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[Music]
today’s episode is proudly sponsored by the rising tide Mastermind each and every year the rising tide Mastermind
gets together in Atlanta for a live event this is one of the most
anticipated events within the rising tide Mastermind normally we have a zoom
call each and every week but this is where we all come together and we become
better friends we learn more about each other and we help each other with their
issues it is my favorite thing and I’m sure it is going to be your favorite thing to look forward to if you were a
member of the rising tide Mastermind that could be a possibility to find out
if the rising tide Mastermind is right for you and you are right for the rising tide Mastermind go to scaling up h2o.com
slm Mastermind and you can schedule a 15-minute call with me to find out
more welcome to the scaled up H2O podcast my name is Trace Blackmore the
host of the scaling up H2O podcast of course that’s the podcast where we scale up on knowledge so we don’t scale up our
systems Nation you probably heard this story before when I first started this
podcast I had 10 ideas before I did my
first recording and at the time I was out of ideas well luckily I came up with
some more ideas and now with well over 350 episodes I still come up with ideas
our team comes up with ideas but thank goodness the scaling up Nation comes up
with ideas Nation we need your help we want to know what you want to hear on
this podcast what are you seeing in the field what questions do you have what do you want to dive deeper into but don’t
stop there who do you want us to interview is there somebody that you
know that is an expert in the water treatment industry and you want to share
them and their knowledge with the scaling up Nation if you do and I know
I’m talking to you I know you have these ideas inside your head please go to scaling
up2.com show idea and you can fill out the form
there and you can get that out of your head to our team so we can start working
on that together we’re going to make sure we have thousands of show ideas so
we can continue for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of more episodes
so thank you scaling up Nation not only for listen listening to this podcast but
for making sure that we always have something to talk about on scaling up
H2O speaking of talking about things one of my favorite things to talk about is
the Hang now you might not know the story about the hang the Hang was our
solution to not being able to go to the association of water Technologies
Conference during the co error I don’t know if that’s how you say that but that’s how I’ve said it when Co was
going on and we could not get together and we couldn’t have a convention in person there was a virtual convention
and all the different companies that did virtual conventions they did the best that they could but let’s face it there
was just that aspect of seeing your friends talking about what was going on
and just feeling that connection with your peers so we thought to ourselves as
the team here at the scaling up H2O podcast and we thought why don’t we do a
zoom call at the end of each and every night for the awt convention and just
decompress what was going on that day what do you think of certain speakers and we put that out there and we had
hundreds of people join us each and every evening for each one of those
nights it was very very cool so the Hang was formed over that and then we enjoyed
it so much we were like hey let’s do this again and we started doing that in
conjunction with awt and then awt decided to go a different direction so we’ve kept up the Hang each and every
quarter and the Hang has become just a really easy way for you to meet people
in the industrial water treatment industry let’s face it when we talk to people about what we do on a day-to-day
basis people don’t get it they don’t understand the context don’t understand the equipment that we work on but when
we talk to our peers about things that are going on we don’t have to explain
all that background they just get it so with that that’s why we continue the
hang and the format for the Hang is very easy so on July 11th which is our next
hang starting exactly at 6 pm. eastern time going until 700 p.m. eastern time
we will all join together on the hang and I’ll have a few announcements of
what’s going on in the industry for you and then we will quickly get you into
breakout rooms now we specifically break you out into smaller groups so you have
FaceTime with other people in this industry people introduce themselves
talk about what’s going on and maybe they say I have a lot of information or I’m an expert in this field if anybody
has any issues within that field maybe I can help you out or maybe somebody says I’m having a problem with this piece of
equipment and maybe somebody there knows what the solution is one of my favorite
stories is about a water softener and this one gentleman tried everything and
they could not figure it out they had the manufacturer on a Google Hangouts call
and the manufacturer could not figure it out of course the customer was getting frustrated they were getting frustrated
and on the Hang they’re like I’m sure nobody can help me with this because we’ve been dealing with this forever and I’m sorry I don’t remember the specific
problem but another gentleman said I think I know what’s going on there I’ve
seen something like that how about you and I connect off the hang and they did
that and they had to troubleshoot a couple of things it turned out to be some part I think and that softener is
working and the customer’s happy of course the the members happy that came to the hang and uh the person that was
the softener expert he of course is happy because he was able to help somebody so stuff like that’s happening
all the time at the Hang well I don’t just put you in one breakout room I put you in two breakout rooms so we divide
that time up and then I bring everybody out and we do some sort of fun activity
just to kind of uh cap the night with a lot of fun and then you are out of there by 700
p.m. eastern time so Nation all you got to do to have all of that fun to meet
all of those people is to go to scaling up h2o.com hang hng you can register for that and
trust me you will be glad that you did speaking of networking I cannot tell you
how vital it is to know people within your industry a friend of mine told me
that you’re never more than two people away from meeting the person you want to
meet now I’m going to give you an example of this this just happened the rising tide Mastermind which is the
Mastermind that I lead for the industrial Water Treatment Community we
read books on a regular basis and one of the books that we are reading I’m trying
to get the author to come and talk to to us and that’s one of the cool things we do we read a book and a lot of times the
authors will come and they’ll share why they put certain information in the book or issues that they were having maybe
there were things that the Publishers made them take out because the book was too long because Publishers always want
to shorten the word count of books because I think that sells more books
and they might say yeah I really wanted to put this in here uh this is what it is and I’ll share my notes with you we
get that all the time so that’s what I wanted to do for this particular book but I was not getting any traction going
through normal channels getting this speaker or getting this author to come speak with us I went on their web page
their company web page sent some emails I heard nothing so what I did I reached
out to people in Mastermind and asked them who they knew and actually there
was somebody that knew this author and they made an introduction so Nation I
cannot underscore enough how important it is to get out there and meet people I
know some people take to that a lot easier than others so if that scares you
a little bit I’ve got some podcast search how to get over social anxiety at
networking events I think I think we’ve got a podcast on that in fact I know we do and we’ll put that in the show notes
page I just don’t have it on me right now so I think that’s proof that you’re never more than two people away from
meeting the person that you want to meet you just have to make sure you are doing
your part to be in those circles Nation we always like to keep
you apprised of what’s going on in the industrial Water Treatment Community so you can become better industrial water
treaters so I want to tell you about the Bulma 2024 International Conference and
Expo taking place July 13th through 16th in Philadelphia Pennsylvania I am such a fan of Bulma
building owners and managers Association I had the privilege of serving on the
local board here in Atlanta Georgia and just so many great relationships that I
was able to develop there and of course share all the wonderful things that building owners and managers need to
know about industrial water treatment well this is not just a local conference
this is all the local chapters and this is their main head chapter that they all go to and you can go too this is the
International Conference so what all the information that you’ll need on our events page and then the other one is
the International Water Association World Congress and exhibition taking place in Toronto Canada August 11th
through 15th and this is where they’re bringing key stakeholders and contacts
within the entire water sector together and they’re focusing on Urban water
Urban water services and all things around drinking water so if this is
something that interests you we’ll of course have all of that information for
you on our events page you can get to our events Page by going to scaling up h2o.com navigating over to our events
page and you will not only see these two conferences you will see everything that
we know that is going on within the water treatment industry now I started
this show with an ask if you had an idea to please let us know that if you have a guess please let us know that if you
have an industrial water treatment activity a show a training whatever it is let us know that too because we
really want to make this calendar the one place that every industrial water treater goes to just to see what’s going
on so if you know something that we don’t know let us know that too and we will make sure to get that information
up there Nation I have known our next guest for years and I’m really excited
to get to our interview my lab partner today is Blaine Nal
senior director of smart relase technology at Dober welcome Blaine
thanks for having me Blaine you and I go way back I’m trying to think that the first awt that you and I met my memory
doesn’t doesn’t serve me well when was that when was your first one uh my first training I want to say was like
97 somewhere in there I think I calculated and there’s going to be bunch of people on here that’ll back calculate
it and figure out that I’m wrong but I think this was like 29th awt that I just went to man something like that um 20
more than 25 less than 35 how’s that the very first one I went to and I could be
wrong with 97 it was uh and I said training I meant convention it was when it was in DC do you remember that yes
that was after my first I think my first was the broad more maybe I’m really looking forward to next year I I love
that Lexington’s a great town yeah so uh a couple people are going to be doing a bourbon tour so uh look out for that but
uh I got to get you introduced on this podcast of course it’s not the first time you’ve been on you were on episode
106 so welcome back for those who have not listened to 106 in a while I think
we’re episode 300 something now do you mind telling the scaling up Nation a bit
about yourself yeah my name is blaina gal I have been in this wonderful
industry for close to 30 years I um started um with a small Regional company
that became sort of a midsize a large Regional company with zero experience in this business one of the best moments of
my life was the day I met Steve dumler he recognized something in me that maybe I didn’t recognize myself and encouraged
me to come join him it took many years for him to do that he and I were friends for several years before I joined so did
that that evolved into a fairly good-sized Regional company when through you know the growing pains and all those
things and um distributorships with people like GE and Equipment things and
there came a time where our equipment offering became a bigger part of our business than I think we ever
anticipated so we started a company called H2 Tronics and I’ll back up that a lot of the the driving force for that
was the E service support program so um I was involved Steve and I and at that
point his son Adam was was really young and coming up with something for ourselves that rapidly got real
expensive and we looked for ways to pay for it and you know we commercialized it so between that and our equipment
offering we started huttronics I ran huttronics for many years with the help
of a lot of really talented individuals I can’t name them all but I can tell you right now that that that’s a that’s a
Brain Trust for sure and um I guess fiveish years ago Frank lacron
approached me at a moment of weakness and suggested that we uh joined forces
had been hinted at before and it was a great time in our Evolution we we grown to the point where we really could use
the partner and you know again one of the best days of my life second to Steve
was meeting Frank that was a super super good thing for me so joined them we got
that up and going did some Acquisitions had a lot of fun I got to participate in the aqua Phoenix business for for as
much as I I’d like to which was fantastic it’s a really neat company that does a lot of things and um about
three years ago I decided that it was time for me to Exit the Working World and Take On The World of scuba diving
full-time I’m jealous Yeah well yeah I think I did I did 400 Dives I think in
14 months or something like that it was fun and started my Consulting business and started doing consulting and one of
my Consulting customers was Dober for the smart release through some arm
twisting and all that kind of stuff the doz family asked me to join them and I’ve done so and it’s it’s um it was a
great decision so my career has covered the formulation side of it the service side of it the equipment side of it the
software side of it and now and some distribution and now um this side of it so Steve was instrumental in that I’m
mentioned his name a bunch of times during this discussion because he he’s I I I know things sometimes I ask myself
how in the world do I know that and I realized pretty quickly that Steve encouraged all of us to do everything it
wasn’t like you know will this go together it was like here’s all here’s some Little Dixie Cuts here’s a gram
scale to Bunch raw materials will it go together definitely did some blending experiments that way as well you know I
talk all the time on this show about having a mentor and and being a mentor
to other people and just your introduction you know what an important role Steve played in your life and I’m
curious have you paid that back have you mentored somebody I try every day um I try every day and that would be a
question for people that have worked with me in the past I will say that if if I didn’t succeed doing it wasn’t for
a lack of trying again here’s Steve’s name for about the fourth time the first two minutes he taught me that you have
to explain to people why you’re doing things people will always do something for you just because you told them to
but that’s not what you’re looking for so I’ve made an effort to do that
sometimes I may overe explain things and sometimes I might give things explanations that people may not want to hear or care about but they’re going to
get it from me and if they want to you know better themselves and pack it back and use it sometime I promise you that
one of these days they’ll come up with something they’ll think how did I know that and I love them to think well you know what blae taught me that Blaine
when you were with H2 Tronics I came down to visit you guys uh you guys were in the Grapevine area Grapevine Texas
and you took me to which is still one of my favorite restaurants whenever I’m
down there I always go I’m talking about hard Hard Eight Hard Eight barbecue yes
sir oh my gosh so you walk in and they’ve got everything grilling in front
of you and they say Hey you want one of these you want one of those and by the time you walk out they weigh everything
and you’re like how do I have $140 on my trade talk about e service I took a guy from Russia there one time that was
interviewing for a job and I took him there for lunch and he had a $90 plate of meat he ate every every Li of it but
he had a 90 plate of meat so that’s still there that’s fun thing about that place it started off in a little town
called Stevenville as a hole in the wall sort of barbecue place that didn’t have her liquor license one of the great things about it was you could walk in
there and they gave you a cup if you’re of age and you could go to the corner and serve your on bravic keg for free so
that was really neat and they’ve grown there’s a bunch of them but yeah I I’ve never had a bad experience there and
I’ve never had anybody come back and say you know that just wasn’t as good as you said it was are they just in Texas uh
I’m sure yeah I they’ve they’ve opened up four or five locations but I can’t imagine that it’s scalable that way that
just the typee of people you need the meat and the wood and stuff is pretty unique to Texas that is that is true Texas barbecue and Georgia barbecue is
pork and Texas barbecue of course is beef risk it yeah yep and I love you
talk about food all day with me because I’m you know but I love Regional takes on anything I love it so Blain when you
were visiting with us at 106 you were talking about all things equipment today
we’re going to change the conversation a little bit around solid technology and
this is not new technology this has been around for a while I I’d be surprised if our listeners have not had some sort of
an experience with solid technology and if I could go back to when that first
came out however many many years ago that was one of the issues was how it
dissolved and how concentrate the the mix was as it disolved and then over
time that wasn’t an issue anymore it was an issue because the water pressure might have been higher one location than
another or it might have been a hotter water or colder water so I’m I’m curious because that has been fixed how were
those things fixed they were fixed I I guess going back to the those days there
was no way for IP reasons or just technology reasons to know what you had in the system it doesn’t matter how
concentrated that liquid is your pump can run longer or shorter but you need to be able to you know quantify what’s
in your system so I guess the arrival on the scene of PTSA everybody’s favorite four-letter acronym is the driving force
for that it made it so that the amount of product in your system was independent of the concentration you you
were making when you’re diluting it well another question most people know how
liquid products are made maybe it starts out with a bench test with some Dixie cups and a gram scale and then that goes
into a larger mix system and then that gets transferred over to totes drums
pales what whatever with solid technology we need the same chemistries
but now it’s in pelet form how does that happen yeah so the Dober smart release
technology is imp pellet form it happens with the same way you do it with the liquids you know Gram scills no Dixie
cups or sometimes Dixie Cups Scoops instead of pipets and the same amount of finger Crossing and Wishful Thinking the
nice thing about solid products I can speak about the way we do those at smart release is that one of the things that
everybody here that that formulates your products have been involved that understands that one of the challenges when you’re formulating liquids is
putting things in solution keeping them Solutions incompatible liquids um solubility limits pH
constraints yada yada yada well with us we start with the same raw materials in
dry form and we don’t necessarily need to dry many things many things you have that we use are started start as dry and
then are put in solution for to make liquid so we don’t have the obstacles that that are involved with liquid
formulation like pH adjustment so like for example our cooling water Inhibitors don’t have any alkaline adjustment pH
adjustment so therefore they’re not corrosive they’re not labeled corrosive that means that they can ship just FedEx
UPS like a box of golf balls yep so one that brings up sort of a and I it was a
pet peeve I never knew I had but I have it now and TR knows me well enough know that I might use a few Politically
Incorrect examples here but to me I I hear that’s really good for solid well that’d be like saying your smart for a
girl it’s solid chemistry is the same chemistry solid chemistry is good chemistry period it’s not good for solid
it’s not we’re starting with the same polymers the same phosphates the same tur polymers the same azol all that kind
of stuff we’re just putting them together in a different way so when I hear that’s that’s really good for solid
chemistry it it drives me nuts because you know it’s good for chemistry um the
polymer in the phosphinates and the azol they don’t know how they got the system they just know they’re in the system so
the one thing for us though uh specifically is our products are are are
basically free of any sort of um binders or anything like that there there’s some things in there very little like single-
digit percent less maybe a couple percent of things that help flow powder flow but in general ours are you know 99
is% active as raw so we have to make sure that we put it together and it
taizz is that it stays together getting things to mix together as a powder or or
or or in solid form granules isn’t that difficult but imagine taking a handful
of dry sand and saying I’m GNA make a tablet out of this so there’s some magic to getting those things to come together
and you know we do friability testing to make sure that they they have the kind of you know my manufacturing gu probably
slap me in the head but I don’t know tinsil strength or strength to hold together because we do press these things in pharmaceutical type presses
and then we actually coat them in coating machines that are no different than you’d coat a medicine with or or an
Eminem with so they have to not only stay together before they’re coated but they have to go into these Industrial
Coating tumblers and stay together when we apply the the the membrane on the outside the polymer coating on the outside so we have a different set of
challenges some really really brilliant people here that seem to overcome those things for us I don’t have to do that
anymore the coating that you mentioned that actually controls how much water is absorbed into the
product can you talk about that yeah sure so it’s actually acts as a membrane and when I say membrane I I mean a true
osmotic membrane tra so I’m gonna go back just a little bit so one of the things that that dover’s done and still
does and it’s quite a large part of our business we do a lot of work in pharmaceutical like cleaning and pharmaceutical type chemicals we don’t
do that as as the service work we don’t we don’t do Service as a company but we we Supply those chemistries to people
and I think part of what people learned learned is that that coating is no different than what you’d put for slow release in your stomach when you take it
and swallow tablet so that coating actually acts as a as as a membrane and
the way it works is the osmotic pressure for for people that aren’t familiar with osmotic pressures is higher the pure of
the water so you have a very high osmotic pressure relative to the water that’s been soaked into this tablet and
it wants to migrate through that membrane into the tablet it displaces chemistry back out so it’s not high
omotic pressure in tablet forcing chemistry out as high osmotic pressure on the outside forcing its way into the tablet swelling it and pushing chemistry
out so that’s how we control the release now in our original smart release
technology that you’ll hear us referred to as maybe generation one or SRT that was the first step in the development
Second Step was was understanding how you could remove this chemistry that’s come through this membrane off at a rate
to ensure that you have a a sustained release over a period of time you know 30 days or 30ish days so we developed
there’s a very strong relationship between the size of the basket the wall free board of the water flowing around
at the flow rate to allow us to as that product comes off we remove it from the membrane allowing more water to come
back in otherwise if we didn’t move the chemistry that that migrates that membrane would basically equalize asonic
pressure and you wouldn’t that reaction wouldn’t happen anymore so you could shut off a feeder and it won’t continue
to release it’ll it’ll stop so that worked great and we could predict you
know within reason how much would release over X number of days the problem was is that was a fairly linear
relationship and cooling systems aren’t necessarily linear in nature they operate High loads low loads medium
loads hot days cold days you know free cooling overflows you name it right we
can talk about all the things we’ve seen that that caused that Blaine when we are sizing systems and we’re using liquid
products we figuring out what our dosage is based on what the dosage rate is of
the liquid product maybe it’s 100 PPM maybe it’s 500 PPM how do we dose solid
products same way you determine what you need as actives is phosphinate or polymer or AOL and we disclose or offer
give um all of our products there’s data sheets that tell you what the what the actives are and what you should derive
in a system based on a feed eight so in the smart release generation one technology we generally recommended
about a 25p PM feed rate and that got you that got you the actives which I won’t get into on this they were
equivalent to I can’t say 100 PPM products that doesn’t make sense who knows what they did but you know a a
normal well-rounded cooling water program it be about 25 PPM we had to
kind of play that overshoot if you will because we had to have enough in there so when the load did increase Maybe by
20% we could go down to maybe 20 PPM in the system and so we kept a little extra
weren’t overfeeding kept a little extra with the new generation since we since we can control on PTSA and I’ll get into
how we do that now incidentally that product’s had PTSA in it forever people tested it that way but you just couldn’t
do anything or much to those feeders to make it go faster or slower so we played the overshoot generally now with the
smart regeneration two products with with a few exceptions they in the 20 PPM so what that means is
going back to your 100 PPM example you’re shipping oneth the volume we’re not shipping water we’re not shipping
CTIC you know these products have so hydroxide potassium hydroxide the liquids do and we’re not shipping water
so obviously there’s a carbon footprint benefit to that and it’s it’s a simple one you’re you’re shipping 20% of the
weight you’re generating 80% less carbon um on top of that there’s you know
they’re not imp plastic drums and they’re not um they’re not corrosive and and all those type things well from a
logistics standpoint they’re also non-hazardous you don’t have to worry about DOT regulation
so there there definitely some advantages to use this chemistry and as much as I love to talk about that that
is 100% true you have that and and the thing that that runs out the inhibitor on a on a Thursday afternoon you could
literally overnight this as somebody have their Friday that’s you can’t do that with the liquid typically unless
you’re running trucks and all that kind of stuff and the buy sides are really straightforward and if you’re shipping
an oxidizer obviously you need to make sure you don’t shove it in overnight air but all of our inhib hibitors are not
corrosive and we offer several formulations for different we won’t get into LSI RSI or PSI because we don’t
want to get those all those comments going here but that’s a whole show pick your pick your pick your three letters
we offer formulations that address a good percentage of what you’d run into for Waters your water where you are now
is much much different than maybe water in Phoenix now I want to say that and I could be wrong but I’m going to say it
that these products are more popular on smaller systems that were people people are climbing up a ladder and it’s hard
to get product up to the roof where the cooling tower is now if we’re talking let’s say a 3,000 plus ton cooling tower
do we have an application for solid chemistry we do and it’s funny you say that because yeah the the perception has
been for solid chemistry in general that that they work better in smaller systems I and I think that’s true in I’ve seen
power plants with large solid feet systems where they have 10 feers 20 feers lined up in a row for whatever
driving factor that was they chose to do that so there’s no technical reason why you couldn’t do bigger systems but
logistically filling 10 feers or or or changing 20 bottles out or whatever that is didn’t make as much sense but yes we
have Solutions now for much much larger systems we regularly install these things on multi- ton systems going with
smart release generation 2 which we’ll talk about here in a minute but I I will also say that I’ll put on my mintor hat
for a second be real careful and I know you you know this I’m this isn’t your target you but this whole how many
thousand tons you can treat because a th000 ton 3,000 tons in Phoenix uses
maybe three times water is as 3,000 tons in Georgia so that’s the thing I’ve
fought since I’ve been on a solid feed side because of this this this mindset of tonnage versus what’s feasible I find
people talking in it’s good for 200 tons it’s good for 300 tons it’s good for thousand tons well maybe maybe not well
if I could join you on that soap box for a second it’s not just the tons because
we can have a 3,000 ton system and it could have this huge sum or it can go straight into the building so we are
water treaters we got to know how much water we’re treating ask the questions water treaters out there what’s the
temperature what what’s the Metallurgy what’s you know ask too many questions because the devil’s in the details solid
liquid electronic whatever your poison is it the devil’s in the details well
let’s go there bla if you don’t mind so I’m now calling you I’ve got this customer they’re in downtown Atlanta
what are some questions you’re going to be asking me to make sure that we get the right product to them we want to
know understand the makeup water we want to understand your expectations on Cycles you know again pick your three
letter abbreviation on what levels you want to run so we can select a proper
product we want to understand the load profile again another thing that you’ll get is you know I’ve got a 3,000 ton
system but it only has 1,00 ton annual average a load yeah but does that mean 2600 PB in a summer and 400 pounds in
the in the winter you know sizing things like that because that does matter quite a bit when you’re doing any solids
because you want to make sure that you size it so you’re not especially now with our generation 2 technology since
we don’t necessarily have to do a 30-day we you know maybe it’s three days maybe it’s 300 days but we we want to
understand what your demand’s going to be and then real importantly why is this customer looking to change what what is
it that you know Frank lron my other Mentor had this thing that was what
sucks about Aqua Phoenix it was a weird weird thing to say but he would ask people in meetings what sucks about Aqua
Phoenix well I want to know what sucks about why why you want to switch to solid why are you changing from company
X to to trace Blackmore you know he’s smart and he’s a big tall good-looking fow but there’s more to it than that so
very attractive BL attractive if you too bad this isn’t the video podcast because I’m having trouble focusing but
but uh those kind of things it’s no different it is no different than the questions you’d ask for liquids it’s not
the only thing that’s different is I think we can check some boxes as far as environmental stewardship carbon
footprint employee health and safety meaning is someone taking a rope and pulling a five gallon paale up through a
roof hatch or to the case you’re 3000 ton system are you keeping 300 gallons
of corrosive liquids you may have a freight elevator that goes to the 10th floor but do you really want a 300
gallon tote of corrosives on the 10th floor because Murphy’s Law if Murphy was
a real entity definitely a water treater Murphy’s Law applies a water treatment more than anything else I think you’re
right it’s going to be right above the president of the entity Office Buildings where that tote’s going to leak I don’t
know why but you are so right with that there is one building that we take care of in downtown Atlanta actually there’s
several but there’s one I’m thinking of it has the most beautiful mahogany
floors that we have to get out of the freight elevator and then because it doesn’t go where the cooling tower is
and where all our equipment is we’ve got to take all of our products across this beautiful mahogany floor to get where it
needs to go why did they design that well because the people that do the
interor design are not the same people as The Architects so you know it’s just like I said Murphy’s Law art Tre and I
always say that you know buys you need customers the pump always loses Prime contract customers the pump always get
stuck on hot that’s how that works that’s just how it works always loses Prime five minutes after you leave the
service Vis and not five minutes before you get there you know it’s just the way it works so and the the pretty floor is always the one that you have to drag a
tote across on a pallet jack that you wrap duct tape around the wheels bla you were mentioning you know
a tote versus uh the box that that you guys ship in and I can say we have a
warehouse here our liquid prod products which we’re a huge fan of but they’re in totes they’re in drums and they take up
so much space and we now have the products that we use that are solid we’ve built some wooden shelves and we
have at least the equivalent if not more in such a smaller footprint yeah it’s
oneth to maybe 1 sth E sometimes a tenth the weight volume so with that if
somebody hasn’t considered that they’re probably thinking well there’s got to be a huge cost so I’m just curious so if
everybody’s used to doing liquid chemistry do they need to get in their mind that okay 10 times more is what I’m
going to spend on a solid chemistry but they’re all these benefits no that again
goes back to the solid mindset of it’s great but it’s a lot more expensive do the products cost more per pound
absolutely they’re five times more expensive than a 200 PPM product but you feed one as much that works out okay I
will say that probably pound for pound because there’s a lot more handling and and Manufacturing so
to speak that goes into products yeah they’re a little more expensive but if you factor in one simple thing and this
isn’t one of those famous subjective rois where if the the moon’s lined up with Saturn and the space shuttles
flying upside down on a Thursday that it’ll work price per pound’s price per pound if you’re shipping a pound of
liquid corrosive liquid versus a pound of non-corrosive solid the price per
pound for Freight is going to be different the other thing is is you’re shipping oneth as much or one10 as much
you’re saving all that in Freight and I would encourage everybody to do a simple calculation take a a product that cost
and I’m gonna use numbers that aren’t real here but take a product that cost you a125 a pound to make and then take a solid product that cost 10 or11 a pound
and then figure out you know if you’re going to feed one fifth as much of it add a dollar a pound for Freight or 60
cents a pound for Freight in there see what that looks like it’s it’s remarkable the difference
and keep in mind you’re not shipping the liquid RWS in either you’ve got inbound Freight and outbound Freight you’re dealing with for every totea product you
have that you’ve made you’ve shipped in about 50% of that weight as raw before you formulate it it’s a great Point
Blaine you keep referring to 2.0 technology tell us about that so when I
was with aqua Phoenix Dan dobres and I think John does came out and a Gentleman
who’s no longer around here who’s moved on came out and said we’ve been challenged to innovate we want to
innovate and we’d like to use you me Blaine to to do that I’ve been a a
consumer of smart release products since I was in water treatment um I’ve been big believer in solids they said we want
to be able to to do some things and I said well I know how to do that I’ve got it figured out and they said well what
do you mean and again here comes one of my Politically Incorrect allies I said you’ve always had the best bullet I just think you’ve not had the best gun we
need to come up with the better gun and these technology and Smart Relief this membrane technology isn’t a gimmick it’s
not a misnomer it’s truly a functional part of the product so I said let’s capitalize on that let’s change our
mindset and let’s get that stuff out there as quickly as we can let’s suck that stuff through there and then get it
in the system the same way so smart release for we didn’t talk about this much at all is the Smart release
chemistry doesn’t use chemical pumps there’s no metering pumps we simply push the chemistry through the vessel sort of
like a pot feeder all the time at a varies low flow rate and that’s how we
release that product with srg 2.0 or recirculating smart release we actually
do the same thing but we stop that flow and we have another little booster
pump we’ve all used those grun fos type red resarch pumps when we didn’t have enough flow through our systems a really
reliable resarch pump and we actually recirculate the liquid within a feeder so we have a much bigger feeder holds
twice as much there’s some freeboard in it for liquid and we’re sort of charging a battery I’m still using that membrane
but I’m circulating water through there at a higher rate I’m allowing that chemistry to come out be stripped off that membrane and be put into solution
and I’m making sort of a semic concentrated solution I’m charging a battery and only when I need that power
does the PTSA sensor tell my motorized ball valve to open up pushes product through into the system and shuts off
when the PTSA level gets hit it’s it’s it’s still no chemistry no chemical pumps plenty of chemistry sorry no
chemical pumps but um we we’re opening a valve a motorized ball valve a good high
quality motorized valve um I can get on my Soap Box about motorized valves and so noise for blow down if you want
actually I remember a demonstration that you did for the awt where you’re not a
fan of diaphragm V or the little what are they called um vals I’m not not a
fan of them I’m just again Murphy’s Law is that that’s the one that where someone’s paying $9 to 1,000 gallons for
water that sticks on and and their FL drink can take the blowdown well I remember you were talking about that and
you took a stick or a coffee sore or something and you shoved it in that
valve and you allowed the valve to close and it broke it off and I think that was such a good I don’t think that was me
but that would probably happen I think that or was me I’ve I’ve you know I am
I’m old you can’t see giving you credit for that cuz I thought that was the best demonstration
to why motorized ball valves are a better choice you’re talking about motorized ball valves doing that yes I did that I thought she made made a
solenoid valve do that and I was like no you were talking about how solenoid valves would would stick open and just a little bit of debris would give you an
issue that was me a June bug will kill Ceno valve you know a June bug leg in the wrong hole will will do that yes so
motorized ball valves so we put a Mot ball valve solenoid valves are great if the water’s not full of debris I mean
there there he can’t argue the fact that there’s millions and millions of them out there and they they do work
99.99% of time the problem is that 0.01% is going to be your account so we use
motorized ball valves and let the chemistry through so the nice thing is is we’re taking this technology that’s
been proven for 15 or 16 years now this membrane technology and we’re exploiting that we’re circulating water through
there we’re still letting it come out the homogenity of the of the mixture is really good the release profile stays
the same if you were to shut the system off for months or years or days or
whatever it’ll stop releasing still once osmotic pressure equalizes in that liquid you’re not going to Lee it all out into a big oall it’s going to stop
it’s s and or slow down for sure but we let it out um I’m a big fan of solar
stuff and it’s like having solar cells you you charge your batteries up and then when you need the power you don’t
have enough it’s a great analogy yeah that’s there’s a green analogy right so smart release generation 2 takes in the
same chemistry the same products and the same product lit literally the same products and and and allows us to feed
them in a way where we can control so that does a couple things so our biggest feeder in the smart release generation one’s 15 pounds though you can put those
in in series and do a lot more of them in parallel excuse me but smart release generation 2 starts at 30 pounds on her
metal feeder but on top of that your feed rate is you know 20% less so you
you get the benefit of double the pound capacity and 120% of the water that you
can treat per pound Blaine let me ask you if somebody is thinking okay this
sounds really good especially maybe they have the hogy floors too that they’ve got to walk across is it all or nothing
so what I mean by that can they just simply maybe use the inhibitor as a solid and use some liquid biocides or
whatever that mix is please please please please absolutely amen hallelujah and all that kind of stuff that’s
another thing this whole solid that goes back to my knowledge about solid chemistry solid chemistry isn’t the be
all end all for everything neither are gadgets and neither are all gas systems and neither all what there’s not a
single solution for anything in my mind if you can replace the inhibitor for
example but you’re feeding commodity sodium hypochlorite maybe maybe the plant uses it for something else you
know maybe they have it coming there anyway use use the bleach use it works great there’s people that trace and I
both know that are big fans of that and there’s people that we know that aren’t fans of that your buy side of choice or your B dispersion of choice absolutely
not using solid chemistry if you’re using solid chemistry for the reasons that you want to be a better Steward of
environment you want to eliminate some of the corrosives you know you just love Blaine and you want to send him purchase
orders I don’t I don’t the motivations what it is and you’re not doing it because you can’t do all solids because
maybe your customer wants to feed glut or alahh or something well that’d be the same as thing I don’t turn off one light
in my house because I can’t turn them all off so I’m just gonna leave all my lights on you got to do what you can do
um and there are a lot of times where pH control is is you have to do it you have
to do it you either either do that or you use 10 million gallons of year extra water so feed acid and feed solid
chemistry maybe you need to feed glut alide maybe you’re in an account that
that’s that’s necessary there are schools of thought that glut alide is is what you need to feed feed glut alide
Blain so somebody’s got a controller and a couple pumps on the wall and let’s say
they’re not very old they call you and they said we’ really like to use a solid inhibitor here do they have to get rid
of all that equipment and bring new equipment in how do we match the right equipment for the products we’re using
yes and no you don’t need chemical pumps anymore you don’t need tanks unless you’re doing a hybrid system like we talked about where you’re feeding some
liquids and some solids so yes it is a different setup our typical setup would
be a brominator a feeder that’s the same as our smart Lo generation one feeder
for dbnpa which would be our our primary non-oxidizing biocide and then the the
solid feeder for the for the inhibitor in some cases people put a small feeder in for supplemental AOL now our products
have plenty of AOL but again there’s schools of thought out there that you need to have a lot of azol and what
typically happens is people overfeed their product if if your product develops three parts of AOL or two and a half parts of AOL but someone told you
you need five the solutions to feed twice as much try to pump liquid Aol out of a drum which is like pumping unfund
stuff or we put a small feeder in where we have 100% AOL product that we can
feed it a couple part per million so that’s what it normally is but yeah you do have to buy new stuff I don’t know
how to compare it I probably know equipment pricing better than almost anybody but I don’t people’s purchasing
relationships and what they pay for things are different and that’s this isn’t a form for that but I would say that it’s comparable to doing that but
there is a cost of change the question is is there an offsetting cost in other
things um people say we’re going to save you water well shame on you because you should be able to save the water with
liquid chemistry too you know that’s that’s that’s really it right again you have to be fair solid chemistry same
with liquid chemistry all the things that you can do with liquid chemistry is kind of the same thing if you want to go
super fancy you can do whole skids with everything on it if you already have a controller it stays PTSA sensor stays
your pigtail plugs into a motorized ball valve inste to a pump so when you need PTSA it’s opening a valve instead of
turning on a pump we do use a a power to open capacitor closed valve we do that
because some people have controllers that don’t have forc relays don’t have power to open power to closed relays so it’s a two wire motorized ball valve you
plug your your valve in for your your dbnpa feeder into your nonoxide pump
plug and you plug your bromine solenoid valve into your old oxidizing bide pump
output and and and the set points are the same it’s you know you pick a PTSA set point if you’re doing orp or
whatever it is we use dbnpa as our primary non-oxidizing bide um it’s it’s
it’s nice because it’s really predictable and how it goes in solution and we can pretty accurately predict how
much if you need X number of pounds again going back to your your 3,000 ton system analogy 3,000 ton system with
100,000 gallons of water is not the same as 3,000 tons with 10,000 gallons of water so you have on your water treater
big person pants and figure all that stuff out Blain let me ask you’ve taken
us through the evolution of how these products started where they are now
where do you see them going in the future the freedom we’ve gained from in
going to this recirculating technology the smart release generation 2 and you know Etc is that we are no longer as
concerned with the release profile now the homogen release is certainly important but the ability to have
something release over X number of days predictably doesn’t really affect us anymore because we’re now exploiting
that and and we’re we’re we we don’t care we want to get it into our our aformentioned battery so to speak to
have it available to feed so you’re going to see us releasing products that maybe weren’t as easy to formulate
because we can’t in the old days old old days meaning two years ago we couldn’t um just put things together Cod didn’t
throw in a vestel because we had to understand that it was going to release in the amount of time we say it’s going to release in so there’s a lot of stuff
now we have pilot cooling towers here we have all those things here for anybody who’s you know in the area please stop
by we have an amazing laboratory set up here and a great R&D and we use it and
we will continue to use it but our freedom to formulate changed quite a bit when we went to this generation to we’re
looking at adding some biod dispersant products to the product line the holy Grill of some better silic type products
silic control type products you know we do offer closd products and those type of things also but our ability to custom
formulate or to innovate on the formulation side has always been there
but it it’s it’s a lot less complicated now with this SM releas generation to Blain with all the installations you’ve
seen with all the surveys you’ve seen with all the the good things the bad things what must people keep doing what
do you want them to stop doing people need to keep and this is a really cliche keep learning I can get on
my CBT bag you know I wasn’t on my cwt bandwagon for a long time my cwt number is like 200 and something it’s it’s
really low I’ve been around doing this for a while and again going back to Steve dumler he and I did it first as an
example and then we made everybody else do it so continue learning continue learning continue learning read read
read understand how AI is going to affect you if you do Ai and look for cooling water water you might get
something about like forkin hygiene and animal husbandry but you’re going to get something weird like that but keep at it
keep understanding how to to exploit that what I want people to stop doing is trying to be cool and get brownie points
and funu style points for equipment I don’t care whether you have a yellow pump or green pump or a red pump purple
pump clear pump there’s no points for style you can have a gray controller and a black pump and a red pump and a yellow
pump people need to start picking the equipment that works not the equipment
that the person took you get a pizza and talk to you about not the one that’s
easiest to get because it’s down the street now there’s Merit to that you want to be able to get parts and stuff conveniently I come and Trace knows I
come from the industry where there’s a certainly camps equipment camps right
you have the the W people the a people the P people the L people the I don’t
want to leave anybody out so fill in the letter and that’s great you should you should trust and enjoy what you’re using
to the point that it’s functional and I see this I saw this this week you got people have to stop picking equipment
based on a popularity contest or based on the fact that it’s got the best flashy light and start picking things
and that goes for solid feed chemistry liquid chemistry anything um when we started building these these smart
release generation 2 systems we took a spare no expense approach to that there’s always value engineering that
goes on you’d be irresponsible to your consumers if you didn’t do that but we took a do it right the first time
because we’re not a service organization we don’t sell direct end users we don’t have a fleet of people running around fixing stuff so we had to make things
that once we put in the field we didn’t get the reputation of having you know the best broken equipment in the in the
world you’ve educated quite a few people on solid Technologies uh they might have
some more questions we’ll have your contact information on the show notes page now last time you came on episode
106 I asked you our first round lightning questions and you’ve made it to round two so are you ready for those
questions oh no bla what would you say your superpower
is I I I think it’s absorbing I think I’m sort of a sponge when it comes to
things um my kids and my wife would probably argue that that’s my bad power
but I seem to be really adeptive understanding things like calculations
and and technology and kind of seeing how things so I think my superpower is just my ability to absorb
information looking back at your water treatment career what would you say your most proudest accomplishment has been
cwt for sure because it was back then and you know I’m sure it’s still the
case there was this myque about it there was a pretty low success rate and it was
a it was a validation of I worked really really hard my whole career but especially hard at the beginning when
there was not a lot of us doing a lot of work and it was it it really validated the fact that going back to Steve that
you know even in my role where I wasn’t a quote unquote salesperson really none of us really were that I was not a quote
unquote service person we all were literally a bunch of hats and it we all still were able to go take that exam and
and you know do Steve prow and Steve did the same thing Steve went and took it too he I took it he took it Darren took
it we all took it in roles that were not historically taking it so cwt for sure
if you had a magic wand and can change anything about the world what would you
change um and Trace these are these are such I feel like I’m running for Miss
America or something well these These are round two so I mean the point values are double so these are harder so I I’ve
been very fortunate I’m pretty well traveled I’ve flown I don’t know how many millions of miles on American Airlines I’ve spent a lot of time in in
overseas I would do my best to kind of change the perception of what America is
or people’s perception what America is and mainly and I’m I’m talking about from a water treatment environmental
stewardship not you know politics nothing like that but I do find that when you travel outside the country that
people’s perceptions about how things go here some of them are true but I think a lot of them are are are things are
cliches and things like that so I think i’ I’d work on changing the way we’ve presented oursel as a country and as an
industry maybe let’s talk about industry so it’s not political to the world because it’s weird that you know we’re
we’re considered to be this leader in the world but we’re always seem to be behind sometimes that’s good the curve
on on water treatment related things in my opinion we’re not the leader in water treatment or in hygiene things like that
when you have water treatment questions what are some of your favorite resources to go to um Dr
no I’m not afraid to pick up the phone and call people again you talk about mentors I’ve had the honor of working with you know I’m GNA name names I’ve
worked with Jim lukanich um I’ve worked with with Greg Simpson I’ve worked with Steve dumler I’ve worked with Frank lron
who is just from a just bouncing business things off of has just really been great I’ve worked with you know
Jeff Gman there who is you know taught me to appreciate um you know lean in in
efficiency so I pick up the phone um I the more I think I know the more I I know I don’t know I know that AI is
really I joked about AI earlier but AI is going to be something we also can’t ignore and I do think it’ll help in
water treatment I think there’s some things that can come with AI if people were to open the mind up to it I’m not
an AI guy I’ve just just started using chat GPT for you know anything remotely
work rated since I’ve been with Doper and there’s a lot of bad bad bad stuff in there so you know trust but verify
that kind of stuff Blaine I want to thank you for coming once again on the scaling up H2O podcast and teaching us a
lot deeper about solid chemistries can’t tell you how much I appreciate you have me here thank you for what you’re doing
for the industry the more of things like this out there that people can listen to and try to learn from the better thank
you well Nation as you can tell Blaine and I go way back I will say one of my
favorite restaurant experiences with that one I mentioned earlier with Blaine at hard8 someone played a joke on me one
April fools here in Atlanta and there was a restaurant that they were building they’re like Trace you know that’s going
to be a heart a I was so excited it wasn’t a heart a anyway that person had
their laugh and my heart was broken but if you are in the Dallas Fortworth area
please if you like barbecue Texas barbecue which is beef it’s what for dinner you go to hard8 and make sure
you’re going to pay for it a little bit because you’re going to want one of everything that they have I tell you one
of the best salese I have ever met in my life was behind that counter at hard8
and he was talking about how they had these bacon wrapped jalapeno poppers that just came off the smoker and how
amazing they were yeah yeah put a couple of those on my tray oh yeah we just had this brisket come off and oh let me tell
you the way way we do brisket with the rub and then we smoke it so long we let it rest and then we we go ahead and yeah
put some of that on my plate everything he said he just described wonderfully
and I probably exaggerated by saying I had a $200 tray but I don’t think I exaggerated by much and it was amazing
so there you go we sell water treatment people sell their smoked barbecue it’s
all about creating an experience for for our customers and uh that was just an
amazing experience at heart8 I’ve been there a couple times it’s been so great an experience I am advertising them
they’re not doing anything for the scaling up Nation except feeding the host when I go to the Dallas Fort Worth
area that’s the impression that they left on me so I guess the lesson from all this is what impression are you
leaving on people that you are meeting on a daily basis what impression are you leaving with your customers
and is that going to get you a free ad on somebody’s podcast one day I don’t
know if that’s the acid test for what the impression is that you are leaving but heartache definitely left an
impression on me and I just think it’s a great way to think about every time we have an interaction what kind of
impression are we leaving now there’s no doubt about it James McDonald has left
an impression on the entire scaling up nation and he of course does that each
and every week with a brand new installment of drop by drop here’s
[Music] James welcome to drop by drop with James
the podcast segment where we wonder explore think about imagine and learn
IND duster water treatment you guessed it drop by drop
together in today’s segment I have a whatif for you
hm what if nitrite drops in a closed loop but conductivity Remains the Same
and the makeup water meter shows zero makeup was used what could cause this curious pattern is nitrate reacting or
being consumed in some way could the makeup water meter Miss lowf flow makeup
could unwanted microbiological activity be the culprit have you thought of all the ways nitrate could change in a
system and how other parameters may or may not change 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 James thank you for making us smarter as we travel through the year
week by week people love James’s drop by drop and of course this is I think the
fourth segment that he’s done over the past four years of our show so if you
want to catch up on what he’s done this year that’s so easy go to our show notes
Page by going to scaling up2.com and we’ve got all of that listed there so if you are not up to date on everything
that’s happening this year with James’s drop by drop you can definitely get up
to date now speaking of that I have heard where companies are using this
podcast to try to educate their employees their team to try to encourage
them to look for different things when they’re out in the field and then share that when they’re having team meetings
companies will assign podcasts and then somebody will lead a conversation we’ve
started doing some quizzes that we we’re just starting to sample and put out to
try to help with that facilit of those conversations and a lot of
people are using James’s drop by drop in previous segments for that as well so if
you lead a team or if you’re on a team you might want to consider how do you
bring some of this free content that we have in the scaling up Nation with this
podcast to get your team a little bit further than where they are a little bit
talking more about what they’re currently talking about having some fun along the way and making sure you’re
always doing best practices so just something to consider especially since
you have an entire week until I release a brand new episode but don’t you worry that’ll be next Friday until then have a
great week [Music]
folks Nation there’s no doubt about it the industrial water treatment industry
is the best job out there and why not show everybody that you are among the
best in the best industry well one of the best ways I know to do that is to let people know that you are a certified
water technologist and if that is something that is on your list to undertake and I sure hope it is a great
way to start is to go to scaling up h2o.com cwt prep to sign up for our cwt prep
course to build your conf confidence so you can sit for that exam Nation you
deserve to be your best and give your best so to help you with that go to scaling up h2o.com
cwt prep to start getting ready to sit for your certified water technologist
exam today [Music]