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021 The One with James McDonald
Our guest today is James McDonald. James has been in the water treatment industry since 1997 and is a Chemical Engineer by degree with a Master's from the University of Louisville. After college, James worked for an environmental compliance company, doing environmental assessments for the likes of the FAA and various army bases. Later James went on to work for Crown Solutions and today is also a much loved committee chair at the Association of Water Technologies (AWT). Interestingly, after many years at Crown Solutions, his next job at Chem Aqua, was discovered via a LinkedIn advertisement pop-up seeking a Corporate Engineer.
Most of you out there are on LinkedIn and LinkedIn is probably dominated in the water technology community by James McDonald. James spends a lot of time on social media, specifically his LinkedIn page. But when we have so much work to do already, is social media really worth it and what are the rewards? James loves the work he does and loves sharing it with other people, so today we hear James' story, his role in the AWT, how LinkedIn has helped him connect hundreds of water treaters around the globe and why we should continue to keep learning a little bit every day and share our knowledge even more. Take a listen!
We also answer questions from listeners on Pinks and Blues.
This person just switched hardness test manufacturers and the softener used to be soft all the time with the old manufacturer. Now it's hard all the time. So is something wrong with the softener or with the test kit?
Here at Blackmore Enterprises, we had that exact same thing happen. We were using manufacturer A and the softener was soft all the time. Then we switched to manufacturer B and it was soft some of the time, but a lot of the times we were getting that red tinge to the hardness test, and as those of you know out there in the ScalingUP! Nation, a soft sample is nice and blue and if it has a red color to it, then that indicates hardness and then we add the EDTA to it as a titrant until it grabs all that hardness and then turns it blue. So in a softener situation, as soon as we put the buffer in there and the indicator in there, we want that sucker to be nice and blue.
Well, we thought that the softener was malfunctioning, and it actually was. The only reason we found that out was because the test that we then started buying with manufacturer B actually was able to test to a smaller degree, less than a ppm. The other test was only testing down to 2 or 3 ppm and we actually worked with somebody and we sent those off and actually had an independent lab measure those using a different method and we actually found that out, that one of the test manufacturers was able to get that lower. So it might be your tests are working fine, but they're only working in the limits that they are able to work in.
What we did when we did that, we found out that we were actually putting hard water in when we thought we were putting soft water in with the other manufacturer, Manufacturer A, and that actually explained some of the readings that we were getting where we were losing alkalinity on occasion and things like that. The water was still clean, but everything didn't add up and then we found that when we were testing with this lower range test kit that we were actually leaking over some hardness. So I say this because the boilers, in order to be soft, need to be less - actually I think it's supposed to be less than half a ppm.
So if your test kit's only testing 2 or 3 when it says it's soft, that's several times higher than half a ppm. So make sure you know what your test kit is actually doing and even in the same manufacturers, they have different ranges. So if one drop equals 10 parts, that's probably not good when you're titrating. That's probably not good enough for a softener. You probably want to figure out either how to change the sample size, or maybe change the test kit so you can get
Published on 7 years, 3 months ago