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TRACE: Welcome to the special holiday edition of Scaling UP! H2O. I am Trace Blackmore, your host for this special holiday edition of our podcast. Folks, we are smacked up in the middle of Industrial Water Week. It is the first time that, us, water treatment folk, have had holiday just for us. I wanna know how you’re celebrating Industrial Water Week. I tell you one of the things that I’ve done is I have reached out the people that have held me most in my career. Unfortunately, I can’t do that to my dad. He’s not with us anymore. But I can do that to two of my mentors that have held me so much in my career. One, you heard from him yesterday. That’s Bruce Ketrick, CWT. Folks, I can’t tell you how much he has done for me to help me in business as a water treater. But today, you are going to meet another one. I’m still gonna keep you in suspense because we are celebrating Industrial Water Week by you going to scalinguph2o.com and recording me the question that you wanna ask on Scaling UP! H2O. And that’s what you’ve done and we’re gonna listen right now to a former guess of Scaling UP! H2O, Andy Morcomb.
ANDY: Hey Trace! It’s your old time partner Andy Morcomb from Jaytech. I wanted to call in and ask you about cycles of concentration in a cooling tower. Up in the Midwest, we’ve got a lot of facilities that are trying to cut back on water use. So my question was this. If you’re able to control your limiting factors like hardness and Alkalinity even Silica, is there any reason why you would stop cycling your cooling tower? Can we take it to 10, 15, even 20 cycles? What are the reasons will there be to stop cycling a tower above a certain point? Thanks for your help.
TRACE: Andy, thanks so much for your question. And how many of us have really thought about that? You know we have these limiting factors and, nation, if you don’t know what limiting factors are, there’s certain ions in water that we are only able to concentrate up a certain amount of time before they produce some sort of scale or other problem. And one that I’ll throw out very easily that I think we all know about is Silica. Silica, I think we all agree, well, I don’t think water treaters agree on anything, but a hundred and fifty parts per million depending on some other things that you got out there. I can just hear Bruce in the back of my head explaining why other reasons would work against a hundred and fifty. But let’s just use a hundred and fifty parts per million of Silica when we’re concentrating up a cooling tower. We don’t want that to go above a hundred and fifty parts per million.
So, if we have 10 coming out of the makeup water as Silica, we could only concentrate that up 15 times before we would hit that hundred and fifty limit. Of course, when we do that, that’s a little too close for comforts so what most of us are going to do is we are going to back off of that just a little bit so we have a little margin of air. But Andy’s question builds that in and he’s saying “ Ok Trace, we’ve already done all those things. So I can run this tower up way higher than I am doing right now and I’m not gonna hit any of my limiting factors. Can I go ahead and do that?” And the answer is yes, and the answer is no. Again, the whole purpose of use having a holiday is we’re celebrating we are water treatment professionals and we have to know all the things that are going on with the water.
Now, it’s important for you to understand that if we concentrate up to a concentration ratio of 8 and then we concentrate up to 9, and concentrate up to 10 and 11 and 12, the savings is not as big as you would think that it would be. So let’s look at that. If you take up one concentration ratio, and by the way, concentration ratio is the term that I like to use for cycles of concentration because it never fails when I’m explaining to somebody how a system concentrate and I let them know what it is that it’s doing and then I ask them a question about it and I refer to it of cycles of concentration, they will come back with its how many times the water is circulating through the system. And of course it is not that. It is the fact that only pure water evaporates leaving its solids behind and every time a volume of water gets evaporating out leaving a volume of waters worth of solids behind.
That is a cycle but what I like to call it is that is a concentration ratio. So in Andy’s question, why can’t you do that indefinitely if all of your limiting factors are okay? Well one, there’s not as much cost savings as you think there could be and as I was saying earlier, to go from one concentration ratio to two is your biggest impact because that’s a 50% savings. That’s huge. You’re using 50% less water by doing that. In contrast to that, if we were to move up to 4 concentration ratio that’s going to be one quarter, 25%, the water that we would have used originally when we just had a once through system. So in the fancy name for that is the reciprocal of the concentration ratio.
What is that? That’s simply if I had a concentration ratio of 4, I’m gonna put 1 over it that makes it reciprocal, and ¼ is 25%. So, 25% of my initial value is what I’m saving there. Well as we get higher up into the concentration ratios 8 9, 10, 11, 12 times, the savings just isn’t there because the percentage gets lower. So what I would ask that we all do is see exactly how much water we’re saving and then what are the issues that could be caused because we’re concentrating that up so much. Now finally Andy I’m getting to your question. The issues that I see far too often is that people think they’re saving a tremendous amount of water by concentrating the water up into this incredibly high amount.
And we can do that here in Atlanta. We have very soft water but what happens is the organic loading in the system becomes so incredibly high there is no way to keep it clean from the microbial activity that’s taking place. Now why is that? Well all that organic carbon is acting as food and we just have this tremendous buffet for all these things to eat and these guys are going crazy and it’s very difficult for our biocides to work in a situation like that. Now, we can get them to work but normally it’s not gonna work on the same program than it did before we had all of that loading. So I hope that starts to answer your question and moreover, I hope that that question has gotten you to think about what our job is. Our job is to treat water properly using as little as we can. And keeping everybody safe in the process. But sometimes we have to make sure we know where the savings goes too far. And it’s just not enough savings. And now we’re creating some issues in the system where we can’t solve our core water treatment issues which is controller scale, corrosion, microbial fouling and dirt and debris.
Well forks, I’m not gonna keep you in suspense any longer. Yesterday I introduced you to Bruce Ketrick. Today, I’m going to introduce you to another one of my mentors. His name is Jay Farmerie, CWT. You know I’m thinking of it, we’ve had the next additions of each of these individuals on Scaling UP! before we’ve actually have these people on Scaling UP! Bruce Ketrick, of course, Bruce Ketrick Jr. on last year. He was the president of AWT. And then several times on the show we’ve had Michelle Farmerie, daughter of Jay Farmerie on the show. So now, we’re getting to the original formula of each one of those. And today we’re talking with Jay Farmerie, CWT. And Jay, just like Bruce, has invested a whole bunch of time and effort in to me and I am so much better because of that. So thank you Jay. And also thank you for coming on and answering this next question.
LEYV: Hey Trace! This is Leyv with Pulsifere. My question is about managing efficiencies in critical processes. So, in a cooling tower and a boiler, how do you weigh downtime against maximizing your water consumption and chemical consumption?
JAY: Well, there’s a lot of flat process that goes into versus the chemical consumption. The biggest thing is for a chiller or for your cooling tower because your cooling tower is not the most important thing, its chiller. And it’s the up and down cycling and the scaling of that piece of equipment. To give you a real quick indication, approximately 800 tons of cooling class A facility here in the North East but 350,000 dollars for their electric class for a year’s period of time. You know you put a quarter inches scale on there, you’re gonna add to that cost about 75 to 80 thousand dollars. So there is your ROI. And the biggest thing is we don’t worry about the chemistry as much but your job as a water treater is more or less to not sell chemicals but prevent energy use. I mean we look at green building systems and things like that, we’re trying to keep them green. So they’re using less energy, less water and less everything else. You know, the other things, I mean, you go between 2 and 4, 6 cycles.
You’ve got your maximum solubilities you remember you have to hit but these are all the things you really wanna look at. And then, you know, what’s your water class, what’s your sewage class. I mean your sewage class in California and places like that are over 25 dollars per thousand. Here in Pittsburgh, it’s 7 to 9 dollars per thousand and it’s going up. It’s going up about 5% a year. So that’s your ROIs you have to do some calculations on. You know for downtime for boilers, shutting a boiler down over the weekend does a lot of damage to that boiler. I’m dealing with that with a pretty large account that has turbines and everything else and they shut down every weekend. Well they’ve done a lot of damage in the last five years since they adapted that process. Now they’re having to re-tube boiler. That’s gonna cost some upwards of 1.4 million dollars.
TRACE: So Jay, basically, what you’re saying is the keen and cooling of the metal has stressed it so far that it has to be replaced?
JAY: Well, they’ve caused other problems because when the boiler shuts down you’re drying in air, you’re sucking in air. Maybe they’re putting their sulfite levels up a little higher or their oxygen scavengers up a little higher but they’re still drying in lot more corrosion especially in the economizer and the super heater and things like that so that’s causing damage to us and that’s causing more deposits. And they’re actually on RO water which makes it a little bit more aggressive so now we have another issue. So they have full-time operators, if they leave them on, you know, low fire over the weekend, even though they’re not gonna be in production.
We’ve done the calculations and it was a wash from what they were saving in energy cost. So, I mean, that’s the biggest thing as a water treater. We have to start running the talking in different mode. Talking ROIs. What’s you return on investment of adding the chemistries? Don’t talk about scale, corrosion and fouling. You know, in a cooling tower, what’s the cost of a Legionella outbreak from your cooling tower or a system? I’m working on lawsuit right now with 20 Million dollars on wrongful-death suit for Legionella. So not playing that chemistry in or not doing the things you have to do. You talk about the return of investment, you’re saving them from the bad publicity. For some places it’s tough to put a dollar value to that but you also have to talk about what it’s gonna cost them in real dollars. A 20 million dollar lawsuit’s probably gonna cost that company with time away from the other things, even with their insurance, if they’re not self-insured, it’s probably gonna cost them about a million, 2 million and a half just in time. And I don’t know any water treatment program that’s costing them million dollars unless it’s here in the film or something like that.
TRACE: Jay, I remember a while ago and it was in some trade journal, I wanna say you showed it to me. It showed it all the different costs to run, say, a chiller plant. And the lowest cost that they had in the chiller plant was water treatment. I wanna say it was about 2%. Do you remember that?
JAY: Yes I do. You really have to look at the chemical cost is nothing. So, everybody, its 30 seconds one minute commercial were bought themselves and the companies cannot be about water treatment. Nobody understands water treatment. You must not talk about energy savings, utility savings, and things like that and protecting the people around protecting the environment. That’s what we actually do. It has nothing do, remember, water is only the transfer agent from getting the chemicals to the equipment. We use water to get to chemistry to protect the boiler, to protect the cooling tower, to protect the people.
TRACE: Jay, let me ask you. So, you and I, we don’t know each other. We’re in a elevator. You’ve got that 30 seconds to 1 minute to convince me what it is that you do. What do you say?
JAY: Well I’m in the energy savings. Basically, I’m trying to protect my clients from using more electric and natural gas cost. I’m also trying to prevent people from Legionnaires disease. We’re looking at Legionnaires disease quite a bit. In our industry, in cooling water systems and potable water systems, we’re looking at Legionnaires disease. And we’re trying to help our clients make sure they don’t kill people.
TRACE: That’s pretty strong. Jay, I wanna thank you for coming on and helping us answer this questions from Leyv and I hope you have a wonderful rest of Industrial Water Week.
JAY: Okay Trace. Have a good day.
TRACE: Jay, thanks so much for coming on the special holiday edition of Scaling UP! H2O celebrating Industrial Water Week. Of course we’re talking about cooling. Jay, Bruce, you guys are both scheduled for a complete interview to come back on the show. So Scaling UP! nation be sure to listen to listen for that. I can’t say enough good things about these two gentlemen and I cannot wait to have them on Scaling UP! H2O. Well, we have just completed our third installment of Scaling UP! H2O holiday edition Industrial Water Week. It is Wednesday. We are smacked up in the middle of Industrial Water Week. So what are you thinking about that you can change about what you do on a regular basis that’s gonna impact on everything that you do on a regular basis? Does that make sense?
So what are you doing just mechanically that maybe you can give a little bit of thought to and because you’re giving thought to that one item, it’s gonna change everything that you do. I don’t expect that to come quickly to you. I do expect that you use the rest of today, Wednesday of Industrial Water Week, to try to figure out what that is and then tomorrow try to put that into application. Folks, we’ve got two more episodes of Industrial Water Week. So tomorrow we’re talking about waste water and then finally on Friday we’ll be wrapping up the special holiday edition with careers. Folks, can’t wait to talk to you on Scaling UP! tomorrow.