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[Music]
welcome to scaling up the podcast for water treaties by water treaters where
we’re scaling up on knowledge so we don’t scale our systems hi everybody tres Blackmore here the
host of scaling up and I hope that you are ready for a great show today a lot
of people have asked about hey how do I get the word out that I’m in this
industry and people start to know who I am and probably the easiest way to do that
is with social media and social media is a very easy way for you to either write
an article or something to educate your audience on what’s going on there and
then when people start searching for certain topics they are going to find
your information there well a gentleman who’s done just that
is Chris golden of Taylor technologies now Chris wasn’t trying to get his name
out there because quite frankly his name is already out there but Chris has had years of water treatment experience and
then he transitioned over to a testkit company and now his expertise is in what
we test for day after day he does a great job with that and he also does a
great job with sharing the knowledge that he’s gathered over his years of experience and if you are connected with
him on LinkedIn you’ve seen some of the articles that he’s written that tell us
about you know how do you know if something is being treated properly and more importantly what happens if you
don’t treat it properly so he’s got a bunch of articles like that and I thought it would be very interesting to
have him on the show and talk about one what inspired him to do those articles and then also what those articles say so
I hope you enjoy my interview with Taylor Technologies Chris golden oh and
he’s a CWT if I didn’t mention that so I know a lot of people out there doing the CWT challenge so hopefully you will
enjoy this interview let me restate it with Chris golden CWT today my lab partner is Chris golden
Meet Chris Golden
of tailor technologies and I’ve known Chris for quite a while we did some
training together and have worked together with a WT and I’m just so excited to have him on scaling-up today
how are you Chris oh man I’m doing great doing great well thanks so much for coming on the show I know you have a
wealth of water-treatment knowledge in addition to a wealth of testing knowledge so I think we’re gonna put all
of that to good use today what do you say that sounds like a great thing well excellent well for those of you out in
the scaling-up nation that do not know Chris rather than me introducing Chris I think you could do a better job tell us
a little about yourself if you don’t mind oh boy well okay it all started in central Pennsylvania outside of Reading
Pennsylvania went to a nice high school that offered a broad range of subjects
anything you wanted to study you could do it if you wanted to be a secretary could be a secretary if you want to be a
plumber you could be a plumber if you want to be a chemical engineer you can start on that path so it’s real lucky to go to real good high quality high school
outside of Reading Pennsylvania and then for whatever reason it very Strange’s
when I was early in high school for some reason I wanted to be a chemical engineer it kind of weird and it just I
thought putting together chemistry and engineering was something that really fascinated me and I had a chance to
basically prepare myself in high school to go to college and get into a good university I was noted for its chemical
engineering program so I did that I graduated in four years to the day which
is something I’m kind of proud of it was pretty tough curriculum and that was in 1981 and a long time ago in a place far
far away and after college I ended up joining a steel mill of all things and
they put me into technical sales and that kind of steered me down the path of where I’m at now because chemical in
Chad really wanted to be when I was getting out of college a water treat her it was so weird how I learned about the
water treatment industry was getting out of school and I was interviewing with a bunch of companies and here was this one
company called Nalco and I’d looked at the job the scripture said man something I’d like to do and at that
time they weren’t interested in me but that steel mill experience along with the engineering degree eight years later
they were interested in me come to join him so that’s how I got into the water treatment history well excellent what in
high school happened to make you say you know that’s the industry that I want to be in it was really the chemical portion
I enjoyed chemistry took a couple years of chemistry in high school and enjoyed that and my older brother who’s two
years old of me went off to Penn State to study civil engineering and I just learned about engineering through him
and got a chance to kind of put the two together not really knowing where it was gonna lead me but it just sounded like
like a fun interesting thing to do there you go so you you’ve been around in
water treatment for a while so I love asking this question because I know you’ve got to have a great answer what’s
the weirdest water treatment story you have what’s the weirdest water treatment story oh how about there’s this one
system down at a steel mill and it had some dynast and filters on it which are
continuously flushing filters and they always bleed water out of the system well in the summertime we didn’t have
any problems maintaining her cycles of concentration because blowdown was was low enough that that it would work but
in the wintertime when we took some of the heat off or we couldn’t get our cycles of concentration up we were
bleeding too much water out of the system we thought the culprit was the dynasound filters so for a couple years
I’ll admit we went on thinking that the Dyna scenes were the problem until one of my engineers came up to me and put
his arm around me said you’re not gonna believe what I found last week and I said what’s that they had tapped into
the cooling water system for a hose bib to wash down the floors nice so that’s
earth water was gone they were they were using my expensive cooling water to wash down their floors
who would ever thought I had a similar story that that reminds me of we
couldn’t find a leak in a closed-loop system and it was a hot water system and we were at a school system in in
Virginia I won’t mention the one we couldn’t find a week in the engineer since there is no leak trace you’re
crazy we were walking around and walking around and finally we were just there on the right right day and there was the
janitor who was washing the van with hot Loup water said that that’s hot water
that’s hot loop water he goes well yeah it’s cold out here so that’s where the leak was oh my gosh that’s hysterical so
there’s probably 50 more just like that right well I just they just thought of one real quick one it was it was at my
automotive carpet plant just what he said closed cooling water system chilled water system and we kept having to dump
night right after night right after night right into the system finally put a water meter on it and I asked the guys
to watch the water meter record the number each day and we come to find out that Monday through Friday when the
plants operating the water usage rate is real high Saturday and Sunday when he shut down it’s real low oh that’s
interesting the maintenance guys were tired of me hounding about there’s got to be a leak in the system until one day
after a few months this is going on I walk into the maintenance shack and all them got their heads down and go what’s
going on we found the leak who found it where that water’s gone when they plumbed in the new bathrooms
up on the second floor they used the chilled water for the toilets there you
go the line was closed plumbing into that yeah there it is good deal man yeah yeah it’s awfully cold this toilet yes
anyway it’s nice so obviously with all these stories you know this because you
What happens if you dont treat systems
treat systems but recently you’ve been very active in social media and you’ve
put a series of articles out stating what happens if you don’t treat those systems so why did you decide to put
those out of LinkedIn well the the beginnings of all this back when I had a power plant my power plant was putting
in an auxiliary boiler for when they were down and the boss of the plant said
hey well let’s use this as some retraining of the guys on boiler water chemistry now all these guys were really
experienced operators in the plant so I was trying to think how could I make this interesting for them because I know
what’s gonna happen we’re gonna get in the room and I’m gonna start talking about ox Jen and and scale and their eyes are
gonna glaze over and it’s not gonna be very effective so how can I make this different well I decided that hey what
if I told him did a class on what would happen if you didn’t treat this boiler
what would fail first and so I designed a whole training program off of that and
it just went over fantastically said okay what would happen if we didn’t treat it didn’t treat this boiler what
was what’s gonna fail first whisking to the first failure mechanism which is oxygen corrosion and we went down the
list and it was a great interactive class the guys responded so well to it and then what what we do is at the tail
you know we do a lot of a lot of training in education in the marketplace and to all of our industries we we
certainly do give back a lot and so we have a post that we do every week we do
one week we do industrial the other week we do pool and spa so when I’m right in the industrial what I’m coming up with
some ideas for these posts well I remembered back in time to that time going to did those classes and realize
hey this is a goldmine every week I struggle to come up with the topic to talk about why can take this one there’s
these two topics calling water and boiling water and make it into a series and I’ve got two or three months worth
of material so it all seemed to come together to make a lot of sense to do
this well excellent well how about we start off talking about what happens if you don’t treat a cooling system well if
Cooling towers
you let’s let’s talk about the cooling system first you know cooling towers hopefully the audience knows what
cooling towers are basically their systems for removing removing heat from a process whether it’s a chiller or an
air compressor you know in my world a blast furnace or a power plants condenser and that water comes raining
over the cooling tower and there’s a syn deuced draught that goes up goes across the water evaporates some water and that
evaporation the heat evaporation which is like a thousand BTUs per pound cools the rest of the bulk order that’s in
there and in the mean time when that pure water is evaporating what it’s doing is its leaving behind all its
dissolved solids they’re cycling up and now we got chemistry starting to play play a part in it
and like III like to say it’s chemical reactors of government by three things time temperature and concentration and
what we’ve got uh some temperature in the tower and now as we’re moving that pure water and leaving the dissolved
solids behind we start to get some concentration in there and you get any one of those out of whack and you’re
going to get some some bad things happening so if that water in that tower is left to just continual to concentrate
and we don’t throw any treatment chemicals at it well there’s going to be some chemical reactions are going to be occurring that’s gonna affect our
process and primarily it’s going to be gonna be scale formation so we want to make sure we protect against scale and
let you know let me go back for something left untreated in a cooling water system given that we’ve got this
air raining down on the rain down through the cooling tower pulling a draught through it well anything that
happens to be in the air is gonna get trapped in those in those water droplets and one of the things we worry about is bacteria and bacteria if you’ve been
around cooling towers you know it’s a hot subject Legionella people getting harmed supposedly from cooling water
having containing Legionella so what the first thing we want to make sure that we do is we protect against bacteria we
want to we want to make sure that we’re throwing a biocide into those towers to make sure that we’re killing all the
bacteria and it’s safe water so that’s really gonna bacteria and left unchecked and untreated it’s going to affect the
cooling water process the people around the health of the water so we want to make sure that we treat for the bacteria
but if we don’t treat the tower also we’re susceptible to scale scale is
going to occur as those dissolve solids continue to concentrate with the pure
water leaving the the system and they’re going to get to the point where they’re going to want to come out of solution
where the calcium alkalinity levels are high enough that they’re going to come out of solution and where they love to come out of solution is in heat transfer
areas like heat exchangers where we want the water to be doing its work that’s where that scale is going to come out of
solution and form on the surfaces and hurt our cooling water system so those
are the two real main ways that in current industrial cooling water systems
that left untreated they’re going to affect us all right so how do you get a customer
Customer system
from saying you know I’ve never had this budget item of water treatment I’ve never treated this system before now
you’re telling me I have to treat these systems for the reasons that you just mentioned and now I’ve got to put money
in the budget how do you have that conversation oh that’s that’s a great conversation and I got to tell you some of my best friends in my plants were the
controllers were the financial people because they knew the financial implications this is where we’re really
getting into knowing a customer system or a prospect system is very important
let’s talk about a prospect system they may say well I’ve never treated for for what you’re talking about why would I
want to spend any money well now the investigation begins you say well tell me about the equipment your plant that
the cooling water cools and typically gonna say well we really don’t know much about it well hey can I do a survey let
me walk around your plant take a look at the equipment you have in your plant and come back to you with a little bit of
information and that’s where we are the experts on the equipment and experts on the cooling water systems and we need to
be those experts in the cooling water system so we go into the plant we take a survey we take a look at the equipment
being cooled let’s say there’s a bunch of heat exchangers that are in the plant
okay that’s a good spot to go in well let’s say they have a compressor a compressor is a very interesting thing
because of all the heat exchange equipment that’s being cooled by the cooling water the compressors tend to
have the highest heat flux so what does that mean that’s where a lot of heat is being removed that’s probably where the
cooling water is stressed and has its highest temperature that’s your highest probable piece of equipment for scaling
so if you if you do a little research and take a look at the at the compressor take a look at those heat exchangers
start watching and tracking some flow rates through them start watching pressure drops across them talk with the
maintenance guys about hey what does it take to run that compressor oh every two months we’ve got to take it down we got
to rot it out for the scale that’s in there okay that’s interesting when do you do that oh we do that on Saturdays
oh you get paid overtime for that well yeah we get paid overtime for that well there’s a cost associated with not doing
proper water treatment so you go around you collect all these little items that are cost that they may
not recognize I have to tell really kind of a funny story while we’re in the
middle of this there was one plant that I was doing a survey on and wanting to win the
business and they’re gonna go out for bid and I talked with the maintenance guys and they said hey tell me about the
systems oh well each year we spend about 10 or 12 thousand dollars reed tubing
the chiller tubes what are the chart to be made out of they’re made out of metallurgy and I said really so I start
to take a look at their chlorine residual rates which were quite high quite high Fortin for a normal system
and so basically what I what I did was I wrote into my proposal hey look you know I could do away with those chiller tube
replacements with the chlorine monitor will monitor the levels of the lower level and you’ll eliminate that cost so
there was a ten thousand dollar cost that basically my program got rid of there you go straight to the bottom line
straight to the bottom line and when you have those conversations with maintenance guys they kind of look at you like okay but he had that
conversation with the controller with the financial guy in the plant he says oh when can we start yeah not to mention
the downtime that they had to do all of it downtime they had to do right and and the extra labor cost and all that oh
absolutely so you really have to dig into it find out what problems the plants are plants have it if they have
no problems well there’s probably no opportunity and the guys right but chances are you dig enough and you talk
to enough people you’ll be able to find out the implications of poor or non-existent water treatment and then
you just got to put pencil to paper and and total it up and do it on an economic
basis and that’s great advice so let’s move over to a boiler what happens if
Boilers
you don’t treat a boiler well if you don’t treat a boiler what’s probably gonna happen is the first thing is gonna kill you is oxygen corrosion the oxygen
courage because Auction corrosion is interesting phenomenon where rather than taking a little bit of metal off all the
surfaces that are inside the piping it will it will bore in through and and gouge the gouge the steel and quickly
penetrate the wall of the pipe so it’s a very quick acting corrosion
so that’s the first thing that’s gonna hurt you is oxygen corrosion the next
thing that’s gonna hurt you is gonna be if you don’t treat the condensate you’re gonna have a condensate that’s very pure water it’s very hot and it’s gonna have
a very low pH because the carbon dioxide is gonna read us all back into the condensate and make carbonic acid and
that’s gonna be low in pH and it’s gonna again gouge the pipes but before those
pipes start failing and condensate system which may not be something you’re too concerned with those corrosion
products of iron and copper are going to come back into the boiler water system they’re going to plate on the tubes of
the boiler and they’re going to basically insulate that too from the
boiler water and cause it to overheat and eventually fail so it’s the corrosion products from the condensate
that are going to come back there the second thing that’s going to to get you and the third thing that’s going to get
you if you if even if you have a softener on your system there’s still trace amount of heart and hardness that’s coming into the system if they
don’t have a softener system like I saw at a steel mill down and down in the Baltimore Maryland that scale is just
gonna accumulate in the boiler until it heat transfer surfaces and again
it’s going to cause a a failure the boiler tube through overheating so obviously those problems are much much
much much much more expensive than actually having a real water treatment
program oh it sure is and in the mean time it’s very hard to convince some
boiler people that haven’t had treatment that they really need to do treatment when two major things had talked about
with the with the scale and with the corrosion product coming back and causing an insulation layer in the tubes what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna have
to burn more fuel in order to make the same amount of steam you need to burn
more fuel to make the same amount of steam and there is one plant of the automotive carpet plant that allowed me
to take a look at the records of their steam production and her fuel usage and her burning natural gas well I took
those numbers on a monthly basis and I took the steam and divided by the fuel
usage and it came out to a factor very close to one well you could do that at
plants that don’t use water treatment if you say well do me a favor let me have a little
access to your steam production rates and your fuel usages which shouldn’t be anything that’s real of concern or
anything that you wouldn’t want to share with anybody and let’s take a look at how it goes over time and you have these over time
well if they’re not treating their boiler then they are probably losing fuel deficiencies in their boiler and
that steam production divided by the fuel number is going to decrease to a lower number and you chart that out over
time and you say well let’s take a look at how much extra fuel you’re using what do you usually spend well here it looks
like you’re you’re using 20% more fuel now than you were back a couple years
ago what’s your fuel budget it’s probably in the millions at a lot of plants and greatly outweighs that that
fuel efficiency loss greatly outweighs any water treatment ever do at that plant Chris how do you go back and prove
How to prove
that everything you said did come to be true well that’s a great question you’ve
got to know your plant you have to know the critical pieces of equipment in the plant and which is gonna be affected by
poor water treatment before the other one so you might want to take a look at critical heat exchangers I talked about
the compressor it’s gonna be heat exchanger look at the temperature in temperature out look at the flow rates and and monitor that and include that in
your data collection in the plan figure out which piece of equipment may be affected by poor water treatment and if
you chart that out and show that there’s no decrease in performance chances are
they’re gonna say okay yeah you’re doing the right thing the other thing to do is to validate a program if you’ve got a
system where the water corn water is corrosive in nature corrosion coupons are a great tool
corrosion coupons are a great tool they’re pieces of metal that are different metal urges like copper and
iron mild steel stainless steel aluminum whatever you might have in your systems you put them into the system hopefully
with a corrosion coupon rack which is readily available from equipment manufacturers and you leave them in
there for 30 days or 90 days and typically you leave them in there for 30 days and their pre-weighed you put them in
the system you allow them to be in that flowing water system for 30 days you take them out and you get a lab to weigh
them for you and you compare the previous weight that the new weight versus the old weight and you figure out
how much metal you’ve lost from those systems corrosion coupons are an excellent way to validate program have
Corrosion coupons
you ever used corrosion coupons during the survey part of an investigation yes
I did I even i used corrosion coupons and i even used a core ater i even used
a quarter and it was for a continuous caster at a steel mill and they were having all kinds of problems with
corrosion in their system and the current supplier was not using corrosion
coupons well i said oh you know okay in an investigation discovery what are your problems oh boy we have problems with
corrosion all through the system we’re losing well do you do corrosion coupons no what are they well let me put some in
and then i explained it to him and i said well you know you’re looking for something under 1 mil per year that happens to be like one of the one of the
and and the cooling water subcommittee of a WT by the way has done a fantastic job with discussing corrosion coupons
and best practices for corrosion coupons so you may want to take a look at the AWT members section under cooling water
for corrosion corrosion coupons anyway once I put them in and I found very high
corrosion rates the supplier ended up putting in them in two and oh wow look
we do have a system now I’m gonna in all honesty I did not win the system there is a whole lot of other stuff going on
but I did use those corrosion Cooper coupons effectively to increase my stats
that plant and I ended up winning other business at the plant there you go so I would be remiss if I did not ask you
Temperature
some testing questions because you are not only a water trader you are a test kit guru so let’s go back to the boiler
how important is temperature when we’re running tests temperature is very
important when running tests and just in particular the boiler water sulfite and one of the uses for channel locks
besides turning bolts is to hold hot bottles hold bottles yes absolutely so and boy if I had all my
channel locks back then I left in people’s plants I think I’d be a rich person but so we’re so used to fire two
boilers using the channel locks to hold a bottle underneath a sample port which is probably the site class and filling
up that bottle with hot water and then using that for testing well if you use that water that’s let’s say at 200
degrees Fahrenheit and you go do a sulfide test what’s gonna happen is you basically cook the indicator and you’re
gonna use a lot more drops to get to the end point then you really need to have so you’re going to think that you have a
good amount of sulfite in the boil order but you don’t you really need to properly cool down that sample and and
cool down the sample you can use that same bottle if it’s like a Nalgene bottle and and a nice tight cap fill it
up all the way to the brim rinse rinse your cap put the cap on tightly and then just dunk that in in a pail of water a
five-gallon pail of water in a sink full with filled with cold water and let it come down to room temperature which is
you know 80 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit and then test your sample but temperature is very important and remember as the
temperature of a water goes up its density goes down so you’ll think that you have a lot less analytes in your
water than you really do because of the density difference you know and the folks out there in the scaling up nation
I would urge you to experiment with that do a cooled sample do an unsung cooled sample and you will see the difference
Chris I know you do to a video where you actually brought some test that you did and just some training that you did
there god I want to say it was like 40 parts per million offer it was you know yes it was it was a big number off I
believe was more than 40 off I think my real test result was around 10 drops and
the one that was the hot sample was around 30 drops so 30 times the 5 is 150
and there you go take a look at that on Taylor technologies website we’ve got a
lot of videos on there it’s also in the AWT members only section I did a webinar
on testing and it’s kind of in the middle of that so you’d always be able to access it there well in addition to
the articles we just discussed that you put up on LinkedIn you also put one on a
zall and you are a very strong proponent of testing asel so first off what the heck
is this a czar it well the asel is the yellow metal corrosion inhibitors so it’s protecting
your copper metallurgy in your system and without it you’re gonna get accelerated copper corrosion rates
you’re gonna get those corrosion products come into solution and then going those heat transfer areas and mess up your system that’s what the asel is
do and their tally triazole and bzt are the main two A’s all’s that are out there so why do we need to test for him
well back in the days before before trace and I ever got into water treatment they used to just feed non
oxidized and biocides into the system and that was standard so you might have one or two non oxidized bias lights there your glutaraldehyde DB NPA’s iso
thousand type of chemicals and they’re basically they’re poisoned so that used
to they used to feed those about once or twice a week and not be worried about
bacteria levels that were ten thousand accounts and below so now comes along
this whole thing called Legionella we start worrying about this Legionella bacteria and they happen to look at
cooling water systems and all water systems say hey look there’s some Legionella in these in these cooling
towers now I got it got a preface this with probably Legionella it’s not coming
from : towers coming from other systems so it just happens to be that cooling towers have a target on their back and
they’re an easy prey and and they and they spotlight them so the CDC gets into
it and says you know what best practices you should feed Knox dice biocide once a day to over a part per million one part
per million well what are these oxidized and bhayya sites where these oxides and besides are chlorine compounds and
bromine compounds well chlorine compounds and bromine compounds do not get along with easels
they tend to tear them down now there’s non oxidize and besides they never worked on the easels they never
had any reaction with the easels the Hazel’s were perfectly content to be swimming around and water not affected
by the non oxidize and bio sites but féin oxidized and by side into water and your easel levels going to decrease I
actually had a there’s quick story of a of a power plant that I had that was a
coach that the other process that was at that plant was a fish farm it was a fish farm
so what they would do is they’d split off part of the water going into cooling tower and run it through the fish farm
well the fish farm would the fish farm water effluent would come back into the cooling tower system bringing all its
nitrates and all its all it’s a biological activity back into the
cooling tower Wow yeah and on top of that did they not like you
I took the system over from from before and it was it was one heck of a thing so they had a copper metallurgy in their
condenser and their critical piece of equipment and her condenser and they used to read tube that condenser about
every five reads a five or so years spend a lot of money to do it well here’s what was going on was then I go
like oh well okay the chlorines hurt in the condenser so let’s feed some basil in there to protect the condenser well
they had to feed a lot of asel in there to counteract all of the chlorine that they had to feed in to take care of the
biological activity was coming from the fish form you know we were spending in a horrible circle here and so what we had
was a copper core rater which is a corrosion monitor connect continuous corrosion monitor on the system to
monitor the copper corrosion rates well I came in one day and and what I typically do in my service visits is I
meet with the engineer and say what should I look at today Javan concerns before I get my normal run well the lead
engineer said to me you know the core rate are spiking and I said the core reader spiked let me take a look at the data take a look at the data boy the
corridor spiking and then I take a look at the A’s all levels and I look at the
asel levels which they used to test for me once a shift boy what a nice plant that was and they’re at rock bottom on
what the heck is going on but they’re feeding the same amount as they always fed well here I take a look at the
chlorine levels and the chlorine levels are through the roof through the roof and when I graphed the chlorine levels
versus the asel levels versus the corrosion rates here’s the chlorine and the corrosion rates going up together
and here’s the AA’s all going exactly the opposite way so what I did was I had
him back off on the chlorine feed we had we said it for three-quarters of part per million stead one part per million which they had
gotten up to one and a half parts per million well I backed him off on the chlorine setting and what happened was that the
chlorine levels started coming down the copper corrosion rates started coming down and the A’s all popped back up so
why why do I encourage testing phrasal ‘s well I have a friend that works for
one of the consulting companies and we’d all know although the consulting companies they’re bad they’re not water
treaters are just the cops for the water treatment industry and he’s a pretty good friend of mine and we ended up in
the same city at one time as some let’s go have some dinner so we go have some dinner and I looked I said what is your number one thing you’re picking on when
you go around to these plants that are treated by water treaters what are you picking on to make yourself a consultant
and he looked and he said A’s all’s nobody’s tested for a zoals we’ve all with complying with the CDC started
feeding oxidised besides well a lot of the people that aren’t used to test a nasal as they think well Mazal is going
to be in there there’s nothing that’s that’s going to go after my asel well here the chlorine is going to go after
the asel and it’s going to take it out take it out of the water it’s gonna
react with it’s going to be gone so that’s how they were making their money they’re walking around saying hey or is
your water treat or testing your asel are you on a chlorine program well if you’re on a chlorine program you better
be testing your asel to make sure there’s still a residual there how do you how do you know that that corrosion
inhibitor is still there that’s a great reason to test for it you know you brought something to me a
SteriPEN
couple of years ago that I want to thank you for because I’ve always test today’s all I was taught to do that but I would
carry this big 20-pound brick transformer around to power the UV pin
and you said no no you don’t need to do that we have this portable system there can you please tell our audience about
that because you are my hero for explaining that one to me thank you coming to Taylor came to Taylor 10 years
ago because they were developing a colorimeter and he wanted to have some input from a field person well I happened to be the local field person
for a water treatment company and got to know these people some come in and talk to us about all this stuff
well that eventually led to me coming in to work for Taylor and and working with
them on this colorimetry project of all some some other projects well I got to tell you a trace it was so much fun to see my
phone ring and it’d be the phone number for our D because our D we got some really great people over an R&D and they
get excited about something in this process and research the heck out of stuff well one of the days when my phone
rang I saw was R&D and I excitedly pick up the phone and my vice Prez wearin DC says oh my gosh that’s great you’re in I
got to come up Kenny can you wait a few minutes I got to show you something and it was always something good and some
Steve rides his car up to my office and he comes in and he’s got this device in his hand that looks like almost like
electric toothbrush a big electric toothbrush maybe maybe closer to a flashlight and I said what is that he goes this is a UV
pen it’s called a SteriPEN now all you people out there that are hikers and
campers should probably get a go SteriPEN I use that too to purify my water when I’m out camping and that’s
exactly right that’s what it was used for well it just so happens that this SteriPEN is more powerful than the
typical plug-in UV digestion systems it’s also a heck of a lot less than cost
so you can replace your $400 plus UV
digestion system that now you got to find an outlet to plug into it so you can use it and your lamps they probably
last a year and it cost about a hundred and fifty hundred seventy dollars or so well now you can replace it with this
like $70 battery-operated non plug-in UV
digestion pen it is absolutely fantastic I got to tell you almost hug Steve for
fine and I was like that is the coolest thing well people are gonna love this and now the only downfall with it is
you’ve got to make sure that you use high quality lithium batteries with it and you’re probably gonna get about
thirty tests out of the set of four batteries so I’m just being upfront that’s that’s the only downfall to it
but again you’re not spending $170 or so a year on the replacement lamps and
you’re not having to find a place to plug in it’s portable it’s quick it’s also in the time that it takes you to do
a UV digestion for phosphonate which is ten minutes or a saw which I believe is
five minutes this SteriPEN in three minutes there you go so and as
Scaling Up Nation
always I would encourage people out in the scaling-up nation to run your tests in the regular fashion and then run it
alongside with this that way if you have any questions you’ve answered it for yourself but I got to tell you having
something that I don’t need a wheelbarrow to carry around to the accounts and it fits nice and neat in my
test kit I thank you for that advice it was awesome oh it’s good I’m just I’m just bringing with you what our R&D
finds and it’s it’s exciting to work with them excellent well I’m sure that you get
calls saying I I did everything that direction said but I’m not getting the right answer and then you start talking
with people and sure enough there probably is a common mistake that most people make so here is your voice out to
the scaling up nation what do you want people to know that the biggest mistake people do in testing is so they don’t do
it anymore Oh what is the most important thing to do in testing it’s everything is is
cumulative of all the errors you might have in technique and as a matter of
fact I’m going to be talking about that at the a WTO on Saturday we’re going to talk about how interferences can help
you gain business and keep business and there’s quite a few things that come
together it all starts with proper sample collection I see people that don’t collect a sample properly don’t
flush the line they don’t rinse out their bottle three times it’s always funny to see an experienced water treat
or collect a sample because they’ll be talking with you and they’ll be collecting a sample they’ll be flushing the line it’ll be triple rinsing their
bottles not even thinking about it now I do not even think about it’s absolutely hysterical when I when I’m
out with people and I see them doing it it’s automatic and then so it starts with sample collection make sure you got
a representative sample and a fresh sample and then the other thing is you know read the directions there’s a lot
of interesting stuff in the directions and too many times we learn how to do testing from our bosses or our managers
or trainers and that kind of stuff and they may have gotten into some habits that may work for them but again as time
goes on and that herbal or not herbal the urban legend gets passed long
and from one ear to another year to another year gets gets out of it gets out of whack and it leads people down a
bad direction so read the directions the way I learned how to test Oh Tracy this is this is a funny story is I had a guy
that was named Ron Humphries Ron Humphries was our mechanical guy for our
district and I nicknamed him the pump master general and what he did was they they put him with me put me actually me
with him for a day and he was going to teach me how to do testing here’s how he taught me how to do testing we had her
heart it was a refinery had a hardhat and earmuffs on and we went around to all the systems with the marked bottles
and collected all the samples then he took me back into this into this building and he had me carry these two
big test kits in and put him up on the table he handed me a book that had all of the instructions in it told me what I
needed to test for what samples and said I’ll see you in two hours good luck what was cool about that I
mean I’m there like oh this isn’t this isn’t fun at all but I read the directions I started out fresh I didn’t
start out with somebody telling me how to do the test I actually read the manufacturers directions and did it now
I had about eight samples so I got a chance to do each one of the tests eight times after you’ve done something eight
times you pretty well know it you’re pretty well known so that that’s how that’s how I began testing water systems
and it developed good technique I am I’m very insanely fastidious I guess about
my numbers that they’ve got to be consistent and that kind of led into my second part of my life at as a water
treat or I went to a lot of plants where they did all the training all the testing for me so then instead of being the person doing the testing I became
the person training these people doing the testing making sure they were consistent and getting consistent result
results that I could consult from so a lot of stuff in technique don’t take
triple rinse in your bottle collect letting the sample flush long enough and and reading directions for granted by
the way there was a hospital that did some work in that they finally caught me one of the service visits and gave me a
five gallon bucket you know where they gave me a five gallon bucket because I was leaving water all over the floors
well I was when I was flushing the same so I mean if you’re going into a place it’s a data center or a hospital or
something like that and you think well I don’t want to get any water on the floor and I’m just gonna take a quick sample
well take a five gallon bucket with you make sure that you let that that’s that sample line flush long enough and then
get your samples so don’t don’t leave that graded don’t make that yeah reason why you’re not flushing your sample line
out enough yeah we try to leave five gallon buckets that the majority of our accounts and then they’re not there the
following month so that’s that’s the issue that we that’s poisoning them no
Interferences
there you go I haven’t thought about that alright so you heard it here first so you’ve done a lot of testing you’ve
been around equipment for a while so how do you know when the answer you get is the real answer or there’s an
interference or something else is going on how do you know that well that’s that’s that’s a great question you
compare it to the other systems like let’s say a boiler system and when I teach my plants about their boiler
system I say let’s take a look at the path of the water okay it’s coming from the pretreatment it’s coming into the
feed water tank or the deaerator and that’s becoming feed water which is going in the boiler which makes the
condensate the condensate comes back around and goes into the feed water well if you get a strange result let’s say
you get a real high hardness level in your feed water you get high have a lot hard to slow in your feed water well I
was training to take a step back in the system to where the water is coming into that system so it’s gonna be my make up
water it’s gonna be my condensate and I’m going to take a look at those two waters now if that if that high level
exists in both of those systems then or want one or the other system then I can
find out okay where this is coming from and I feel sure that okay I do have a problem going on but if it’s if it’s not
neither one of those systems well it may be an interference and for hardness one of the interferences is iron iron and
copper metals metals winter four interfere with your hardness test and on those feed water systems you’re doing a
real low-level hardness test you’re hoping to have less than 0.1 parts per million in my feed waters in all of her
feed waters and so if there’s a little bit of metal in there it might turn up to be five or ten parts per million
you look wow that’s that’s not right that doesn’t seem like the right level you kind of get this weird fading end point we called it where you put your
indicator I’m sorry you put your buffer in and then you put your indicator in and it’s supposed to turn blue if
there’s no hardness in there well if there’s hardness in there it might turn red or purple depending on the indicator that you using well you add a couple of
drops of titrant in there and it turns blue and then it slides back to purple
well you add a couple more drops of titrant in there and it turns blue and then it slides back to purple again it’s
kind of like a magic trick and that’s a really good indication that you have some metals in there that are that are
tying up the titrant which is Kailen Kailen loves metals calcium and magnesium are a metal iron in copper
metal but it prefers that Kalyn prefers the iron in the copper so it will go attach one of those iron coppers leave
the calcium magnesium alone which will turn the sample back to red just how do you tell if you have interference if you
know think about what you’ve got look at the waters before going into it compare your test results today with
your test results that have historically been there chances are interferences pop up and
they’re not consistently there they just pop up all of a sudden and if you’re getting some strange readings a flag
should go off and flag should go up and say okay I got to take a look at this system well of course the first thing
you’re going to do if you get a really strange test result is go get a new sample and retest sure go get a new
sample retest it it may just have been the way you collected a sample but it’s uh it’s kind of like almost CSI I mean
you have your dead body is a strange water sample now you got to figure out what the heck’s going on that’s an
Testing
interesting analogy I like it so here we go the number one tip that
you want all the listeners out there to know that’s gonna save them time frustration what have you what is it
understand that testing your water systems is controlling your program you
got a test for the right analytes you gotta you got to do it on enough of a basis that you know your systems under
control coming from the background that I come from we used a lot of tracers we used a
lot of fluorescent tracers and we’d have these monitors up in a wall that would be measuring the amount of fluorescent
tracer that’s in the water well it’s easy to get complacent say oh it’s supposed to read 100 so I’m good to go
I don’t need to do any more testing well what happens and let’s talk about cooling water systems what happens with
cooling where systems as dresses can change stresses can change and and when those stresses change and it could be
temperature it could be suspended solids it could be a different water source
there are all these different stresses that go in system that will stress your treatment chemical in different ways
some of them more some of them less well if you just rely on that 100 that’s reading on your monitor and don’t test
periodically for your active ingredient well then you could be making a mistake and I’ve chances all right say you you
are making a mistake that’s one of the things to do and the other thing is to make sure that you get an accurate test
and phosphonates one of those squirrely tests you got to be real careful there’s there’s an easy test that’s out there
that’s just a pill and a titrant and okay I’m often running but what that
pill and that titrant don’t do is one of the things that interferes that phosphate a test is fluoride I believe
that I was told that every minutes of power that’s over a hundred thousand people adds fluoride so they were
drinking water and the makeup it pumps with mind control that is it’s yes it’s
the grand conspiracy so if you’ve got a system that’s on municipal drinking water as makeup chances are you got
fluoride in your cooling tower and that’s gonna be a positive interference on your test it’s gonna be a positive
interference you test if you use that simple test to test for your phosphate you may be getting fooled that you think
you have enough phosphonate in your water and you may not that’s why the the good tests and and they’re available from three reputable manufacturers have
fluoride masking agents and you may want to say oh well that might be part of the grand conspiracy to fluoride masking
agent doesn’t do anything for they’re just trying to sell more chemical it’s less my kids are out of college so need to sell more chemical that’s all
done but before I’m askin age is a very important part of the phosphonate test so I will encourage you to make sure
that when you’re testing for phosphonate which is your active chemical ingredient treatment chemical in the majority of
your cooling water systems that you’ve tested properly and you make sure you’re using a fluoride masking agent great
Lightning Round
advice well this has been a great interview but we’re not quite done yet we’ve got the lightning round to go to
so are you ready for that all right so you can go back in time to the very
first day that you were a water treaty what advice would you give yourself it
would be to use your resources and develop your resources and and network
at the beginning of my career I had a trainer who is an area manager who very
much told me to do that make sure you use your resources and he made it so
that during my training I got a chance to be with everybody in my district and a whole lunch a whole bunch of other
people and I got to learn their specialties where their strengths were where their weaknesses were and
especially noting where their strengths are and then when I got into the thick
of it and I didn’t know the answer I would call on those resources and the
the very nice part about maturing in this industry is when you start getting those phone calls and you’re the
resource that’s that’s the fun part but don’t be afraid to use your resources your resources especially you young
professionals are out there in fact Michelle farmerie invited me to one of the first meetings that they had with
the young professionals and I thought wow she’s considering me a young professional this is really great until she went up there and said oh by the way
we’ve got some gentleman gray hair gentleman in the back there’s there’s four or five of them back there and you
should consider them your resources you should you should listen these cuts it’s not like one oh wait a second I’m the old unfortunately I remember that
because I was stand-in next to you well you’re still a young guy but I was like oh my ego deflate is like oh come
on you don’t consider me a young professional shoot use your resources they’re all around you they’re very
willing to help you I filled phone calls about many other topics but the other than
testing from from people during the weeks time and you’ll you’ll be
surprised how many people were willing to help you and give you advice in the AWT and and with all your other
associations whatever they might be use your resources the worst thing you can ever do is try to cover something up or
ignore it and for like let’s say ego purposes why don’t tell my boss I’m in trouble or I don’t know what’s going on
or they don’t have the answer to this so I’m just gonna not tell them that’s a real big mistake because some competitor
is gonna come along and is gonna save the day for them and your boss is gonna say why’d you lose that account well I
was having problems why don’t you come to me that we’re here for you we’re here for you as a resource so use your
resources great advice well I’m a big reader and you don’t know what you don’t know and you can get a
Book Recommendation
lot of information for books from books so I always ask people I want to add to my reading list so I want to know
whether the last three books that you’ve read last three books I know my favorite
one is by a guy and if you remember back a few years ago he came and gave a talk at the AWT as David noir I’m a very very
room David noir fan that get his emails I’ve listened to a couple of his webinars and he’s got a book out that’s
called co-creation maybe not so much for the water treaters out there but but tres for the for the business owners and
other companies that may be manufacturers and and have R&D and that concept of co-creation is a wonderful
book about really getting the right people in the room that have the right skill set and the other person you want
in that room is a representative of the customers you may think that you’re
making something really cool and it may miss the mark with your customers you
wonder wow I thought that was really cool where if you had taken the time and gotten your customers involved at the
early onset of a project they may steer you in a better direction they may steer
in a better direction and that’s one of the fun things that I get to do here at Taylor is as much as I come out to you
guys and represent Taylor I’m also getting your ideas and also since I was one of you I get to represent the customers when we’re
around that Ardi table I get to say you know okay that’s a really cool idea but
I don’t think I’m gonna use it why wouldn’t you use it well because I do it this way now if you can come up with a
better solution than me doing it this way then I then you know I’m on board but co-creation from David Knorr is one
now for anybody that’s out there doing like a sales rep type job long service
and that kind of stuff there is a book and I can’t come up with the guy’s name and if you if you email me I’ll tell it
to you then they it’s selling with a story it’s selling with the story man
this guy goes through talking about sales situations and and having certain
stories that that fit and trace you know that when I teach I love to tell him stories I love telling the story about
the deaerator but Harrisburg incinerator how a little nugget of metal held open a
spring on a spray valve and caused us to not have good oxygen levels I mean I the
stories tend to and and the real stories not made-up stories stories tend to
stick better and make you more memorable with the customer sometimes it may be
for a good reason but sometimes maybe for bad me but you’re more memorable and more memorable yaar that chance a better
chance you have of winning some business or maintaining some business so telling what the story is is very interested in
sort of on an audio discs that that’s that’s a good one and then other books I read on the
Stephen King fan oh gosh so I’m read a lot of Stephen King I used to be a Clancy fan I read almost all Clancy’s
books before he passed away before they got like ghost writers so that’s that’s the kind of stuff that I spend my
winding down time with yeah I think Stephen King is an incredible writer I I
can’t be near a clown to this date what
was the clown’s name penny wise I don’t remember I’m getting chills all right so
we’re moving on clowns if there any clown water treaters out there I apologize just don’t come
near me all right so obviously with a life like yours they’re gonna end up making a movie who plays you when they
do it oh my gosh my new boss seems to think and I’ve had a couple other people tell me Steve Martin and I said I can
see that what did Steve Martin could hit by a truck recently he’s a good-looking
guy I’m no Steve Martin but he says Steve Martin he feels like he’s talking to Steve Martin all the time I can see
that did you know he’s a big banjo bluegrass so one of the guys that works here he was playing for some of the
stuff I was like I had no idea I thought he was just a comedian oh now back in the early 70s before you were walking probably trace he used to
get on stage and play a banjo well he’s very good at it in fact somebody was telling me that he does a mastermind
group to teach you how to play the banjo that’s so I guess you got to be pretty good to do that that’s pretty good
anyway okay so last question you can talk to anybody throughout history who
would you have that conversation with and why oh that’s that’s a really easy one he’d be Elvis I love it
why Elvis I was born on Elvis Presley’s 25th birthday and Elvis is just uh I
would love to talk I’d love to talk to Elvis you know if Elvis was alive today what would Elvis be saying he’d be
saying did Elvis just join the scaling-up nation no why are you saying get me out of this box it’s dark in here
and I can’t breathe well cool I had the opportunity to go to
Graceland when we were reviewing Memphis for an AWT convention and it was
actually snowing I was with Jim Lucan it’s we were walking we actually get him off the plane of Elvis’s plane there at
Graceland and as you were looking out into the fields of Graceland the couple
behind us I won’t do the impression that I normally do with this story cuz I don’t want to offend anybody but they said we can die tomorrow we’ve seen the
most beautiful things no one great ha ha ha that’s great you talked about if you
could meet somebody there is there’s a book and tie this into the books there’s a book that I’m a really really really really big fan of and it’s
called spin selling SPI n it’s been selling its situation problem implication needs payoff and it was
written back in the late 90s by a guy by the name of dr. Neil Rackham dr. Neil Rackham and I had a chance to go to a
conference and he was one of the speakers and my boss was there and I went up and I shook his hand and I
looked him in the eyes of man you know I just love your book this is absolutely fantastic and when I came away my boss
said boy look like you were just meeting Elvis but it’s it’s it’s a very
interesting book and to tie this into David nor what David nor says about
selling and it could not be any more true than for the water treatment industry is like me no me trust me pay
me that is the sales like me no me trust me pay me like me you like me that
you’ll talk with me know me well you know that hey I’m a stand-up guy I’m gonna do my part I’ve got no hidden agendas trust me you
gain that trust and until you gained that trust from that customer you don’t ask for an order because if you get an
order without the trust well it’s probably just transactional business and the next guy that comes in with the
lower price is probably gonna get that business gray so when you have that trust and think about a truck trace all
those accounts that you have that are good solid accounts they trust you completely they trust you they know
you’re gonna do the job they know you got they know if they have if they have to make a phone call and they’ve got a problem you’re there for I mean it’s
that trust it’s a two-way street so spin selling basically supplements that we’re and talk about the basis of all selling
is is trust so would advise that anybody that’s in industrial water treatment
sales take a look it’s been selling alright well I’ll make sure to put all the books that you mentioned up on my
show notes page so nobody have to take their hands off the steering wheel to take notes on these books so this has
been a lot of fun thanks so much for coming on oh I knew it was gonna be fun trace and I really appreciate you invite
me to do this it’s it is a lot of fun it’s a lot of fun too to talk about what’s going on and
know your resources and be one of those resources and I appreciate you as a resource well Chris thanks again and I’m
sure we’ve got lots more questions to have you back in the future so every day
we go to work and we think about how a properly treated cooling tower or boiler
needs to be but how often do we think about what happens if we aren’t there
and what happens when those systems aren’t treated so Chris thank you for
taking that perspective because a lot of times we’re focused on the other end of that and now we know how important our
job is and what unsung heroes we all are
in the water treatment industry folks if you want the Articles that we reference
today that Chris golden wrote they’re going to be on my show notes page so make sure to go to Scanlon off h2o comm
and get those and of course if you have any questions for me go ahead and get
those into me as well and I’m looking forward to talking with you next time on scaling up where I hope you guys
have a great week when you look for the comeback you soon
you [Music]