The following transcript is provided by YouTube. Mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode, click HERE.
[Music]
welcome to scaling up the podcast for water treatise by water treaters where we’re scaling up on knowledge so we
don’t scale up our systems everybody tres Blackmore Here I am the host of scaling up and you know as well as I do
as a water treaty you have to know so much stuff the list is never-ending well
today’s guest is Chris Nagle of a vapp Co Chris has a very unique perspective
because he’s a water treat he also works for a vApp Co which is a cooling tower
manufacturer today chris is going to talk about all things white rust and if
you don’t know what white rust is I promise after today you will know and
he’s going to talk about all the things that Ave aapko is doing to help solve
this issue the simplest definition of white rust is the galvanizing coming off
of the cooling tower now galvanizing is a coating of zinc over the steel surface
this is done so the zinc can corrode instead of the steel below it this is
called a sacrificial anode we sacrifice the zinc which is anodic so the steel
can be protected once the zinc is gone the steel will then begin to corrode
now white rust is the premature corroding of that zinc now folks as a
water treaty we get blamed for everything I remember a conversation
that I had with the customer that said they never had bulbs burn out until our
company took over their water treatment so what that means is we are not doing a
good job of explaining what water treatment is that’s a soapbox for
another episode but we’re talking about white rust now and white rust is an
issue that is normally blamed on the water treater in fact some of the
cooling tower manual State consult your water treatment provider for concerns on why trust they
just put all the responsibility on us or they state some ridiculous water
condition that needs to be maintained in order to prevent white rusts something
that is nowhere near normal operating conditions Ave aapko has done a great
job in working with individuals like myself and others in the association of
water technology gathering information about white rust and also testing that
information and exploring new ways to deal with it in their units that they
have set up in their home office so I hope you enjoy my interview with Chris
Nagel my lab partner today is Chris Nagle of evap Co Chris how are you today
Meet Chris
I’m doing well trace how are you I’m doing very well I want to thank you for being on scaling up and I want to thank
you for getting ready to tell us about the topic that most water traders want to know about what do I do if I get a
brand new cooling tower that happens to be galvanized happy to help glad to be
here so Chris you and I have known each other for years but there may be some people out there that aren’t familiar
with you so do you mind maybe giving us a brief synopsis of who Chris Nagle is
sure I’d be happy to I’ve been fortunate to be married to Brenda for about 27
years now trace and we’ve been blessed with two terrific children and if they
were here with us they might not like the term children because they’re probably young adults at this point
because on richard has recently joined the Navy to serve our country and is
today on his way to Charleston to enter the nuke school there and our daughter
Julia is getting ready this coming Friday to head back to Boston College where she’s pursuing an undergraduate
degree in well we don’t know undeclared but an undergraduate degree at Boston
College well excellent well Chris I know you’ve been in the water treatment Street for quite a while can you tell us
How Chris got involved in water treatment
how you got involved in water treatment well in one sense I was born into the
business both my father and my grandfather worked for Bette’s Laboratories so as a young boy I
remember my dad bringing home Betsy’s mobile app and getting to play in the lab it’s like in an RV or a camper at
that point back in those days and then following my father’s retirement from bats
I joined bets as a sales and service rep in 1994 I was very fortunate to learn
the business from some great area and district managers at Betts over the years I earned several promotions and
sales awards during my career with Betts laboratories Betts Dearborn and horse PD
water and process technologies so it’s safe to say that you’re not just a
Chris is a water trader
corporate of aapko guy you know water treatment you are a water trader you’re one of us and you understand what we go
through day in and day out would you say I’d agree with that trace and even though I’m in an office most days now I
did spend 13 years in the field doing sales and service and working my way up
through the area manager position the district manager position and when I left GE water and process technologies
at that time I was a territory manager with about 20 direct reports and I think
at that time we had about 40 million dollars in business between the chemical side and of course the RO and high
purity water side of the business so I’ve done most everything from taking water out of the river to anything you
might do in a process with it putting water back into the river so how did you come to work for a vApp Co well that
started in 2006 when I was in working in Philadelphia and I had a opportunity to
meet Joe Bartley who’s our president and CEO and in 2006 of aapko had started to
promote some water treatment systems they were early on and they were looking for somebody with some industry
experience to come in and help them understand not only water treatment technically but the marketplace and how
they be able to grow there water treatment offering from where they began at that
point what would you say the biggest differences are between working in the
The biggest differences
water treatment field and now being where you are now with a bap KO well if
we had video with our podcast today trace one of the biggest ones you’d notice right away is that I wear a tie
to the office every day I’m sorry what is that device you just spoke of necktie
which is certainly not recommended for mechanical rooms and field work so that’s one of the differences from dress
code but other than that the biggest difference is when I go to the office I’m not going to a home office like most
of the water treaters in the field would do and then most water treaters in the
field will log a lot of miles windshield time perhaps driving to customers and that kind of stuff my travel tends to be
a little bit more airplane based so I’m traveling across North America Western Europe in parts of China when I’m not in
the office so you’ve hosted me a couple of times and I’ve seen your facility and
it’s it’s incredible some of the test rigs and things that you’re getting ready to tell our audience about but I’m
worried now I didn’t wear a tie we’re people thinking poorly of me no most of our guests whether their customers or
representatives they’re engineers contractors that come visit us here at about go have a little bit more casual a
dress code and lingers here at about Co headquarters we’re based outside of
Baltimore not too far from Gettysburg Pa and at our headquarters here we not only
have our corporate offices and a full manufacturing plant but we also have all
of our research and development laboratories where we do a lot of the
discovery to improve our evaporative cooling equipment and also our water treatment systems well let’s start
Galvanizing
talking about some of that so today’s episode is about galvanizing and what
happens when galvanizing starts to fail so but before we go into that do
you mind explaining what really is galvanizing well try it’s it’s galvanizing is a process where zinc is
added to a steel substrate so for evaporative cooling galvanized equipment
has been the preferred material of construction for over 50 years and the reason for that is it’s got a great
first cost position and it also can give excellent service life when properly
passivated and treated so there’s two types of galvanizing that are most
typically found in evaporative cooling systems the first would be mill galvanizing where the zinc layer is put
on to strip steel in a manufacturing process so if you think about a cooling
tower the basin or upper casing section might be made out of mill galvanized
steel the other type of galvanizing that’s common in the industry is called
hot dip galvanizing and you would see this more often if you were looking at a closed circuit cooler or an evaporative
condenser or that has a coil bundle in it and what happens from a manufacturing standpoint is the coil is made out of
stainless steel it’s pressure tested to make sure there are no leaks in the coil
then it’s sent to a galvanized or where the whole coil is immersed in a molten
zinc bath and that’s cool that’s the hot dip galvanizing process the difference
between mill galvanizing and hot dip galvanizing is you tend to have a thicker coating on the hot dip process
so on the coil then you would on the middle galvanized that’s typically used for tower basins for upper sections of
towers or cores so what is the issue why did a Valco say we’ve got to do
White Rust
something about this galvanizing what was happening well with galvanizing if
it’s allowed to cure so to speak in nature if it’s allowed to sit for an
extended period at a time it will naturally passivate itself in the atmosphere the challenge in industry
today is you realize trace is lead times have become shorter and shorter and shorter this
just-in-time society we live in and means that a lot of equipment that we’re
making now is being put on a truck sent to a customer location rigged and
started up sometimes in less than a month’s time so the the bygone error of
us building equipment and it’s sitting in riggers yards and getting exposed to the atmosphere and the elements has gone
by the wayside and particularly in the industrial refrigeration space so these
would be the guys that are running evaporative condensers where on the inside of that coil it’s a refrigerant
like ammonia or co2 when they’re running food processes for either production or
cold storage they can’t have their plant be down for very long without maintaining the temperatures they need
for their processes so they tend to start this equipment up very quickly and
under immediate heat load and one of the things that started to happen in late 80s or early 90s is a new phenomenon
that was called white rust and that’s a form of premature corrosion of that protective galvanizing plier so that’s
the actual galvanizing separating itself from the metal it’s actually separating
might be one term I like to think of it in terms of kind of exfoliating because it’ll be a highly localized reaction
where the galvanized ink starts to corrode prematurely and it will usually
become a white volumous sometimes jelly like substance that is really an
indication that that protective zinc layer is being compromised or corroded
prematurely and obviously the concern besides just the unpleasant look of it
is that by losing that protective zinc layer we might shorten the service life
of the equipment so I’m guessing that a Valco probably got some phone calls
saying that we bought this brand new tower and now the galvanizing is coming off and what are you going to do about
it something like that that’s true we did it calls in questions and concerns and
we do have technical guidance on the subject in our equipment IOM or
installation maintenance and operation manual and in a lot of the research and
a lot of the guidelines early on related to why trust and passivation the
recommendation was to start the equipment without that heat load obviously our customers and the
industrial refrigeration space can’t do that so their question for about Co is
what can you guys do to help us minimize why trust for this new equipment that we
need to start with immediate heat load well I’ve got to commend you guys because most people’s reaction to that
Blame the Water Treatment
question is well when in doubt blame the water treater right and for years you’re absolutely
right when I was with Betts my early years here whenever white rust would occur
there was this kind of point of pointing of fingers where the water treater might
want to blame the galvanizing process or the equipment manufacturer and the
equipment manufacturer might want to say well maybe the water treatment guy didn’t do a great job with the
passivation or maybe their chemicals are causing it and then something happened along the way as a vet Co got into water
treatment we became both sides of that argument so that’s when it really hit us
that we need to help move the industry forward by researching this and seeing
what we can do to learn what causes it and what might minimize it or lessen the
chances of a customer ending up with white rust well well let’s talk about
that process because you guys have a great lab you have all these tests hours
that you’re testing these very items so can we back up a little bit you guys know you’ve got a problem and now you
said we’re going to figure out what we can do about it and then let the industry know some better procedures how
did you start that and then what did you do well we started that based on a lot of research and we went looking for a
lot of papers on why trust and passivation as you probably know a WT is a great
source for that kind of educational information and when we started
reviewing the documents a couple things struck us first was that a lot of those
papers were written in the late 80s and early 90s and there seemed to be a
little bit of a gap more recently where there wasn’t a lot of research for talk about the problem even though most in
the industry would agree it hadn’t been solved or resolved the other things so
so from that research we started with some bench top testing and in a lot of
those papers you’ll read about people using corrosion coupons and studying the
impact of different processes on the corrosion potential of the coupons and
we started down that road but we also had the advantage of being a manufacturer we could build some units
and try to see if what we were seeing on the coupons worked well on operating
units and early on we identified that coupons even if we heated the beakers or
aerated the beakers were usually look better than an actual operating unit
would so that means this benchtop testing that we undertook at the beginning usually made the problem look
easier to solve than what we would see when we would take it to a unit and what we attributed that to was the fact that
with the coupons you the most you can do to simulate a heat load is to heat the
bath the water in the beaker but in operating units with coils the heat is
actually coming through that coil and coming through the the galvanized layer
to come in contact with the water and that’s completely different impact on the surface that galvanizing so it took
us about a year to realize that we really couldn’t rely on the coupon type teste or benchtop type testing to try to
figure this complex problem out it really is impressive the rig’s that you set up if it’s okay with you I’m going
to put some of the pictures and the abstract that you presented at AWT on my show notes page yeah that
would be fine all right well now you mentioned earlier you we’re talking about heat load so what why is that such
Heat Load
a big deal so you know everybody’s worried about how much alkalinity they have what the pH is and now you’re
throwing this new variable in the heat load yeah that’s a great question and
early on when I would talk to water treatment guys about the problem I’d always ask the same question what’s the
most important parameter is in I won’t say a hundred percent of the time but the vast majority of the time experience
water treatment guys would point to the pH for the alkalinity of the tower water
or the spray water the other thing we learned about that along the way was most water treatment people will refer
to all of Africa cooling equipment as a cooling tower and in the equipment field
it’s quite different because we’ll talk about a open cooling tower in terms of one that has fill where the water comes
through the fill and comes in contact with the air and is cooled and everything happens there as opposed to
the closed circuit coolers and the evaporative condensers that I mentioned to you a little bit earlier that have
the coil in there where the heat transfer is actually occurring across that coil so the reason the heat is
important is because white rust is a form of corrosion and like most
corrosion reactions the how do you make the surface the faster the corrosion
reaction wants to occur so for that reason I would suggest to our friends in
the water treatment community that having a site-specific passivation plan
is even more important when you’re treating a closed circuit core or an evaporative condenser than it is when
you’re treating an open cooling tower because the temperatures at that coil
water interface tend to be higher on a coil product than they’re going to be in an open cooling tower now in these test
Water Sources
units that you mentioned I know you weren’t just running one type of water you had many types of source waters and
you created since water and you put different products in to see what would work better than
something else can you speak to that sure be happy to so when we started our research and that’s about five years ago
at this point we thought well we’re pretty smart this should be something we can figure out and as we got into it we
learned there are a lot of variables to consider so what we tried to do was build multiple test rigs where we could
change just one variable at a time to see what the impact of that was or is
early on we tried to use Phoenix Arizona water as our test water because we know
that areas with high alkalinity high chlorides and relatively high hardness is prone to white rust and we got a
little bit ahead of ourselves candidly we had to back down from there and start with some easier waters to get some
success and build back up so at our in our little test area or lab area for
passivation here we have the ability to blend RO water with Tony town city water
to make a lot of different blends and then we’ve also done testing where we
will add specific things like chlorides or sulfates back into that mix to make
the water more aggressive towards the news and coding so from all of that
let’s say a water treating out there on the roof and they see that brand new
shiny cooling tower that just appeared nobody told them about it and they now
have to do something about it what would you advise them to do well the first
thing I would advise them to do is notify their customer and writing that
site-specific passivation plan is recommended whether it’s an open cooling
tower where you might be more focused on pre cleaning in the iron pipe so it will accept inhibitors or if it’s a
galvanized coil where you’re worried about the coil bundle the first job in
my opinion of a treater is to notify their customer and/or their contractor in writing that
something needs to be done from there the next step would be to identify what
type of equipment am i dealing with is it an open cooling tower is it a closed circuit cool or is it an evaporative
condenser and how soon are they going to need to reject heat from that piece of
equipment we found that sometimes if we talk to contractors early in the process
they may be able to get an extra week or two of circulation of water without heat
load if they just rearrange their construction schedule a little bit and that can be a real help to the water
treaters because the first six to eight weeks of system operation are going to be most critical and in my view the
first week is more important than the second week second being more important than the third week etc so any amount of
time you can get to passivate with water circulation before II go to put on the
system the better – your chances of minimizing my cross so as far as the
water chemistry’s how much should we let it concentrate up to what type of passivation materials should we look
into using that’s a great question as well because people say to me what’s the best procedure for passivation and it’s
really can vary quite a bit early in our research we took a look at a lot of the
articles that were out there even some written by equipment manufacturers that
suggested high levels of phosphate orthophosphate might be beneficial in
for me the passive Larry were trying to form our research hasn’t substantiated
that and my conclusion which may be incomplete at this point is a lot of
that research or a lot of those articles were more for open cooling towers where
the original intent was to get oils and grease mill scale out of the piping and
passivate the mild steel piping from flash rusty and prior to treatment as
opposed to forming a passive layer on galvanized surface in a tower or in a
closed circuit cooler so certainly a pH and alkalinity player role we’ve also
found that chlorides plays a bigger role than sulfate do so my advice would be to
look at the guidelines and then look at your makeup water quality in some areas
like you are trace in Atlanta it may be a lot easier than Indianapolis or somewhere else areas with high
alkalinity and high chlorides are going to be the most challenging and require the most advanced plan and there’s some
other areas where just by the nature of the makeup water it’s not nearly as challenging so are there specific
chemistry’s that you would recommend that would help say in our water in Arizona versus water in Atlanta
well that research is still ongoing a little bit we have seen or we believe we
have seen that a zoals will inhibit white rust we’re not certain at this
point that they will aid in the formation of a passive layer so it may
be a product and there are some products from different companies on the marketplace that are white rust
inhibitors where they will inhibit white frost but if you stop feeding them
you’re still prone to white cross formula after the feed is discontinued I
would think that Hazel’s fall into that TM and certainly your research would
suggest that having a good polymer in your in your formulation and keeping the
surface clean aids in that passivation from there there’s probably a different
couple of different chemistries you could look at to try to get either some anodic or cathodic corrosion protection
in the mix so what are there any magic numbers that we shouldn’t exceed this
Magic Numbers
much alkalinity we shouldn’t see exceed this much chloride or this pH I think
probably so most of the literature you’ll read will say that during the
passivation phase you want to keep the piece H below e 0.3 I’d suggest being a little
bit more conservative than that if you’re dealing with oil products as the local pH at the coil water interface
maybe higher than your bulk water pH so in our research that’s seems to equate
if we’re trying to stay let’s say between 7.8 and 8.0 pH and we’re doing
pH adjustment in most waters that tends to equate to somewhere around 125 to 140
parts of alkalinity but as you know that can change from location and water source a little bit chlorides certainly
higher makes it more challenging we haven’t got to the point in our research where we’ve found an absolute upper
limit but certainly if you’re in areas with very high incoming chlorides it can
make the problem or challenging the other thing that you want to think about between besides the type of equipment
and the water chemistry in my opinion is to make sure that your contractor or your customer know that minimizing white
rust is a team effort and by that I mean the water treaters not going to be there
every day operating the plant so either the contractor or the customer or hopefully both need to have a site
contact that you can reach out to and get on the phone and check in and see if
there’s any alarms or any of the inventories running low or any upset conditions because without that local
support at the plant it’s very difficult in a six or eight week period to be on-site enough to ensure treatment
success I think that’s great advice and when you’re communicating like that with your customer they realize that it is a
concern and it’s normally when you don’t have those conversations with their customer that they try to point the
finger when something doesn’t happen correctly right and unfortunately that step of not documenting things can come
back when there is a problem people are going to say well did you tell me and if you probably know know if you’ve told
them in writing it’s a lot clearer and easier to explain than if you’ve had a verbal with one of the operators absolutely
do you ever recommend acid in passivation recommend maybe a firm
that’s a stretch but we do use acid in our passivation process in the field
when it’s appropriate the one thing I would suggest to your audience
is don’t try to do pH control or acid feed on the cheap we’ve seen many many
systems ruined by short-duration acid over feeds the problem with acid feed as
it relates to passivation we’re ongoing treatment is over feeds that depress the
pH rapidly can cause damage very quickly so you know the the new zinc will
tolerate pH is between 6 & 8 very nicely as you start to go below 6 then you
start to put the galvanizing itself at jeopardy and we’ve seen examples over a
weekend where somebody’s tried to feed acid on a timer or without good feed and
control mechanisms in place and have fed too much acid and excursions have occurred below 4 and they burn the
galvanizing to the point the systems compromised so in those situations in
those areas where pH control is the only way to maintain your pH and alkalinity
we strongly recommend having good feed control and making sure that you’re
feeding to a point where you have good mixing and you’re getting pH measurements and alarms at an area
that’s representative of the system so it’s safe to say that the acid feed
failures you’ve seen is because people just trying to do it cheap as you mentioned that’s usually the case that
they just haven’t haven’t invested whether it be the customer or the contractor or the water treatment
provider having invested in the correct where the necessary feed and control
equipment to make sure that over feeds don’t occur and the challenge trace is
that the damage done by an acid overfeed of even short-duration a day or two can
be far worse than the white cross that were trying to minimize as far as
equipment service like it goes you know that’s a that’s a great point and I know some mechanical contractors will come in
White Rust Removal
and they’ll clean off all about white rust to try to get it nice and shiny again what do you say to that
I don’t recommend it personally if you think about it that white rust is
premature zinc corrosion so if you remove it you’re speeding up the process
of losing the galvanized zinc that you want in the unit it’s also problematic
when we think in terms of the coil products like cores and condensers because it’s very difficult to
mechanically clean down into that tube bundle you know you can’t fit down in there and even when we’re thinking about
trying to clean up scale from those coil bundles which is slightly different we need to be very careful how we portray
that to an owner because I will suggest to your audience that if I clean a scaled coil to the point where the
bottom of the coil is visibly clear of scale I will almost certainly burn the
top of the coil because the reactions are going to start at the top at the spray header and work their way down
through that coil bundle so I’m not a fan of removing white rust once it’s occurred
my recommendation generally is to monitor or zinc residuals in the water and see what your trend is telling you
if your zinc levels are stable or going down that’s generally indicative of a
stable system that’s not getting worse and as long as your zinc numbers aren’t
continuing to climb it’s probably better for the equipment to leave the white
rust even though it’s visually unappealing that it is to try to remove it from the system our corrosion coupons like a zinc
Corrosion Coupons
corrosion coupon important to have in the system during that first six to eight weeks I would my answer would
probably be no and the challenge with any zinc surface
to have it be representative of what’s going on in the larger systems certainly we all can understand that news ink
whether it’s on a coupon or Ana system is going to be more reactive than zinc that has been there a while so could it
be useful as a trending tool perhaps do we recommend it be part of every
passivation fad I would say no so use it as data not the end-all be-all yeah
Use Coupons as Data
that’s I think that’s really what coupons are good for is to give you a trend and give you a data and certainly
if you have an established treatment program and you want to change to something else having that coupon data
is very helpful to see if you’re staying the same if you’re improving or if you’re getting worse well we talked
Is there ever an instance where the amount of water being used outweighs the mechanical benefit
about some really harsh waters like Phoenix Arizona and so I’ve got water in
Phoenix Arizona it’s very harsh so now I’ve got the options of either I can add
acid and maybe the customer doesn’t want to spend the money so I can do that properly and I feel comfortable about it so now I’ve got to set the bleed so
we’re going to be wasting some water in the beginning so we can set up that galvanizing to have that nice passive
film is there ever an instance where the amount of water being used outweighs the
mechanical benefit to the actual passivation procedure well that’s a good
question I I would say that in many cases bleeding more water maintaining
lower cycles can be a sound strategy for passivating a new unit obviously
depending on the quality of the make up water the two caveats I would give to that is again it goes back to
documentation you’re going to need to notify the owner and the contractor in
writing that going down that road will use substantially more water because we
see a lot of customers after the fact complaining about water usage in that kind of scenario and the other one is
that it depends quite a bit on how hard the units be wrong so again going back to that
distinction between an open cooling tower which tends to be a relatively large volume of water with relatively
low turnover rates versus a cooler or a condenser which is a very small volume
of water with very high turnover rates if you have a cool or condenser that’s
under some amount of load it’s going to be very difficult to maintain low cycles
of concentration with that unit running rejecting heat and evaporating water Chris how much longer will a properly
How much longer will a properly passivated cooling tower last
passivated cooling tower last over one that was not properly passivated you
know to answer that specifically it’s quite difficult sure but I will give you some anecdotal answers to that my view
of equipment lifespan is if a galvanized piece of equipment is passivated
correctly and maintenance and water treatment or maintaining consistently
that having a service life of fifteen or twenty years is certainly achievable in
many parts of the country well note when I say that it events in front of customers sometimes somebody will say I
have one that’s 25 years old or thirty years old which is probably true and
achievable in other parts of the country I would question then if the energy efficiency and the design of that units
up to current standards on the flip side several years ago in 2010 I was
fortunate to give a talk at iiar which is the ammonia refrigeration conference
in San Diego and I suggested to some of the contractors there that stainless steel might be a better material
construction in some markets or with some water qualities and after my talk a
gentleman came up and was discussing the cost at associated with stainless steel
and I asked him where he was operating and his luck would have it it was Phoenix Arizona I asked him in Phoenix
Arizona how often his customers were typically changing out condensers and
his answer was seven years so certainly we have seen cases on zero bleed and
other systems where a white brush can occur very quickly 90 or 120 days I would say that most even
somewhat abused systems should be able to get you five to ten years and
well-maintained should be able to get to you fifteen or twenty years well let’s go back to that water treater that
What do you recommend for your next cooling tower
instead of finding a brand new cooling tower on that building they have a great
dialogue and relationship with their customer and the customer asked them
what do you recommend for our next cooling tower what would you recommend they say in that conversation well
there’s so many options out there today between hybrid coolers and open cooling
towers so you really want to start with the with the area the part of the country or the part of the world you’re
in and what their design conditions look like and then you want to look at the customers process you know does it make
sense for them to have the cleaner process water associated with a closed
circuit core or is it feasible for them to run tower water to their process from
there it becomes a question of the make up water quality available in many parts
of the country you can get 15 20 25 years out of galvanized materials or
construction and obviously they’re going to cost a little bit less upfront on the flip side of that there are areas where
it’s going to be very difficult to pass a fee and so it may be worth investigating whether you want to go to
some stainless steel whether it would be 304 or 316 materials of construction and
the costs of doing that have come down substantially over the year or so we’re seeing more and more customers that are
at least investing in stainless steel bases and then deciding on their other
materials of construction from there so and has it been your experience when you can explain with a customer that even
Has it been your experience that people appreciate that
though the basin being made out of stainless steel is more expensive you can show the ROI and show how things are
going to last longer and in downtown Atlanta you’re not just putting a cooling tower on a building you’re
getting a helicopter or crane and closing down the street so there’s a lot of other expense says that people don’t necessarily
equate with that has it been your experience that people normally appreciate that and say yes that makes a
lot of sense I would say that more and more customers are heading that way trees as you know in your business or
any of the other water treatment businesses out there there are some customers that are going to be low first
cost customers but I think more and more customers today are looking to their
service professionals like their water treatment provider to give them options
and to give them alternatives to what they may have done in the past and and
your points an excellent one where it’s not only the cost of the equipment but it’s the rigging the getting it on the
roof we see projects where they’re buying things knocked down because they
have to take them up in elevators or the helicopter lift that you mentioned and you know in areas like Los Angeles going
to a higher tier of construction in that case 316 stainless steel they can actually run higher cycles of
concentration and save some water versus the other options on the market so I
think the trend is certainly in that direction but in any sales situation it’s difficult to say that a hundred
percent of the customers are going to take that kind of advice answered like an attorney how about that all right I
have not been an attorney and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn Express because waiting for that one what is the biggest
What is the biggest mistake watertreaters make
mistake that you would say water treaters make that they need to stop doing when it comes to passivation I may
have touched on these but I would give you three as opposed to one biggest one and the first one is that documentation
make sure that you explain why it’s necessary and that you recommend it to
your customer or to your contractor in writing the second mistake I see is some
folks will treat a cooler or a condenser like a cooling tower and they’re
mechanically different and probably from a chemistry standpoint need to be thought about differently one idea I’ll
give you there is so because of the high water turnover in a core condenser
using a low acting or long-duration non oxidizing biocide it’s probably not as
useful as something that like DB MPA that’ll that’ll act a little faster
because the retention time in those systems is different than an open cooling tower and then the third one I
would would say again is related to pH control either do it right or don’t do
it because your risk of trying to do it with either inexpensively or on a
low-cost solution without proper feeding control you’re taking on a lot of risk
well if one of our listeners wanted to learn more about why trust and passivation what advice would you give
How to learn more about passivation
them I would I would have them start at the AWT website I know AWT updated their
paper guidelines perhaps on the subject in 2012 also the cooling technology
Institute has a paper from 1994 that’s a good primer on the subject and for those
that might want to watch a video of aapko is produced a educational video that can be found at wwe.com and if you
go to our website there’s a link at the top for videos if you click on that in
the bottom right you’ll find a video entitled understanding passivation and white frost which was really designed to
explain to contractors and owners the importance of passivation to minimize
weigh frost and also shows some of the test equipment and some of the research that babka has been doing on the subject
well with your permission I’ll put that on the show notes page as well make it real easy for people to find that would
be fine we’d be happy to I believe it’s also available on youtube and I got to tell you as a water-treatment I have a
Thank you
lot of dialogue around this topic and and other things water treatment related when it comes to cooling towers and of
course all the other things you guys call cooling towers I always always learn a new acronym or something every
time I talk to you but I really want to thank you for not one of those folks that say blame the
water treater you really have developed ways to get information you created
alliances with people like myself and other people in AWT to to test that information and I know I personally have
learned a tremendous amount because of that so I want to thank you for doing that well that’s very nice of you to say
tres and it’s really my pleasure to be able to do that not only individually but on behalf of AB Co and you know I’d
say that one of the great things about water treatment as an industry and a career is no matter how much you’ve done
there’s always something else you can learn in and I’ve had the good fortune
of learning a lot from my father and and other people with pets as well as many
of the people you know at AWT that are you know brilliant in specific parts of
the industry so you know if we all keep an open mind and are able to ask
questions and learn from each other I think we’re gonna move the industry and positive direction well I can’t think of
Conclusion
a better way to close this segment so thank you so much for coming on and sharing all these ideas I’m definitely
going to get all the items that you mentioned up on my show notes page and you’ve been a great guest thanks again
thank you trace it’s been a pleasure thanks for having me I am amazed at what
happens when people team up to solve a problem instead of simply pointing
fingers at each other I’ve really enjoyed working with Chris and a vac Co and sharing my data that I’ve collected
over the years on white rust and then in turn sharing what they have with me
collectively they have done so much for learning what causes white rust and how
we can do better jobs in working together with the manufacturers so we
can prevent white rust I gotta say I hope that next time when you have an
issue your first goal will be to work with the people that are involved to
solve the issue and not try to assign blame to somebody else
it’s my hope that you use tomorrow to make yourself a better water treater
than you were today and I look forward to listening with you on the next
episode of scaling up have a great week folks [Music]
you [Music]