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today’s episode is proudly sponsored by the rising tide Mastermind the rising tide Mastermind is one of my favorite
things that I look forward to each and every week because I get to see people
that have my best interest in mind I know this because I have their best
interest in mind and when you get people together in a room like that you can
just imagine how people want to help other people if this sounds like
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Mastermind welcome to the scaling up h2l Podcast the podcast where we scale up on knowledge so we don’t scale up our
systems I’m Trace Blackmore your host for this podcast and Nation one of the
things I ask all of my guests after we do our interview is what books that they
are reading and I don’t know if you are like me and you love to read because
people just give away all their knowledge in books and then we can take that knowledge and we can go out there
and do something with it so I’m always looking for the next book that I can go
out there and do something with and one of the books I want to bring to your attention is Daniel Pink’s drive it’s
been out for a couple of years and there’s so many books out there about
what motivates people and maybe back when some of those things were true but
people are motivated differently today and I really think that Daniel pink and
the book is called Drive the surprising truth about what motivates us really
lays out how people are motivated and the reason I’m sharing this with you is
I was just speaking with somebody that I coach that is in charge of a team and
they were trying to motivate in a way that I think was yester year and today
people are motivated differently so in the book pink argues that traditional
approaches to motivation which rely on rewards and punishment are not as
effective as they once were he introduces a concept of three Instinct
motivators and he calls those autonomy Mastery and purpose autonomy refers to
the desire to be self-directed and have control over your own work Mastery is
the drive to improve and Excel at tasks that really matter to you and purpose
involves a sense of working towards something larger than yourself now think
about that have you really looked at your systems to see if those are the
three items that you are truly motivating your team over so many
companies out there are still motivating on rewarding and punishing and that is a
disconnect for so many people Nation I always talk about audible but it’s also
on a book I enjoy audible because I get to listen as I’m driving from account to
account so Daniel peak’s Drive is on Audible it’s also a very easy to carry
paperback book but it is one that I recommend if you want to check it out
you can go to scaling up2.com Drive and we’ve got an affiliate link
all picked out for you to just make it super easy for you to go over to and get
your copy of drive now when I mention an affiliate link what that is that is a
link that we are sending you directly to Amazon directly to that book drive and
Amazon just to say thank you for sending you there will send us a slight
Commission Now that won’t cost you a dime extra but it is something that helps us pay some bills around here so
if you do decide to get the book drive by clicking that link or going to scaling up h2o.com
drive and just typ in that whole thing out by yourself I want to thank you for that and I also know you are going to
thank yourself for reading that book I think it’s one of the best books that we’ve read in a long time and when I
said we I’m talking about the rising tide Mastermind that’s a group I started about four years ago where we get
together we try to process issues our goal is to get each other further faster while having fun and we also read books
along the way that was one of the books that we read last year and we just had
so much great conversation around that book so do yourself a favor get a copy
of drive and when you see me let me know what you think about it scaling up
Nation a few events that you might want to put on your calendar is the 2024
water re Symposium taking place in Denver Colorado March 11th through 14th hosted
by water reuse so we’re going to have all the information on this Symposium
for you to find out if this is where you need to be and while you’re there you can check out this one the Pennsylvania
brownfields conference that’s taking place in State College Pennsylvania March 25th through 27th this one is all
about the Pennsylvania Brown Fields Program and how to address abandoned and
dilapidated building of course they’re going to talk about posos and all things related to that this is hosted by the
western Pennsylvania Engineers society and they’re the people that put on the
International Water conference I had the distinct privilege of being the keynote speaker at the International Water
conference put on by the engineer Society of Western Pennsylvania this
past year and if the brownsfield conference is anything close to the
International Water conference you are wanting to be there so be sure to check
that out on our events page last week I went into detail about the 2024
Association of water Technologies Technical Training conference and of
course there’s two different events that you can attend some people attend one
some people attend both because there’s so many choices that you can attend at
that conference why not sign up for both your first opportunity is going to be March 6th through 9th in Frisco Texas
and your second opportunity is going to be April 17th through 20th in Cleveland Ohio now if you want to learn more about
this conference listen to last week’s episode which is episode 350 where I go
into exactly what we’re talking about all the courses that are available and
my plea to get you to sign up because I want to see you there cuz I’m going to
be there Nation I love meeting members of the scaling up Nation so whenever you
are at an industrial Water conference look for me look for somebody that’s on
the scaling up H2O team and by all means if you have a scaling up H2O button be
sure to wear that because that lets everybody there know that you are part
of this scaling up nation and that allows you to network with people that
are also members of the scaling up Nation if you don’t have a button look
for either myself or somebody on the scaling up H2O team at one of those conferences and we will make sure to get
you one well Nation we always love to bring you great guests and of course
we’re finding those great guest because many of you are letting us know who we
need to reach out to and who we need to talk to and that’s what happened today so here is our latest
interview my Live partner today is Dr Kelly zire of Garett Callahan welcome
Kelly thank you trace it’s a pleasure to be here I’m very excited to talk with you today I am excited to talk with you
and we’ve got a lot of landscape to cover today before we dive into that do you mind telling the scaling up Nation a
bit about yourself absolutely so I’ve been in the water industry for about 30
years which is um interesting to look back and realize I have so much experience for being so young right but
I started right after my PhD in chemistry and the fun thing about being in the water industry is that prior to
joining it everything I did for graduate school was sensitive to both air and water and the first thing that happened
to me within two weeks of getting my first professional job is that I was introduced as a reverse osmosis expert
that to me meant that I should look wise keep silent and take notes and
eventually I did grow into that role but it was kind of fun to be thrown into the deep end and realized that you had to
learn to swim one of my favorite questions to ask my guests because there’s never the same answer how did
you get involved in water treatment so I was a graduate student at
the Ohio State University finishing up my PhD and interviewing with a number of people and some of the interviews had
actually taken place at an American Chemical Society meeting and it was
there that I first met representatives of a company that you might know called NCO and they introduced water chemistry
to me and they came through with one of my offers and it was a good location it
was a great company and although I had not studied that area of expertise
before back in that day getting the PHD me you know how to learn stuff and so I
said to myself I can learn this water and that’s where we started it has been
endlessly fascinating since then my prior experience made me think yeah water okay at hydrogen bonds and that’s
cool but other than that you know it’s kind of boring turns out it’s absolutely
not boring in so many ways and it’s led me to learn so many different things because as I’d like to get into later
everything that we wear or eat or touch or consume as consumers has a water
component to it and so being a water treatment expert means that when your customer runs into a problem you get to
learn their industry how water impacts their industry and then what you can do
to help make them more profitable so it’s been endlessly fascinating I have never been bored a
day in this industry and when I hear of people saying that I don’t know this is
for me or I am bored I don’t think they’re doing it right because if you are a lifetime learner there’s just so
much in this industry it is wonderful and I’ll tell you it’s great for cocktail parties because there’s always
a snippet of something that you’ve learned I’ve learned a little bit about how tires are made in molds how we
determine what’s safe to eat based on studies that were done with prison food food and uh how Pharmaceuticals come to
be coated in something that tastes not like whatever the pharmaceutical we’re taking taste like it’s it’s fascinating
and that’s just three examples of different things that we’ve learned well you bring up cocktail parties and that’s
something I think our industry has difficulty with because the question inevitably comes up what do you do how
do you answer that question well it’s been a while for me to learn how to answer that question but
one one of the things I do is that I help industries save money and keep their equipment in Better Health over
the Long Haul so that’s one of the things I do but the other thing is that I help keep all of the water in our
world safer and more readily available for people to use and enjoy So speaking
of the water we have available to us we have the same amount of water today that we’ve always had but you can’t turn on
the news without somebody in the world having a water shortage uh maybe there’s
an issue going on locally in the United States but we hear this all the time so
how do we put that together we’ve got more water than we do land on this planet but yet we don’t have enough
water that’s a great question trace and the the fact is if you want to put numbers to that three4 of the Earth is
covered with water 98% of that is saltwater or saline water which which is not useful for drinking it’s not useful
for industrial and so it’s not that we have a shortage of water because as you said we really do have the same water
we’ve had since the Earth First cooled but what’s happening is that we’re using it more and more frequently than we used
to in the past and part of that is population growth part of that are the changes that come with global climate
change because now if it’s warmer in the world more water and for those of of you
that know the hydrologic cycle basically nature distills water from these bodies
of water and sucks it up into the clouds where its pure water form brings it back
to us in the form of precipitation whether that’s rain or snow and the problem is that more water is getting
sucked up into the form that then needs to precipitate and so we get more storms
and floods and when you get storms and floods you get lots of water but it doesn’t all soak into the ground and so
through the ground down into uh the underground storage areas called aquafers and when that happens it just
runs back into the large bodies of water like the the lakes and the oceans and so
it’s there but it’s not useful and available to us we had a guest on not
too terribly long ago and she made us aware that basically we all think we can just go anywhere on the planet we can
drill a hole deep enough and we can find water but exactly as you said the water
is not getting back to those locations and eventually we’re going to have a major problem some of the problems that
happen when that happens in California is an example where you can see some of this the water in those underground
aquifers doesn’t replace and what happens is now the ground starts to shrink into those aquafers so the height
of our elevation if you will lowers because those aquafers no longer can support the ground above it and so
things shrink and Compact and now we have more oan water and how are we going to deal with that so it is truly an
issue worth understanding and it impacts Us in so many different ways that a
sound bite can encapsulate all of what we have to know about water to understand it we’re obviously using
water much more frequently and in different ways than we have in the past
you said we really can’t touch any product any service without uh water
touching it at first can you expand a little on that absolutely so I I’d like
to have a pop quiz for everyone out there who’s listening and you can be their proxy Trace but how much water do
you think it takes to produce a single gallon of gasoline fuel you know I’ve
got a slide that I’ll teach that has different things with water but I don’t have gasoline on I’m going to think it’s
probably about a th000 gallons of water you are unique in that you guess a lot
higher than most people people it’s a anywhere between 40 and 100 gallons of water per gallon of gasoline depending
on how you calculate it and that’s because water is used in drilling and bringing oil up from the areas where it
resides beneath the Earth which is a complete and different topic but no it’s not in a big underground Lake down there
it needs a little bit more work to bring it up and then it has to be refined into the gasoline fuel and then depends on do
you count the transportation to get it to the place where an individual would buy it so it’s interesting that we have
that and inevitably these days I get the question well what about if we go to an electric vehicle instead of a gasoline
powered vehicle and it turns out to get the electrical equivalent of a gallon of
gasoline you will end up spending between 650 and 2,000 gallons of water
to produce that electrical energy and that leads to something that I’d like to call the water footprint of an
individual user and so much as we have a carbon footprint we can think that we have a water footprint some of the
products that I would like to talk about and just raise some awareness so it takes about 75,000 gallons of water to
produce a ton of Steel if you’re going to make that into a car a car actually takes about 880,000 gallons of water to
produce that’s an average siiz vehicle and 2,000 of that is for the set of tires that you’re going to put on that
car tires are made in molds molds need to be cooled Etc and so forth and you
may be beginning to see the trend here of how we use water often in industrial
cooling of a process let’s go not from uh big things like that but to Everyday
consumer products it takes almost 3,200 gallons of water to produce a single
cell phone and we can’t get through our days without our communication devices it takes 53 gallons of water for
a gigabyte of data so people think that sites that store data and use data whether that is
something like Google or Facebook or eBay or Etsy or anything that has an online presence even our online banking
all of that data is stored in data halls in places and just like your home
computer produces a lot of heat and energy when it runs these data Halls produce enormous amounts of energy and
they need to be cooled down in order to keep your data safe and to keep keep everything from overheating and water is
one of the ways that things are cooled down through humidified air that’s why
all of these processes as much as they feel free to us as end users they’re actually costly and they use a lot of
water so we’re putting water back in different places than we pulled it from
we’re using water at a greater rate than we ever have before and all of us want
our goods and services so we still need to produce those what do we do so that’s
exactly the question we have to answer and here’s you hit the nail on the head exactly when you said we’re using more
so if you look at population curves we’re expected to reach about 10 billion
in population by the year 2050 and if you compare the rise in population to
the rise in energy and water usage you can see a huge gap so each person uses a
lot more water and energy than ever before and that’s because we all like
nice things we like cars we like cell phones we like data we like uh Cotton shirts and uh canned vegetables all of
those things take water to produce and so what that means for us is that while
Nature has a way of purifying the water that we use if it were left alone to do its thing it’s a slow process nature
filters water through rocks back down into those aquafers where we draw it up and then we use it again we have to
mimic what nature does but mimic it much faster if we want to purify that water
so that the billions of us can have all the nice things that we want to have in our lives and we can do that but we have
to be conscious of how we do it how we conserve and how we quickly clean up what we’ve used and reuse it well that’s
where we’re going next what are the Technologies available for us to use
today and where are they going to answer that one of the questions and this comes
down to almost another Pop Quiz so I’m going to set you up here and tell you that the United States water use and
we’ll just stick in the continental US it’s over 410 trillion gallons per day wow almost
50% of that water has a specific use the top three categories 50% goes to one use
31% goes to another high use and then 12% to the 3 and those three things that
I want you to think about is public Supply and domestic water irrigation and
Thermal electric cooling so of those three things which do you think most people would guess is the highest user
well I want to say cooling because that’s the industry that we’re in but I’m not sure what the right answer is
and you’re absolutely correct trace and and everybody in our industry has an edge over most people so almost half of
the us water usage and I would venture to say this is pretty true with all of
the industrialized World goes to cooling the next biggest slice that 31% slice
goes to Agriculture and depending on where your state is or what you’re looking at that slice is bigger or
smaller for you so in California actually the agriculture slice is closer to 80% for them than the cooling slice I
can’t remember the exact number but I was just flabbergasted when I learned how much
water an almond consumes I it was I can’t remember the number but it was huge there was some saying and I’m not
sure this is entirely true but it was like one gallon of water per one almond or something like that those those trees
soak up a lot of water and and one of the things and this is a little out of order of where you might be thinking
about it but one of the ways to do better use of our water is to look at what we’re growing and where we’re
growing it so if you Look at California and say that that’s a water stressed industry or water stressed State it’s
probably not the state where you want to grow water intensive crops like almonds and rice maybe you want to grow those
down in the southern us where we tend to have a lot more water and and a lot more floods and so planting more native crops
that are designed for your particular Region’s climate makes sense and so in
some ways that’s one thing that we can do to help with water now what we typically do and that brings me down to
that 12% 12% of our water is used for domestic Supply and so typically what
happens when there’s a drought some politician will get on the news and they’ll say local politician you shall
water your lawn only every third day or you know this side of the street Monday Tuesday that side of the street
Wednesday Thursday and nobody the rest of the week so they’re attacking a really small portion of the problem
because there’s great Optics there but whether you turn your water off when you brush your teeth or
not the way to change water and to change our usage of it and and to
promote better water use is to look at that cooling piece and also the agricultural piece because those are
where we’re going to get our biggest ways to becoming more sustainable and like I said before lucky for us because
that’s the industry that we are in so what are some things that you are working on to help this endeavor well
one of the things that I am working on is in conjunction with my people who
Focus specifically on cooling water and that is when you’re cooling an industrial process there’s a thing that
most of our listeners will know about called cycles of concentration and that’s how many times you use the water
over and over again before it becomes so Laden in minerals that you can’t
realistically use it over and then you have to pull some of that water off and replace it with fresh water well there
are some places where people are maybe using three cycles of concentration and we did a study for a client who shall
remain nameless but this client was doing about three cycles of concentration we found that if we could
take them up to six cycles of concentration that they would save about
one and a half million gallons of water per year and if I pull up some information here yeah they were using 12
million gallons per year for one specific cooling feature and on that
feature if we could drive the Cycles up they would save about 1 and a half million gallons the way to do that was
to add cleaner water at the beginning of the process so that there was less dissolved material and you could do the
cycling up more and that they would do through using a reverse osmosis type of
process and for those who are not familiar reverse osmosis basically takes water and splits it into a stream where
you’ve got 98% of the solids removed from one stream and all of those solids concentrated in an exit or concentrate
stream the challenge with doing that is that the reverse osmosis also has a waste stream that has to be accounted
for and so we did some studies with this client and we said oh you know you might be able to save two and a half million
gallons from this but you have to take the RO waste into consideration so you’re not really it’s down to one and a
half and that frightens people but I I am happy to say that I’ve been working
with Garett Callahan and intimately with a few other inventors there and we have invented a process and patented process
whereby we take the waste from the cooling water systems and the blowdown or the waste from those Tower systems
and we process them in a way that is quick and efficient and removes all of
the dissolved or um slurry minerals that are in the system brings that out to a
waste material that can be up to 90 or more per dry and then reprocesses the
water so that it is clean almost arop permeate Quality Water for the customers
to start using again so when you couple those two species together what you have
is a way of getting to a minimal liquid discharge situation now within the
industry there’s been this Holy Grail called zero liquid discharge and z Z is a hard number to
reach zero is even a hard number to get close to and if you’re trying to get
close to zero it’s going to cost you lots and lots of money so the idea behind our invention was we wanted a
less expensive way to get close to zero and help smaller customers that didn’t
have Deep Pockets that could spend hundreds of millions of dollars on equipment to be able to recycle and
reuse their water I’m sure everybody listening has a story where a client was
trying to get to Z and that’s probably followed by some sort of disaster story
I’ll share one with you it’s probably similar to what a lot of people have had customer just decided we’re not going to
bleed anymore well guess what happened to their system exactly what everybody’s thinking that is what happened and we
don’t want that to happen you said we’ve got to start with cleaner water so what’s a good way to have a conversation
with a customer they’re trying to be environmentally conscious they don’t understand all the things that we know
maybe sometimes they even think they know more than we know how do we have a conversation so everybody is involved in
that decision that’s a really great topic to discuss and I think it has to
start with us looking at our customers and knowing that they’re very knowledgeable in their specific area of
application and if you want someone to respect your knowledge you have to start by respecting their knowledge so that’s
the first thing that we have to do and then it really makes sense to go into the conversation and say what issues or
problems are you having that you observe with your system what’s your pain Point
what is causing you sleepless nights and so once we start there then we can start
talking about what the problems are and begin to say you know what if I could give you something that would take away
50 % of those problems would you be interested in learning more and realistically many of our Solutions can
take away more than that but if we start by listening and respecting their problems then we can start by saying
here are some experiences that we’ve had where we’ve been able to do this for another customer so with the customer I
was telling you about a few minutes ago we presented three scenarios and we said one way that you can be more efficient
with your water usage they’re in a water stressed area so water usage fluctuates
wildly over the course of the year and it depends on rainfall and snow melt and conditions like that so we started out
by saying if you blend your cooling water and drive your Cycles up you could save one and a half million gallons of
water if you couple that with this recovery process that we are calling
Aros which is aquous recovery optimization system or aquous reuse optimization system
then we could save you three and A5 million gallons per year on this
site now if you wanted to go all the way to a zero liquid discharge process and
weren’t content to discharge a little water then you could save almost 4 million gallons per year but the costs
are wildly different so the Capital Equipment cost to save three and a half million year for this particular user it
was under 500,000 if they wanted to go all the way to a zero liquid discharge it was over 7
million in capital costs alone that is quite the Delta yes and once you
position it that way and you say here are the options everybody that was listening to this said it’s very clear
which direction we want to go now and it’s only because I want to be fair and show you yes I’m going to cost you money
all solutions cost people money but are you spending the money wisely and what are you getting for it that’s a great
way to have that conversation and I see t-shirts in our future it’s not about
getting to zero I think we talk about that with Legionella of course we want zero Legionnaires disease but we can’t
have zero Legionella bacteria in a system and probably not reasonable to
aim for zero discharge I like the T-shirt idea I think that’s great we can’t get to zero
but we can get close and when you know the price tag you’re going to want to get close instead of getting to zero
exactly and and getting to zero costs and when we start talking about these things everything is as I said earlier
it’s very complicated so go back to my car example and the water footprint for
a gallon of gasoline versus the water footprint for an electric car most of the people listening to this broadcast
know that electric cars don’t mean we’re going away from fossil fuels most of our consumers that we talk to at the
cocktail parties may or may not know that what it means is that the fossil fuel is burned in a centralized location
at the power plant to make electricity and here we can take advantage of
equipment and processes that help limit dangerous emissions and help maximize
the thermal energy that we get out of using our fossil fuels now I’m a big proponent in pushing people to use the
most sustainable fuel they can because fossil fuels and fossil fuels only or
fossil products only can be used for certain activities and I’d like to let
them be in the back pocket for all the things that only they can do and take the rest of the burden off of them but
the point is that it’s a large system and there are costs and benefits everywhere the old question used to be a
long ago people would say cloth diapers or disposable diapers and the answer to
that question is do you have more land for disposing Solid Waste or do you have more water for washing because that is
really the individual calculation that a region should be doing we talked about
t-shirts earlier I just feel that it’s appropriate that I share this with you I have a Tesla t-shirt that says because
there’s only so much decomposed dinosaur to go around I love that one I love it so what
do you want every water treater to know from this interview and what do you want
them to start doing all of you out there that are water treaters need to
understand how very valuable you are to the industry and the world we like to
live in our own little bubble and think that we’re somehow special in that way but not widely applicable to an everyday
person and that’s not true the specialized knowledge that we have is important to making our world a better
happier place to live and I think that we tend to undervalue ourselves and that’s a human condition always
undervalue themselves so water treaters out there realize that you’re not only extending the life of your customers’s
equipment you’re not only making them be able to produce more goods and services in a more profitable manner but that you
are doing things that make our planet more sustainable and you’re doing things
that allow more people to have good healthy lives because of the work you do
with managing our Water Resources so understand how very important you are if
somebody is not able to deploy the technology that you’re talking about what are some quick winds that water
treaters can do to help with that cooling usage on our water
consumption so as a water treater we also have to make sure we’re doing everything to keep that process the
cooling process healthy and so all of us are going to throw some sort of chemical components into a system and the World
At Large likes to B mouth anything that contains chemicals if you will and they don’t understand that oxygen and and
water and all of that are actually chemicals to those of us that understand them but I know that you’re going to
have to have some sort of a treatment some sort of a treatment that keeps your your piping and your heat transfer
surfaces clean of debris and that means clean of scale clean of fance clean of
anything else that’s going to cause problem make sure also that corrosion is
controlled effectively in all of your Towers so that you’re not rusting through your pipes and contributing to
the dissolved material load with iron oxides or other metal rusting materials
if you will so all of those things need to happen and when you optimize that and
the energy usage you’re already helping your customer do the best that he can
and from there Institute whatever kinds of pre-treatments to the water that goes to that tower that you need we have a
say at least among the people that have listened to me or trained with me about reverse osmosis and other things but the
saying is that pre-treatment is the key to everything and so we have to
understand that the minute the water comes out of the ground there are Technologies to help us remove Bad
actors not that they’re bad per se in and of themselves but that they can
become bad for equipment if they’re allowed to have free reain in situations where they’re concentrated or something
like that so we have to start at that minute to begin to treat and clean the
water and then when it leaves the cooling system clean it up as best you can so that you can return it to that
system Kelly is there anything that you want to leave that resonates with our
audience well for those of you that like to have a cup of coffee in the morning or go out and have a drink after work
know that if we don’t have good clean water we also don’t have cocktail hour or anything to make that coffee with so
let’s keep reusing that water keep it clean got to have that coffee got to have it Kelly I’ve got a few lightning
round questions for you are you ready oh dear these are the scary ones sure go
for it nothing scary about them you’re going to do fine now the double point value will get you ahead in the game so
choose your answer wisely I have no idea what I’m saying all right here we go if you could go back in time and talk to
your former self on your first day when you were introduced as a reverse OS
mosis specialist what advice would you give yourself the thing that I would tell my
former self is it’s okay not to know everything get comfortable with feeling
stupid because you’re not going to know everything learn to find good resources and the minute you get comfortable with
that your career and your life is just going to accelerate in ways you couldn’t even
imagine that is great advice what are the last few books that you’ve read so
I’m in the process actually of rereading some books one is the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell which is a really
fascinating essay series on how certain things take off and become popular the
other is the poisoners handbook and while it sounds like it’s about poison
it’s it’s by an author by the name of uh Deborah Bloom and it’s a fascinating
look into the 1920s and 1930s New York era forens forensics where the whole
science of modern forensics began to be developed by these two pioneering gentlemen who were the coroner and his
chemist respectively it’s it’s chalk full of fascinating stories and as an
aside I I write Murder Mysteries and I often use poisons and so I love collecting stories about poisons hence
me going back to review that every periodically once in a while all right we have to unpack that tell us about
some of the books that you have written and how we can read them so um I write
under my married name or my husband’s name so I write as Kelly Z Riley and the series is called the undercover cat
Series where I imagined a water treatment chemist much like myself who
walked into work and found her boss dead and determined that smart people ought to be able to figure out who killed the
boss and so as she does this she uses her scientific knowledge to help figure
that out and from then on I just just took off on the fun side and I made one of her colleagues uh a spy and I won’t
tell you if any of my colleagues are or not because that’s part of the code and
we go on missions where she uses her science knowledge to help solve crimes
and it’s I have enormous amounts of fun writing this are these available for other people to read they are available
the best place to get started would be my website which is Kelly k l l e z r i
l e y.net and they’re at all major book sellers and you can order them and yes
I’d love to have a few more readers Jump On In well you better believe we’re going to put that on our show notes page
so get ready for those sales to start flooding in I’m perfectly happy to do
that and if your group wants me to talk about uh literary poisons I can do that as well but I we might have to have you
back you never know when you’ve got somebody you need some poison for I it’s it’s it’s very cathartic to be able to
will look at somebody that annoys you one day and say you’re dying in a book there it is I’m curious what are
some of your favorite water chemistry reference books so I like anything by Wes burn is
is excellent we’ve had him on the show and the NCO water treatment handbooks
are also excellent resources that’s from back in the day when they were topof the
line and really pushing the envelope so those are are some of my favorites my
friend Mr Google helps me with a lot of things these days but you have to carefully vet what he comes back with
because like all AI he’s not necessarily self-editing we all know what you’re
talking about so when Hollywood hears this podcast and they start writing the script about your life who do you want
playing Dr Kelly you know I gave this question a little bit of thought and I have to say that Julia Roberts did an
awesome Aaron Brockovich so she probably could Channel me as well I know I’ve
told that story on the podcast but I don’t know if I’ve told you my wife took me to see Aaron Brockovich I did not
want to see it it did not seem exciting to me it was like my favorite movie of all time it was about cooling towers but
see our stuff is really cool and we undersell ourselves we forget how
awesome and cool we can be and you know when you’re played by a Hollywood Blockbuster that helps
I have trouble with a lot of things and that was not one of them but but a lot of scientific purported entertainment I
have trouble with if it hits too close to home so I’m a fan of The Big Bang Theory I think that they got the science
Geeks exactly right in many cases but when it comes to the reverse osmosis episode there are so many holes I could
poke in it I just can’t watch that one without cringing understood my final
question for you if you can talk with anybody throughout history who would it be with and why why you know I think I
would go back to those people that were in the laboratory that were working behind the scenes and just say that
someday your work is going to turn into something that really seriously impacts
the world I mean we know about pasture and liser and and a number of other
people but we don’t know about all the chemists and and scientists on Whose
backs they built their knowledge so I would like to find those people and let
them know that you are important and what you are doing is so worthwhile because we don’t get enough praise in
our life and they need a little bit of love from us Kelly for those listeners
that want to find out more about the technology that you are creating are they able to license that from you is it
just a Garett Callahan product how is that at the moment the technology that
we’re creating is patented to Garrett Callahan and so right now we are are
rolling it out as our product and we have some equipment partners that work with us but I encourage anyone that
wants to think about licensing this technology or otherwise getting involved
to reach out to me because we’re very open to looking at models that make the world better for all of us and at the
same time protect of course our intellectual property in ways that help make it also
accessible if it’s all right I’ll put your contact information on our show notes page that would be fine I would
like to give you a couple of things first the website to go to would be Garrett callahan. comom which I think
you already have we have a dedicated email and that is
Rino gc.com which would be good and then if you want to put my personal it would
be kire gc.com well Kelly thank you so much for coming on the scaling up H2O
podcast it’s been a wonderful experience thank you for having me I’ve truly enjoyed [Music]
this nation the job of the scaling up h2l Podcast is to make sure we are
always learning as we are driving from account to account of course we try to
do that each and every episode and how we do that is from Members like you and
letting us know what we need to talk about who we need to talk to so if you’ve got an idea you can go to scaling
up h2o.com go over to our show ideas page and that of course is how we are
keeping more and more shows in this scaling up H2O Library Nation a show
that I want to mention a couple shows back was episode 307 that was with our friend Mike solar
he’s a member of the International Water conference I mentioned that at the top of the show and Mike is a member of the
executive committee but what Mike did on episode 307 was he told us how we should
look at crafting and presenting a technical paper here’s a challenge I
have for all of you we always talk about all of these conferences at the beginning of the show and we want you to
attend but have you ever considered actually participating in some of these
conferences I know we have so much knowledge out there within the scaling
up nation and I want to encourage everybody out there in the scaling up
Nation to consider presenting a paper at a conference now typically about six or
so months before the conference whoever’s hosting the conference sends out requests for abstracts and Abstract
is not the complete paper the abstract is what you are going to talk about and
then typically you’re going to agree to some sort of due date there’s normally some sort of committee that looks at all
the abstracts and they say with the show that we’re trying to put on these are the papers or these are the abstracts
that we think are going to make a good show and then you become selected once you’re selected you are now committed to
that program because they are counting on you to present the technical paper
that you said you would on your abstract I know that there is a
technical present and everybody that is listening to this podcast so I’m going
to urge you to go to episode 307 to learn how to put something like that
together how to put your technical presentation together and when you get
to deliver information that you know or that you’re testing you’re going to know
that information so much better and if you haven’t presented a lot or you
haven’t presented in a while getting in front of a bunch of people as you
present really hones your skills when you communicate to people each and every
day so I hope that motivates you to go out and at least look at trying to present a paper at one of these
conferences that we talk about on all of these episodes I am sure there’s one out
there that exactly meets something that you can talk about and if you’ll want to
go look go to scaling up h2o.com go over to our events page and see which one of
those conferences matches up best with the type of water treatment that you practice and hopefully I will see you
present at one of those conferences you know one of the guys that I’ve seen present at several conferences many
times is James McDonald and here is a brand new drop by drop with
[Music] James welcome to drop by drop with James
the podcast segment where we wonder explore think about imagine and learn in
duster water treatment you guessed it drop by drop
together it’s in the middle of winter it’s
cold you had a long day as an industrial water treatment professional battling scale corrosion unwanted microbiological
activity and inefficiencies you’re tired you just want to go home kick your
feet up relax and get warm you forget to take your test kit out of the
[Music]
car you wake up in the morning drive to your next indust water treatment system
open up your test kit and it is frozen
[Music] solid what do you do do you run around
in circles do you set the test kit as
closely to a boiler as you dare to thaw it out do you dunk it in hot water the
first thing you should do is learn your lesson and never let your test kit freeze again ever Cross My Heart Hope To
Fly stick a cupcake in my eye I’ll admit I learned my lesson the hard way next I
consulted with a trusty test kit manufacturing expert and his suggestion is to allow to thaw at room temperature
he said do not artificially heat it up even in hot water most Regents are
likely to recover to be safe you should compare your test results to new Regents
or another reps results personally I found my iodide iodate titration
solution used in the sulfite test was never the same after it froze and gave me low readings you can also just replace all
your Regents but I understand this could get expensive another thing to consider when
a testkit freezes is the impact upon testing equipment such as the pH probe
which may have cracked or broken as its internal solution froze and expanded plus plunging a cold pH probe into a
warm solution may induce cracking as
well I’m James McDonald and I want to encourage you to be like water by forming bonds with those around you
dissolving new knowledge and making worthy ripples drop by
drop Thanks James and again if you ever need to catch up on drop by drop with
James we’ve got all of those on our website so don’t worry we can catch you up and if you haven’t listened to every
single episode don’t worry about that either cuz we’ve got them all on your favorite podcast player we can catch you
up on that as well and in addition to that we’ll have a brand new episode for
you next week until then take care folks [Music]
folks