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 treaties by water treaters where
we’re scaling up on water treatment knowledge so we don’t scale up our systems hi everybody I’m trace Blackmore
I am the host of scaling up and today we’re going to be talking about stuff
that really I don’t think we should be doing what I mean by that that is stuff
that I see other water treaters do that just makes me say what the heck are you
doing that for so since it’s my show we’re going to create a new segment and
that segments called the boiling point and the boiling point is stuff that I
see folks do that you just shouldn’t do and quite frankly it ticks me off today
we’re going to just start off with a couple of items that I’ve noticed and the first one we’re going to start off
with is the raw water so hopefully you all know when I say raw water I mean the
water as it comes out of the faucet so wherever that’s coming from if it’s so well if it’s coming from municipality
whatever it is we’re going to call it raw water the water that’s coming into the system as it is so the thing that
kinda gets me going when it comes to raw water especially when I consult with
other water treatment companies is I am amazed at how many service reports that
I actually go over and critique that don’t have raw water on them how the
heck do you know what’s going on with the system if you don’t know what the starting point is and folks if you don’t
get it the raw water is the starting point that is your crystal ball on what
is going to happen in the system I’m starting with a and I’m going to concentrate a up so many times to equal
a times five or six or seven whatever your concentration ratio is now when I
go to test the system I should see five six seven eight times of those items in
there now this isn’t a chemistry class and is not an accurate statement for every
single ion that you’re going to test I get that but I want you to understand the point that that’s a really easy
method for us to determine what’s gonna happen in the system and allow us to
start thinking okay what do I know about the raw water what do I know about how
it’s going to concentrate up and then that’s going to allow me to predict
what’s going on in the system and now when I’m testing the cooling tower or the boiler I can guess what it should
look like now that’s the reason for the test because we don’t guess on anything with water treatment we’re going to
create a hypothesis which is a really fancy name for a guess and then we’re going to prove or disprove that
hypothesis based on our test once we have our test we can say yep what we
thought was right or nope what we were thinking wasn’t right so we need to rethink again to figure out what’s going
on and then we’re going to do it to complete the service so if you are not
running your raw water I want you to ask yourself why and if you tell me because
you don’t have enough time to run those extra tests I have a clean lyrics’
designation on my show so I can’t use the expletive that I really want to say but I will say that that is not your
problem the fact that you don’t have enough time to run those tests isn’t your problem at all here’s your problem
your problem is is that you have not spent the time necessary to learn your
test to be able to know what order to run them in to know I can find run with
this test with that test I’m going to get a little bit extra time ie I can run
this whole battery of tests 10 minutes faster if I do it in this certain order so if you have not played around with
your test kit you have not tried to make the order of your tests more efficient
that’s your problem it’s not the raw water and trust me folks if you’re not in raw water their problems out there
that you don’t even know about so please help me help you become a better water
treater wait a second I just called you a water treat or that means you got to know what’s going on in the water that
you’re treating so if you’re gonna call yourself a water treat you better know what’s in your water and you better test
that raw water wow that was pretty therapeutic as a water treat or I feel
very liberated I like the boiling point segment I hope you guys do too so let’s
talk about another topic how about our next topic is evaporative salts what the
heck do I mean about evaporative salts so imagine you’re walking around the cooling tower and you see the tower
louvers that’s the stuff that keeps the water inside the cooling tower not
splashing out and you see this film the salty crust that’s on the outside of the
cooling tower and say this is somebody else’s account and you are surveying
this account trying to get this business and you say hey look at all that scale right there
the other guy must not be doing a good job and of course the customer unfortunately does not know a lot about
water treatment in most cases and you have just told them something that is
totally false so in order to see if a water treatment program is indeed
working properly we don’t look at the outside of the cooling tower we want to look on the inside wetted surfaces
that’s where the heat transfers taking place that’s where we’re transferring the BTUs out of the water into the
atmosphere so look in the tower fill if it’s a if it’s an open sided cooling
tower you can actually reach and be very careful this stuff can’t touch you and you don’t want to damage it either but
you can actually you can actually sort of reach in there spread that tower fill apart and all those surfaces that are
wetted all the time those should be clean so let’s say we did that and it
was indeed clean but we have all this crust on the outside where the water
splashes and evaporate well folks that’s just how it works no
heat transfer is taking place on the outside of the cooling tower so it’s not
costing the customer more money to have that I will agree it’s not aesthetically pleasing but it’s not scale do not tell
your customers that at scale what it is it’s high concentrated solids water
because that’s what the cooling towers doing it’s concentrating up solids that water is splashing out on a surface that
isn’t wet a hundred percent of the time and only pure water evaporates leading
it solids behind and that’s what you’re seeing you’re seeing those solids left behind now normal cooling tower
maintenance should take care of that but what happens is a lot of our customers
say hey we’re gonna try to save little money this year we’re not gonna clean the cooling tower or maybe that part of
the cooling tower wasn’t cleaned so at least on an annual basis and I actually
recommend more than that but at least on an annual basis you want to make sure that the cooling tower is cleaned and
all those surfaces are clean too now if your customers really you know excited
about that and they want to make sure that it looks good for the owners and all there are some cleaners and various
things that you can spray on there to help get that off but honestly if if
they are really concerned about that and they do that on a more regular basis it may even come off with just regularly
hosing it down so if they want it clean that’s gonna be a process that you’re gonna have to work with them so they
understand there has to be some sort of mechanical mechanism in there ie cleaning to get that off that does not
mean that the water treatment program is failing by all means the water treatment program could be failing but that’s not
your evidence for that so please educate your customers properly and let them
know that evaporative salts are not scale so I hope you realize I’m not mad
at any one person the boiling point just simply let you guys know how serious I
take water treatment and really how high a standard I hold all of us – we all decided to become
part of the best industry in the world we said hey we’re going to be water treaters well folks if we’re going to be
water treaters we need to give this industry the respect it deserves and every so often I’m gonna VIN on you guys
and I’m going to let you know things that I see that if we just pay a little
bit better attention if we just do a little bit more detail we’re gonna be
better water treaters and at the end of the day if I made you think about something that maybe you were maybe you
weren’t doing and tomorrow you’re gonna go out and you’re gonna think about it and you’re gonna do a little bit better I think I did my job because you’re
doing your job and we’re all making the industry a little bit better each and every day next up on our program we’re
gonna have a conversation with John Sabrina okay I was all amplified up I was upset about things that we weren’t
doing properly in the water treatment community so now we’re going to bring it back because I don’t know if you guys
know John Sabrina but I cannot think of a nicer guy we’re going to spend a
little bit of time with Uncle John he’s gonna tell us some things that he does things that might make us a little bit
better tomorrow that we were today so I hope you enjoy my conversation with
Uncle John John Sabrina I’m here today with John’s of breda John is the first
recipient of a WT supplier of the Year and longtime supporter of a WT how are
you doing today John I’m doing fine good to visit with you trace well we definitely appreciate you being on the
show what are the things we try to do on this show is is is learn from people that have been involved with the
industry try to talk about some of your successes some of your failures how a WT
has benefited you suggestions you have for the new water treat or things like that but there might be some listeners
out there that don’t know who you are and that’s unfortunate because John is
an incredible human being so John tell us a little bit about yourself well
was born on the south side of Chicago and we migrated to Florida when I was in high school I went to Florida State and
studied chemistry ended up working in the phosphate industry to start out which processes a lot of water every day
and that’s how I kind of got started in the industry that’s that’s where I hail from all right well how did you get
involved in the water treatment industry on my boat sunk just kidding
I think what’s funny is like I remember back when I was about 4 or 5 years old belly flopping off the high dive into
the water and I realized that water was a pretty hard subject at that time but I think we all have a kind of a
fascination for water and my mother used to think I was a fish when I was a kid and waters a fascinating medium that we
all live with and when I graduated in chemistry and went to the job in the in
the state of Florida we had a lot of water the phosphate entry processes water to the tune of like 10,000 gallons
per minute recirculating pumps around the plant so a lot of my responsibility was handling processed water cooling
water and you know the the manufacturer of fertilizer so it was part of my my
job to watch after the waters and I ended up focusing on water in in
engineering school at my attempt to get a graduate degree in chemical engineering while I was working down
there and piney point phosphoric Complex in Florida and I became the environmental manager of that complex
which was dealing with the discharge of waters and making sure that NPDES permit
requirements were met and actually ended up working on processes to clean up the water and and water treatment facility
for the processing of the acid waters that were in that facility well and then
your company is zybax so tell us a little bit about zybax wells I bet is an
independent company of with the supply chain specific to the water service
industry and other water industries we try to focus on the solutions to the customer base that we serve so that were
actual ancillary engineering ad to our sale and we help people go
through solutions to problems it’s not just products for sale but rather to help people go through formulations and
troubleshoot and figure out how to make a more cost-effective and profitable
formulation because if zybax cannot help its clients develop profitable product
technology then we need to go back to the drawing board so we try to help as a business partner and a supply partner
and come up with solutions to the challenges that we all face in business well I will say that we hear Blackmore
enterprises use John and zybax and he is considered highly as a partner and in
fact right before this interview he and I were in my lab trying to figure out a problem that we’re still working on we
we figured out what we shouldn’t do now we need to figure out how we can do what we need to do so more to come on that
John I know you’ve been involved with AWT for quite some time how did you get involved with AWT wow that’s impose
Charlie Matthews from over there in Birmingham Alabama had gone to the
industrial excuse me the international water conference also known as the IWC back in 87 or 88 I don’t remember what
year that was the first one I attended and Charlie was in the hallway like a preacher man talking about why don’t you
join a WT and he was very vocal about it so we showed up at the AWT ad-hoc
meeting there and Charlie is quite the colorful character from Guardian tip Co industries in Birmingham Alabama and so
I attended the first AWT meeting which was more like I would describe it as you
just went into this room and there was a group of fellows there and a card table or two actually a bigger than a card
table and then they had some technical sessions and they chatted a lot about water treatment and I think at that time
in that period of time there was the IWC in the CTI but coalition or the the
membership of individual business owners there really wasn’t an organization for individual business owners that were
challenging times for them at the and so the AWT was the right
organization at the right time for a burdening in the industry of independent water treaters and I think it’s done a
great job developing resources for independent business owners so I felt it was a good organization to become
involved with and there was no internet back then I don’t think there were even cell phones used I believe well shoe
leather you know the telephone in the shoe leather and pick sometimes if you even
showed up at an account they would say no one ever calls on us they roll out
the red carpet because it was a different time then and I think the folks by word of mouth realized that aw
was a good organization to join and many people we encourage them to join a DBT
and it became a bigger organization along the way so no regrets there and
Johnny to this day you’re still very active in the Association Water Technologies in fact you are the
chairperson of the boiler subcommittee is that right that is correct Oh tell us
a little bit about that committee and what you do on that well I try to keep all the paperwork’s and the reports together and then we work on topics that
we feel that the committee feels and the members that are overall good technical
contribution to the aw team member so they don’t feel all alone if there’s a
new problem such as aluminum boilers or some topic of regulations of additives
that can be used in steam contact with food etc and we try to simplify so that
it’s easy for technical directors and the members of aw fuse they can explain
it to their customers what the issues are and why they’re doing things a certain way and instead of me being more
cumbersome like it can be with regulations and technical so we’re very
active in that area all right well you mentioned aluminum boilers and I believe was about a year ago your committee
published a paper on aluminum boilers and I know our listeners are having to deal with a customer that all of a
sudden presto there’s a little bit of boiler there that wasn’t there last month and now we as the water
are expected to treat that kid you any advice any any horror stories anything
you want to want to talk about around the aluminum boilers we’re among friends here well well you know the aluminum
boiler is a misnomer and I’ve said in our committee meetings the day they make a boiler out of balloons the day that
I’m gonna resign because I just not so sure that uh aluminum is great metallurgy for actually boiling of water
so we use the term hot water heating boilers which is a difference so it’s
hot water under a slight amount of pressure but there’s no steam generation and these heat exchangers and the reason
that the industry has moved to aluminum is very simple it’s a it has very high heat transfer it’s very light and the
size of a hot-water heating boiler is miniscule it’s like having a cellphone
next to a giant switchboard compared to having the old-fashioned steel heat
exchanger so it’s a very compact unit it’s very a very intelligent technology
however trading that metallurgy water is very different it took a long time to
come to the great realization that you need to keep the water between 6.5 and 8.5 I think that those are the numbers
and the recommendations and to avoid at all cost of different types of alkaline cleaners that you’re so accustomed to
when you clean up a hot water system like either go high alkaline or low acid to clean up file systems with aluminum
you have to isolate that heat exchanger or only use cleaning solutions that work
between 6.5 and 8.5 pH that are not deleterious to the aluminum metallurgy
so if somebody just discovered that they magically inherited an aluminum boiler
what advice would you give them well you could go to the members-only website and look at the technical document which
refers you to the various manufacturers resources a quick and efficient summary
of what the playing surface is like with an aluminum heat exchanger and then you
can go to the resources of various companies and most of them are very helpful because they want material their technology to work and
work properly and so does the water treaty and the the customer that we’re all serving which is the owner of that
material because that they buy that excuse me the owner of that aluminum heat exchanger because they’ve walked
ahead and put it in service to conduct a certain unit operation and it’s our job to make sure that they’re working
properly and it’s in everyone’s best interest that these these systems work well the manufacturer included so
everyone should work together to make sure that that technology works and they’ve been very helpful to us along
the way meeting with them and talking with them so that it was a process which
was sort of for lack of a better term when the aluminum heat exchanger first
showed up it was an alien spaceship that had landed on our planet and everyone
looked at it like oh is what are these people going to do to us attack us like
the Romulans or the Klingons and Star Trek and the answer was no it’s just a
change and we have to adapt to that change and once you look at the engineering of the exchanger and why it
was done you understand fully the extent of the efficiency that’s involved and the ease of changing out stuff so
they’re they’re well-thought-out they’re just different so so so that’s good to know that that paper was not only
developed by the committee of AWT your committee but you had you had input from
the manufacturers as well yes could have used a little bit more but it we had an
input it was not done in a vacuum well John I know I know you are one of my
favorite stops at the AWT convention hall for those of you that have not
experienced John Sabritas IBEX lip-balm I tell you you have not lived it is the
best lip balm on the planet I don’t know if he makes it himself but I always have the standing orders from my wife to
pocket as many as I can and thank you for that John there are several new members out there new supplier members
and they might be considering should I go to the AWT conventions should I
get a booth to exhibit my wares what what advice do you have for those people
well you know the AWT convention is an excellent resource for business owners
to have their employees learn about AWT to go to the technical sessions it’s an
excellent resource for the supply chain and different ideas of what’s changing in the industry and I would say that
it’s an experience that is well deserving to folks that have attended it
and they’re very it’s very beneficial both technically and business-wise most important is that we address all aspects
of the of the industry and keynote speakers are quite impressive from year to year and they have very good lessons
to learn especially you know and you have war heroes or business heroes there
and they explain their own personal experiences on how they got ahead and I think last year we had a little bit of a
review of hell week for a Navy SEAL if I recall Craig that was correct yes pictures and circles and arrows and
diagrams and just what it takes to be a Navy SEAL and I I think anybody that has read about Navy SEAL training it’s a
it’s a week of little sleep and a lot of work and I would suggest that you get a
little bit of sleep before you go to the edit TV because you probably won’t get a lot while you’re there it’s a very busy busy hectic schedule and like Oliver
Wendell Holmes once said or the only justices in the halls of justice or in the halls many times in the hallways of
the AWT you learn a lot from your compatriots and fellow business owners and other technical folks as much as you
learn inside the technical sessions are that so it’s a very busy and brisk schedule to visit with as many people
and now that the attendee list is so large it’s hard to cover everyone and see all your old friends isn’t it Trace
you missile even this a few one or two every year don’t you feel it’s it’s definitely well attended and it’s hard
to get around to see everybody but I know we all try to do that John we’ve got a lot of new water traders that that
listen to this podcast and one of the questions that I want to ask that that might help them is what is one
the most common mistakes that when you’re working with other water treaters that you see that they may be able to
avoid well you know that’s a tough that’s a tough question to ask and you
know when I worked in a chemical plant one of my biggest concerns with the staff was we’ve done it this way for
twenty years we’ve tried it another way it’s not gonna work well you should stick that out of your head because she’d always try something new and I
think one of the mistakes we should be careful about is if we have someone that is a veteran tells us it should be done
this way because we might just go in the lab and make a mistake and it won’t blend up for example or we’ll implement
something in the field because someone said that this is the way it should be done and we should be cautious not to
just take things for face value because there’s more than one way to skin a cat
and there’s more than one way to solve a problem but they’re inherently is a wrong way to approach a problem and
sometimes technology that works at one of your compatriots accounts may not
work at your account because of water chemistry we’re circulation rate the nature of the metallurgy or the way that
people apply the technology I think it goes without saying that the operators must be on board to do what what you
have suggested for them to do for if they don’t blow down the boiler or put the chemical in or change out the the
product application vessels then it will end up being a failure so I think you
have to be a team with your customer to make everything happen correctly and John I know you’ve been supplying AWT
members for years have you seen a shift in certain chemistry’s to another
chemistry recently that that you can talk about it’s an interesting question I started selling molybdenum when I
first started and it was a very interesting time because we were just leaving the chromium days and although
molybdenum is not exactly like chromium it was a nice alternative and there were technologies and at the same time we
were leaving the chromium which was acid chrome treatments the blossoming
alkaline treatments were coming along so we’ve seen a great chain in the last 20 to 30 years because I
think now other than a pocketful of phosphorus applications at neutral pH
pretty much everything is treated in the Outland state and the only time type of acid control we’re using today is to
keep the alkalinity in check so that if we want to be at a medium alkalinity is at a high alkalinity that’s good so I
think the the changes that we see is more alkaline more cycles and more
restrictions on the type of chemistry’s that we use and what we can discharge John what is your funniest and or best
water treatment story that you had to share with us well you know I I really
have a fond remembrance of a certain incident that happened down in Texas
with a young gentleman named John Mackey he was for the first time putting the
lived in him molybdate sin to a refinery on a brand-new technology that was developed and I asked him if he could
wait for me and I could help him and he said okay what time can you be here and I said well I’ll be there at 6 o’clock
so he waited till 6 o’clock in the evening it was a Friday afternoon it was raining outside and I had my suit on and
when we wore ties back then and my my raincoat and we had several pallets of
sodium molybdate that we’re putting in as a pretreatment so and back then we could carry pocket knives on our
airplane travels and I was with him helping I’m hoping the the bags of sodium molybdate that were in the fiber
board drums and just dumping away I think there were six kegs to the pallet and I think we had a total of three
pallets and while we’re dumping away the unit superintendent looked at John Mackay and asked how much does it cost
to put this stuff in my system and John Mackay stood up and looked at that unit
superintendent and pointed at the the cracking unit where they cracked the gasoline and and he said how much does
it cost to shut that unit down for just one hour let alone a day that’s what you
need to worry about you don’t need to worry about this right here and that is a real great lesson in sales when you
think about it like don’t worry about this we’re taking care of your system when you’re will prevail in the end you worry about
how much it costs to run your system and because I think in the end the economics will speak for themselves that’s a
that’s a great story that’s a funny story in a great story at the same time so I like to ask people what was their
epic fail so what did you do and you were just so excited about it and you knew it was gonna work like clockwork
and you went out there and it just totally fell apart I know that happens on a daily basis I said you know I think
one of the bittersweet moments of my career was when I had developed a wastewater system in Florida for the
phosphate industry and it was the first to remove ammonia and the first to remove phosphate in Florida like less
than 1 parts per million it was a very effective way in and it had to be done
to comply with an administrative order from the EPA so there was a lot of a lot
of money riding on this project and the bittersweet moment was no sooner did we finish the project and I was just
wrapping it up and that they had to lay off the rest of them two crew members that were working on the project and I
got transferred to another plant so it was like but it was a good lesson you get your job done you move on you have
to go to the next project or the next plant or the next sale your last sale doesn’t make your next one so that was a
really good lifelong lesson from that episode but it was it was a long project and I’m not sure that we quite finished
it the way I would have finished it but then again you seldom do you just have to move on sometimes John it’s the
second time you’ve mentioned sales and that is a very popular topic that people
go to our site which is scaling up h2o comm and they ask us you know how do we
sell water treatment what are what are some tips so let me ask you you you have
any tips for our listeners on what they need to focus on when they’re trying to sell water treatment well you know sales
is solving your clients problems and so you look for that that concern that your
customer has and you resolve that concern that they give you other concerns to
resolve and I think in the end that we’re a technical engineering service
that is renew marry room enumerated our services and sales but in the end we are
solving problems for customers so we just have to find the problems and sometimes it’s best that that customer
has your business card so that when he has a problem he remembers to call you that he remembers oh I’m gonna call for
this and I have this problem that nice gentleman tres was just in my office what was his name Blackmore enterprises
and he finds your card oh that’s old-fashioned he finds your contact on your iPhone or on your computer
and and that is another issue in sales is how do we contact people these days because nobody wants to talk nor return
telephone calls or who wants to read an email so it’s it’s it’s a variety of
challenges on how we contact people and keep our names of the companies or products in front of them so you’re
right it’s a different sales is a different arena today yeah that might be an interesting topic for a future show
what mediums are we using for sales today because because you’re right it is
very different but yet we still have older people in the industry that that’s how they communicate so maybe we’ll
explore that so uh are you ready for the bonus question I guess you have to throw
it out it at some time yeah so so John if you could have a conversation with anyone in history who would that be
and why you know I I looked at your question across the table here reading
upside down mind you which is a very still a good skill set they have and I had to narrow it down to Thomas
Jefferson John Kennedy and Benjamin Franklin and and I’m thinking for purely
technical reasons that Benjamin Franklin would have been the most interesting people to step back in time because he
didn’t have the benefit of all the predecessors before him to innovate so
he had to come up with a lot of good ideas on his own and I think he was a very practical man and a pragmatic man
so I think it would be most interesting to talk with him well you know I I’d like thank all the people that work for zybax
and the folks that we represent and and because we’re a team and we all work
together so none of this would be capable without the folks that we represent and most importantly our
customers and their customers because we’re here to serve and we’re amongst those who serve and we feel that way
very strongly so I’d like to thank everyone out there that works with us and people who work with them thank you
so much well John it’s truly been a pleasure to speak with you and John is going to be at the AWT convention in
September that’s in Grand Rapids Michigan please if you have an opportunity stop
by and say hello John’s a great guy to chat with and I really appreciate you joining us this afternoon well thank you so much and I
appreciate the honor and the pleasure of being here thank you well how is that for a program I started off by fussing
at you and then Uncle John brought it back and let you know that everything’s okay he also talked about some free
tools that you could get from the Association of Water Technologies by the way I’m going to put those links up on my show notes talked about a couple of
committees that maybe you want to get involved with or at the very least get the fruits of their labor I tell you
that aluminum boiler paper is a really good one if you’re just getting started on aluminum boilers and you want to know
hey how can I treat these well so I really appreciate all your comments
please keep them coming without those comments I’m not gonna have a show for long I don’t know what you guys want me
to be talking about without them luckily I have been getting some but that doesn’t mean that I’ve gotten yours so
if you and you know who I’m talking to have not sent me that comment on what you want to hear about and what piece of
water treatment information are you not quite clear about and you want to have a conversation about it with somebody let
me know who that is I’ll get him on the show are all researching as best as I can and I’ll try to explain it over the air but I
want to say I appreciate you guys helping me out the show I appreciate you taking the time to subscribe and listen
to it and I want to thank you thank you for joining me on [Music]
you [Music]