The following transcript is provided by YouTube, mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode click HERE.
today’s episode is proudly sponsored by the rising tide Mastermind the term
Mastermind was originally written in Napoleon Hills book Think and Grow Rich
before that the earliest documentation that we have of a mastermind group was
Ben Franklin’s group that he used to meet every single week in a Tavern that he called huness Nation there’s no doubt
about it life is too short to do it alone and it’s not very much fun to do
it alone in nation I urge you to go to scaling up h2o.com and find out if the
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Mastermind hello scale it up Nation Trace blore here your host for the
scaling up H2O podcast the podcast where we scale up on knowledge so we don’t
scale up your systems and today’s topic we’re going to be talking about one of
the ingredients that create scale in your system
but before we get there who can believe it’s the last month of the year I think
this year has just flown by and it’s my hope that you have been tracking all of
your goals throughout the year and hopefully you just have one 12th of your
goals left for the month of December now that being said December is normally the
most productive month because people are trying to get everything they should
have been doing done within the month of December because there’s no year left
after December so each and every year I always see sales numbers increase in the
month of December and that has been across the board in every
industry and there you go so hopefully you have a great sales month this month
month and is my hope that maybe you can continue that Trend through next year
and make sure you’re taking advantage of each and every month to achieve your
goals because you’ve got 12 months to do them and take it from me it’s a lot
easier to accomplish a 12-year goal each and every month than it is to do it all
in one month well Nation we are going to be doing a pinks and blues episode today
and I get so many comments how people love our pinks and blues episodes a lot
of companies assign pinks and blues episodes to their team and then they discuss those episodes as a team so they
can learn more so maybe this is one of those episodes but before we get there
I’ve got a few things I want to make sure you get on your calendar the first one is thetics water week online this is
an online conference taking place December 5th through 7th we’re going to
have all of that information on our events page along with the 2024
Wastewater administrators conference this is taking place in Michigan January
25th through 26th this is where administrators and providers come
together to interact across all things water so we’re we’re going to have
information on this on our website by the way that’s put on by the Michigan
water environment Association and then finally the 2024 Water conference taking
place in Austin Texas February 13 through 16th this is hosted by the National Association of Clean Water
agencies we’re going to have all of these events and more on our events page
you can get there by going to scaling up h2o.com and navigating over to to our
event section while you’re there check out all the resources that we have for
you it is amazing of all of the things that are curated for you right on the
scaling up H2O web page for you to learn more and do more within the industrial
water treatment industry well today’s show is all about
alkalinity and if you are a longtime listener you might be thinking Trace
didn’t we already do a show on alkalinity well thank you for listening and yes you are correct that was episode
86 and that was a very very long time ago we are now on episode 340 and we
received a bunch of questions around alkalinity so the fine folks here it’s
scaling up H2O thought it would be a good idea to revisit that again answering some of the questions that
listeners like yourself wrote in and asked us now if you want to ask a
question don’t feel like these people are getting any special treatment you have the same ability to do what they
did how did they do it they went to scaling up h2o.com went over to our ideas page and they just told us what
they thought now you can ask a question you can suggest a topic topic you can suggest a guest you can do whatever you
wish and that helps us figure out what we’re going to talk about on future
episodes and that’s what we did and we are talking about alkalinity so as many
of you like to hear me say this is fresh out of the scaling up H2O mailbag let’s
go ahead and start with defining what alkalinity is alkalinity is a measure of
the ability of a solution to neutralize acids it’s a property of water in other
substances and it’s usually expressed in terms of equivalent concentration of
calcium carbonate in millgram per liter or parts per million alkalinity is a
crucial parameter in water chemistry and it is often associated with the presence
of carbonate bicarbonate and hydroxy ions now we’re going to be talking about
those a little bit later in simpler terms alkalinity reflects the water’s
capacity to resist changes in PH when an acid is added now we typically call this
buffering it’s most likely you are running alkalinity in almost every
system that you analyze it’s one of the most common tests in industrial water
treatment so you should be familiar with this test and today’s episode we are going to go
deeper into the alkalinity test and we’re going to go deeper into what I
just mentioned so let’s actually look at the ions that I mentioned earlier the
first one is carbonate and a carbonate ion is what we call a polyatomic ion
that’s a big fancy word by saying we have many atoms that are all put
together and that’s composed of one carbon atom and three oxygen atoms it
has a charge of -2 and whenever you see a negative that’s telling you what it
wants to do it wants to get rid of two electrons and carbonate ions can react
with hydrogen ions to form carbonic acid
which we can further compos into water and carbon dioxide we’ve all probably
heard of carbonic acid and this is something that we try to avoid when we
are treating somebody’s boiler condensate lines how do we do that we
increase the ph and here’s a spoiler alert thereby alluding to there must be
some relationship between pH and alkalinity if we are raising the pH so
we don’t have carbonic acid obviously
there’s some relationship there so anyway so that’s our definition of carbonate
alkalinity here’s another one that you might have heard of it’s bicarbonate
alkalinity and bicarbonate is also a polyatomic ion a fancy way of saying
many atoms smoosh together and that consists of one hydrogen atom one carbon
atom and three oxygen atoms bicarbonate is a
buffer in water systems and that simply means that they can neutralize acid by
accepting hydrogen forming carbonic acid in water just like we said before and
bicc Carbonic acids are often formed when carbon dioxide
dissolves so there we go two things doing very similar things but they are
different and they decompose differently in the system so let’s look at the third
one and that’s our hydroxy ions hydroxy ions are formed when the water molecule
loses a hydrogen they are basic which means they are at a high pH and can
react with acidic substances and aquous solutions hydroxide ions can increase
the pH of a solution and this is the preferred pH that we monitor when we are
treating boilers now typically we monitor carbonate and bicarbonate when
we are treating cooling systems now if we were to add all of these different
terms up so we have carbonate bicarbonate and hydroxy that will get us what we call
Total alkalinity but typically we just use carbonate and
bicarbonate to determine total alkalinity specifically in cooling water
so I know that can be a little confusing so total is everything added up but we in the Water Treatment Community
typically just use total as an addition of carbonate and bicarbonate alkalinity
so now we know the different species of ions when we talk about
alkalinity we know what they’re composed of and we now know a little bit about
what they do but let’s go ahead and bring pH into this equation where does
pH play a role in all of this well first I think it’s important that we look at
pH and pH is one of those things that everybody knows everybody does but they
really don’t truly understand it and I had a fantastic chemistry professor and
she actually explained pH in a way that I modified to give you the definition
that I’m getting ready to explain to you which just allows me to send a shout out
to all the wonderful teachers and professors out there that just instill a
knowledge and a desire to learn more so I hope this podcast does that for you
and I also hope that maybe you thank somebody that has helped you in your
Scholastic career so let’s go ahead and talk about pH so if you will imagine we
have a scale and it starts at zero and goes all the way up to 14 and of course
what’s in the middle of that well seven is in the middle of that and right above
seven we’re going to mentally write H2O and we all hear that water is
neutral and what does that mean well it means that seven is considered neutral
cuz it’s right in the middle of 0 and 14 but how do we use that knowledge to
actually explain what PH is so we’re going to rewrite H2O as
HOH now if you’ve taken organic chemistry this is probably how you were taught to write it because that’s how
water disassociates now if you don’t know what that means that’s just a big fancy word on how the ions come apart so
now we have H and o h is the hydrogen ion and O is the
hydroxy ion now if we have a pH of seven what that’s telling us is we have equal
H’s and O’s now they might be 7 trillion H’s but that means we have seven
trillion O’s that’s how that works as long as we
have the exact same amount we have a ph of 7 the more hydrogens we have to O’s
the more acidic the solution is that means the lower the ph gets so the lower
it gets the more hydrogens the higher it gets the more hydroxy and the less
hydrogens we have so right now you’ve got a great understanding of the pH
scale but there’s one more thing I want to throw in there it’s a
logarithmic representation of the hydrogen ion now we already talked about
what the hydrogen ion is that’s that H that disassociates with water and the more we have it pushes down further to
the low position but I use that term logarithmic and that’s just saying that
each one of the digits on the pH scale represents a factor of 10 so if I go
from 7 to 6 on the pH scale that is
actually 10 times more concentrated with hydrogen if I go from
7 to 5 that is 100 times more
concentrated and we can go along down the row until we get to zero where the
whole darn thing is just hydrogen ions we can go up the scale as well and now
we have two ways of saying uh as we move up as we go from 7 to 8 we have 10 times
more hydroxy ions or we can say we have 10 times less hydrogen ions and the
reason I mentioned that is because if we were to look at the def definition of pH
pH is the measure of the hydrogen ion so that’s probably the more technical way
of saying that but I say all of this so you can now understand pH so hopefully
pH now is a lot more than what you are just putting a sample in your meter and
pushing a button you understand what that means and there is a vast
difference so now you can use that knowledge to better understand every
system that you are responsible for now that we’ve had a refresher on ph let’s
go ahead and bring alkalinity into the equation so if you can go ahead and
visualize that 0 to 14 scale now at a pH
below 43 alkalinity does not exist we have
free mineral acids and and carbon dioxide and this is where we get our
carbonic acid carbonic acid is two hydrogens one carbon and three oxygens
and if you test a boiler condensate line and it’s 4.3 or below be very concerned
you’ll get a condition called condensate grooving and this is a type of corrosion
that looks like an inchworm ate away the bottom of the pipe why only the bottom
well gravity that’s where the water is in a condensate line so you’re only
going to get condensate grooving in the very bottom if you see any anomalies on
the upper part of the pipe something else is going on there this is when you
want to add a buffering agent to increase the pH in the condensate lines
cuz if we increase the pH we now eliminate the ability of carbonic
acid to form now above 4.3 this is where we get bicarbonate
alkalinity now remember that’s one hydrogen one carbon and three oxygens
and then above 8.3 we will find carbonate alkalinity this is two
hydrogens one carbon and three oxygens and above 10.3 that’s where our hydroxy
alkalinity is forming and that’s our o now how does all this information help
us well I think it speeds me up in my ability to interpret my test so I can
only run the test that I need to run and not waste my time with things that I’m
not going to find so what do I actually mean by that so using a pH meter we can
quickly determine which alkalinity that we should be testing for here’s an
example if I had a pH of 7.5 I would not bother running hydroxy
alkalinity or carbonate alkalinity now let’s face it most of us on a 7.5
probably that’s a cooling system we’re not going to run hydroxy alkalinity to begin with but a lot of us only run our
alkalinity tests specifically our cooling water total alkalinity test
based on the directions now those directions state that we are going to start our titration method by adding
phenol phine and I promise you at a pH of 7.5
it is going to stay clear and that’s telling us that all of that alkalinity
is going to be in the bicarbonate form so why put that in there it’s not
telling us anything so we can start with the other juice that’s there that’s the
bicarbonate test and we’ll get into exactly what all of that is in a moment
and we can just start with that and that will eliminate a whole step speeding us
up because we know what our pH is and we can run our test more efficient so with
that we can save a lot of time by only running bicarbonate alkalinity or M
alkalinity now I mentioned carbonate alkalinity earlier that might be called
P alkalinity but more on those later and
since I only have bicarbonate alkalinity that’s the same thing as my total
alkalinity and typically we just record that and we are good to go and I just
saved a whole part of that procedure so if we didn’t know that we would have
wasted time we would have wasted reagent now I typically don’t mind wasting
reagent especially if I’m trying to learn something so what I mean by that if you are curious go ahead and try
testing for something and try to figure out what will happen if you do this or
that and if you have a hypothesis and you think you know what
is going to happen and why it’s going to happen and you go ahead and run that test you are learning so feel free to do
that feel free to try to figure out what’s going on in your systems and how
all of your tests work based on what you think you are going to get when you
finish running those tests but if you already know don’t run the test that you
don’t have to run that’s just just going to waste time and reagent like I said reagent relatively inexpensive but the
time you have is the most valuable resource you are never going to get that
back now let’s talk about two of the items that I just mentioned and that was P andm
alkalinity now here’s the deal in industrial water treatment it is very easy to get confused we have multiple
names for everything so here’s what I want you to do I always want you to ask yourself
where did that name come from and is that name the same thing as something
else I might already know and chances are it is and we just have 15 different
names for the exact same thing I don’t know why our industry does that but trust me we do and one of those is p
alkalinity so if we say p alkalinity is the exact same thing as as carbonate
alkalinity now why do we call it P well it’s because of the reagent that we use
in the titration that is phenol phine that is the reagent that will turn pink
if we have a pH above 8.3 now what is the first letter of
phenol phine well it starts with p so there you go that’s where we get our P
alkalinity so P alkalinity is the exact same same thing as saying carbonate
alkalinity well let’s move to M alkalinity and we get that name from
methyl orange and I’m willing to bet there’s nobody in this audience that’s using methyl orange on a regular basis
they’re using probably a more easy titration method but M methyl the first
letter of that reagent is how we get the exact same name for bicarbonate
alkalinity now methyl orange changes colors in a PH range between 4.4 and
6.3 and typically you will use a color wheel or comparator box to determine
what the alkalinity is based on the shade of color that that methyl orange
will get you and a lot of the reagents that I’ve seen will combine broyal blue
which tests between a pH of six to 7.6 and that combination will be all on one
color wheel or comparator box now this is an older style test you might see
this in some cases but in most cases I’m willing to bet you’re probably using the
titration method so there you go that’s where bicarbonate gets its name m from
the methyl orange and phenol phalene carbonate alkalinity gets its name p
from the first letter in phenol phine so let’s actually talk about testing we’ve
been dancing around testing this entire explanation so when we look at testing
most of us use the titration method and there is a whole host of different
reagents that we can use but the most common combination of reagents that most
of us use for alkalinity is a combination of phenol phine and bromo
crestle green Thal red and sulfuric acid so if you were to look at your total
alkalinity test most likely those are the reagents that you are using and by
knowing what the pH is we might be able to eliminate putting the phenol Phalen
in like I said if we had a 7.5 we know phenol Phalen is only going to turn Peak at a pH of
8.3 or above and if it doesn’t turn pink that means we have no carbonate alkalinity in the
system now here’s the thing maybe your meter says that the pH sample is 8.5 and
you put some phenol failing in your meter and it doesn’t turn pink well I’m
here to tell you that sample is not a pH of 8.5 phenol phing does not know how to
lie it’s only purpose in life is to turn pink at a pH of 8.3
or above now your meter on the other hand it will lie to you whenever it is
not taken care of well so make sure you have a happy meter how do you have a
happy meter make sure it stays clean clean it properly make sure you’re not
bending anything as you are cleaning it and you want to make sure that that little glass cell not only stays clean
but it stays hydrated as those probes are used they start to leech out the
juice that is inside that they need we can talk more about that but that’s another show and you want to make sure
that that meter has the proper juice on the outside to keep the inside of the
juice inside that glass nice and happy now that being said you do not want to
use ph4 buffer because that contains a dye to let you know it’s ph4 buffer and
that dye will actually migrate into that glass and that will mess up the internal
juice so don’t do that make sure you’re buying electrode storage solution and
make sure your meter stays clean and you will have a nice happy probe for a very
long time the other thing that you want to do is calibrate your meter on a regular basis so typically your
calibrate meter with a 7 pH standard a four standard and a 10 standard and I do
this at a minimum of every single week after I clean my meter and I clean my
meter weekly unless I have kind of a gnarly sample and then in between every
test I rinse it out thoroughly and then I store it in the solution that we just
mentioned so make sure you’re taking care of your meter and if you take care of your meter your meter will be happy
and it will take care of you and you will be able to trust your meter now if you’re thinking I can’t remember the
last time I have calibrated my meter you probably need to calibrate it my advice
is you do it minimum once a week and every time that you reach for that meter
you know it’s clean you know it’s hydrated you know it’s calibrated and it
is ready to go and that is going to serve you very well in this industry but
if you’re ever out there and you get a pH that is below 8.3 and the phenol
phine turns pink you know your meter is incorrect we can say the inverse as well
if uh your meter says it’s higher than 8.3 and it doesn’t turn pink phenol
Phalen does not know how to lie unfortunately your meter does I test
with phenol every time I don’t trust my meter even if I’m not testing alkalinity so here’s
a trick a lot of us can benefit from and I think most of us have had the
opportunity where we are cleaning out the piping of a new system before they go online and typically we use a high
alkalinity cleaner and after that cleaner is circulated through the system for the required amount of time a lot of
us will ask the customer since they are on site to start the system flush so we
can turn over that system water and when we arrive the system is nice and flushed
out and we are able to put in our corrosion inhibitor well I’m willing to
bet that more often than not when you get there that system is not flush the
way you had hoped and you have to return at a later date because the system still
has clean cleaner in it well here’s something that I do I give them a bottle
of phenol phine and I find a white styrofoam coffee cup and what I do is I
tell them to after the system has flush for so long go ahead and take a sample
one it should be clear and the white coffee cup helps with that two I asked
them to put a couple of drops of phenol theine in in that sample and the white
coffee cup helps with that as well and if it turns pink they need to continue
to flush if it turns clear please call me and I will come out and put the inhibitor in I cannot tell you how many
times that has saved me and it will save you and it’ll make sure that you are not
wasting the time you do not have to waste and probably save you a couple of
Tanks of gas so with that let’s go back to our testing methods if you’re using the
method we were just talking about this is the titration method please be sure
to clean all of your testing apparatus
every single time you finish running the test now you want to clean those with di
water because that way it doesn’t have any alkalinity in that you never want to
fear that you are testing the last system you just tested because we have
dirty testware so make sure you start out with clean test wear you rinse it
after every use and yes I clean all my test wear each and every week so I’m
starting out each Monday with clean test wear and we have a special dishwasher
here that we clean all of our lab wear with and of course we use phosphat free
soap to make sure that we’re not going to add that into our testing situation
and we actually have a DI resin right before our dishwasher so we can change
that over and we can rinse with just water and that way we don’t have to worry about anything in our testing
vials that we might test for later and yes as you would think we never get water spots and those come out squeaky
clean so maybe you can set something like that up in your lab but the point
is you don’t need all of that you just need to make sure that everything is clean you can do that with a test tube
brush and some phosphate-free soap and make sure that everything is rinsed out
well and it’s dried and you’re keeping that in your test kit and all of that to say assuming that we did all of that
cleaning make sure when you go to get your sample that you are rinsing your
test ing vial three times why three times well I’ve always been taught that
a good chemist always rinses at least three times and that ensures that maybe
you had a little bit of di water or something in that vial that now you’ve
rinsed out that di water cuz that’s going to dilute the sample that you’re getting ready to test and after three
times the only thing that’s left in there is the sample that you are getting ready to test for that’s called triple
range in and that will ensure that you have the best representative sample of
that system so with all of that let’s go ahead and run the test and you’re going
to do that as directed by your manufacturer and when you’re done doing
that titration you’re going to have to apply your multiplier yes that’s right I said
multiplier what is a multiplier well multiplier takes into the equation that
the all different sorts of sulfuric acid
out there and typically that’s what’s used in this alkalinity titration test
is sulfuric acid and depending on the concentration you have a multiplier that
you are going to have to multiply whatever the answer you got to and
that’s going to be how many drops you got when the color change happened now here’s a mistake a lot of people make
they will will simply assume that their company keeps sending them the exact same acid concentration and they never
look at that so please don’t assume that please verify that it’s very possible
that you could have a different concentration of sulfuric acid than you think in your alkalinity test kit and
your answers are not correct now that’s a really easy thing to correct for you
just change your multiplier and I promise if you look at the directions of
your titration test it will have all of those multipliers listed so remember
always check before you titrate and that is the titration method now other
methods include the colorometric method and we touched a little bit on that
earlier and this is where you’ve got a comparator wheel or some sort of box
that has has different colors in it and you’re comparing your sample to what the
wheel or the color comparators match up to and then you’re simply just recording whatever that color is on that
comparator the next one are automated versions of these so you might find the
a titration method where it’s automated there lots of these are are coming out they’re very
popular I almost debated not even mentioning this but I remember it from chemistry class so this is the grand
plot method and this includes a titration uh with an acid and pH in
point and you are recording the different pH points during the titration
and you’re plotting those on a graph versus pH and the acid that you added
and then where the two intersection points are that’s where you can determine alkalinity I can’t ever
imagine a field use for this but I did want to mention it because hey I learned it in chemistry I wanted to use it for
something also another method are ion selective electrodes and these can be
used for alkalinity testing as well yes they’re more sophisticated and what does
that mean well that means they are more expensive now here’s the thing we have
so many wonderful suppliers of test kit reagents in our organization in our
industry so with that I encourage you to have conversations with them most likely
they’re going to point you to the titration method that we talked about this is the one that I’ve been using for
years it’s relatively inexpensive it’s one that I trust it’s one that is easy to use and it is very repeatable but if
you want to get fancier there is fancier out there and I know all of these great
Representatives would love to talk to you about that I always go with what I
can count on and what I can afford so I hope all of this has helped you
understand alkalinity a little bit better before we sign off here’s some
quick takeaways pH is a measure of the hydrogen ion and it is on a scale of 0
to 14 alkalinity is the water’s capacity to resist changes in PH when acid is
added and we call that buffering alkalinity can combine with
calcium to form calcium carbonate another word for this is scale and
that’s why you should always be testing alkalinity and calcium but unfortunately that is
another show generally speaking water with low alkalinity tends to be more
aggressive when it comes to being corrosive and water with a higher
alkalinity tends to be more scale forming but after saying all that I have
to say this water is called the universal solvent so we don’t say water
is either corrosive or scaling all water is corrosive but not all water is
scaling and when we find a water that has a higher alkalinity normally that
means that we’re going to have more of a scaling tendency when we find a water with a lower alkalinity more often than
not that means we’re going to have a lower scaling tendency and because
there’s less stuff that’s dissolved in the water and that’s what water loves to do it’s going to look for things to
dissolve and that’s why we say that that water is more corrosive so now you know
a little bit more about alkalinity and it’s my hope that you make some educated
guesses of what you think the alkalinity will be based on your pH and then run
all the different alkalinity tests to verify what you learned here on this
pinks and blues podcast I also hope you look up more information about
alkalinity it’s a good idea to go ahead and read your test kit procedures and look at the interferences that go along
with those procedures because those will teach you a lot about your test and more
than anything else I hope you have fun because now you understand a little bit
more about alkalinity and I hope every time you run that test you’re now
processing everything that you know and you know what that test is reacting to I
want to thank all the people that wrote in to help me create this episode and if
you have something you want us to explore on scaling up H2O please go to scaling up h2o.com go over to our show
ideas page and let us know what that is so this was a fun show for me to put
together and speaking of fun we always have fun with our friend James McDonald
and here is a brand new 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 isalin or ISO asalone is there a
singular molecular formula or is there a family of chemistries available what is
isoi oyin used for can can you test for it does pH have an impact what dosages
are recommended what microorganisms is it effective against how much contact
time is required for ISO Aslin to be effective what is the mode of action for
isoyan what systems is it used in is ISO aselin ever blended with anything
else 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 #w t23 in # scaling up
H2O I look forward to learning more from you thank you James and thank you out
there in the scaling up Nation a quick ask I have for all of you if you don’t mind as you’re listening to this podcast
go ahead and review this podcast on your favorite podcast player that really
helps us with our searchability when people are trying to find information
about industrial water treatment and that of course helps us get more people within the scaling up nation and more
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raise the bar in the industrial water treatment industry have a great week
folks and we’ll have a brand new show for you next Friday
do you wish you had your own private tutor to help you study for the certified water technologist examination
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examination and I’ve done that very thing if you go to scaling up h2o.com
cwt prep again that’s scaling up h2o.com
cwt prep you will see that I’ve created a course and I tell you everything I
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