you look at the numbers and what
you’re done with that but get out of their face and let them do their job because that’s what they’re there for so you got something else to do
great advice what are the last few books that you’ve read well as I said I’m a
nerd the last few books were the theory of Sound by Lord Reilly which is the inventor of the transit type technology
it’s a archive book it’s written in 1877. the next book I read was the aqueduct of
Rome which is another character play was sextus frontenus the first water Commissioner of Greece
and then my favorite book of all is the salesman of the century by Ron Popeil
uh Pocket Fisherman uh slicer dicer the spray-on hair guy the spray on hair guy
he was the first he was a he was very he used to sell at fairs before he got involved this other stuff it was the
first really really really uh snake oil salesman huckster and if you read the book on that it’s a very interesting
read when Hollywood makes a movie about Brent who do you want playing yourself
I like Tom Cruise but I’m too I’m much taller than he is it wouldn’t work if you have the ability to talk to anybody
throughout history who would it be with and why for history for history I said I would
like to talk to as I mentioned the Greek sextus frontenus uh he was the first Greek water commissioner and he
basically uh administrated the aquifers and he was responsible for developing
the First Billing of the waters to the city of Rome for residential use they didn’t have flow meters there they just
had nozzles So based upon the pipe nozzle that came to your spa your build on that amount there so it’s
surprisingly they have a lot of this information about the aquifers and how they’re built in the engineering but
they don’t really have the politics of it it’s not all published information and I find that bring all that water
into a city and that’s how the city basically survived and that’s why they’re healthy just an amazing Story and there’s very little documented about
it and I’d love to learn more about that you can find yourself a DeLorean and bring him a flow meter
that’s right it’s probably one on eBay Brent thank you so much for coming on
scaling up H2O today and teaching us so much about flow meters thank you for
having me I appreciate it Trace Scout on Nation we are going to have of
all of Brent’s material referenced on our show notes page and I have to tell
you he is definitely an Entertainer so if you want to see some of the things we
were talking about on today’s interview by all means go to scalinguph2o.com come
over to this show and we will have all of those different YouTube Pages
referenced and you’re going to laugh you’re going to learn something you’re going to have a lot of fun so Brent
thank you so much for coming on the scaling up H2O podcast and informing the entire world about everything flow meter
Nation if it was not for a member of the scaling up Nation I would have never met
Brent so I know there is somebody out there that you know that I need to
interview but if you don’t tell me it doesn’t do anybody any good how do you
get that information to me me well it’s super easy you can go to scalinguph2o.com go over to our show
ideas page and you can let me know right there or if you don’t have time to type
all that out you can click on leave voicemail and you can just leave us a
voicemail right there on the web page of who it is that you want me to interview
I will say that is one of my favorite things about hosting this podcast is I
have met hundreds of people through this podcast that I would have never had the
opportunity to meet so that’s why I love having this podcast and if you can help
me meet some more I would greatly appreciate it and to say thank you I
have a brand new episode for you next week until then have a great week folks
thank you do you wish you had your own private tutor to help you study for the
certified water technologist examination well now you do so many of you have
asked me to help you with the mock cwt examination and I’ve done that very
thing if you go to scalinguph2o.com forward slash cwt prep
again that’s scalingup h2o.com forward slash cwt prep you will see that I’ve created
a course and I tell you everything I know about each one of those mock
questions it’s my hope that that helps give you the confidence you need to sign
up to get certified today