Eric Johnson (00:00)
I've seen you post a couple things on LinkedIn. What are you doing with, I think it's Caterpillar engines?
Scott Bryan (00:07)
Yeah, it's outside of what we do in the world of water treatment. The products that we have are really flexible enough to where they're used in construction, in market, in hydro testing, but they're also a great product for engine testing when they do a hot engine test. So that stops the same thing it does when you lay a boiler up using our product that when you're doing without engine testing.
you're prone to flash rust or rust after it gets drained. we can, our technology, our chemistry stops that from happening. So it's, we were doing that, those particular plants I was over there in England was, they had been on our program for about a year. And so got to see the good things going on over there.
Eric Johnson (00:55)
That's cool. would've never known that although I did just open up the Cortec website, ⁓ about 30 minutes ago and I forgot how much was on it as far as products. And then I was like, all right, where are the, where are the water treatment products? And I did find it. so I want to start this podcast off. If you could just tell the audience who you are and
Scott Bryan (01:05)
Yeah.
It
Eric Johnson (01:19)
what Cortec is because I am sure a lot of them have not heard of the company. Could you also spell the company name?
Scott Bryan (01:29)
Sure, sure. First off, I'm Scott Bryan and I am with Cortec I've with Cortec about seven years, the Cortec Corporation, and it's C-O-R-T-E-C Corporation. And my background is and has been industrial water treatment for a number of years, taking care of accounts with anywhere from refineries to a power...
generation plants to hospitals to pharmaceutical plants, everything in between. So small boilers up to HRSG type facilities from a water treatment standpoint. But I also was introduced to Cortec a long time ago with one of their products. And once you hear the name, you'll never not know where it comes from when we name some of the products that are used in the
and what I call in the world of water treatment. Cortec is a global manufacturer of organic corrosion inhibitors. Started with a vision by the owner and founder of the company 45 plus years ago. He went to his boss working for an international chemical company and said, I have this idea about organic corrosion inhibitors. And basically the boss scoffed and said,
Nobody would ever pay for organic corrosion inhibitors. So he quit, went home and he developed the process to synthesize the molecules that he had in mind, created the product, he developed that product. And then today there's 500 different products that same kind of chemistry that we call, referred to as vapor phased corrosion inhibitor or VPCI. And that's in a lot of different products. were talking.
before we started recording about in the manufacturing world, more so in that industry as it is in the water treatment industry. And you're right, there's a lot of people in the water treatment industry, whether they're an end user or water treatment company that may not have heard of us. But at the same time, once we start talking to them and they see the difference of what we represent versus
the way they've always done things, that's when the fun begins.
Eric Johnson (03:43)
Can you talk about that? I don't think I've heard that the vapor synthesized
Scott Bryan (03:47)
Yeah, well, that's how the chemistry that is, the organic chemistry is, it goes through a process at our headquarters. We, in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the raw materials that are brought in are going through a process where they are synthesized to create the molecule that makes it behave the way it does. when in a form of a powder,
you put it in an open space, will, through the process of sublimation, goes directly from a powder to a vapor. You'll have heard probably in the industry that a lot of people hear of VCIs, volatile corrosion inhibitors. Those have been around a very long time. But in all of VPCI products,
fall into that VCI category, a family of chemistry, but not all VCIs are vapor phase corrosion inhibitor. Without going way down to the technical chemistry side of it, it's just that there are some VCIs that require something to happen, like a pressure change or a temperature or something to make it volatize or vapor go from whatever state it is into a vapor. Whereas,
The chemistry that makes our chemistry so much different is that it requires a lower threshold to go into a vapor. And then there's a few other laws of physics that take place on here. And I'll quote them if you want. And I think I'll at least get one on there. It's fixed law of diffusion. Our chemistry will go from an area of high concentration to an area of low concentration.
until it reaches an equilibrium. And that's a key function of what our chemistry does when you go into a particular application.
Eric Johnson (05:38)
kind of like how a gas works. Like a gas will expand to the container that it's allowed. Your chemistry will, like if you dump it in a tank of water on one side, it will eventually spread out through the tank of water. Is that what you're saying?
Scott Bryan (05:54)
it'll
go through the tank of water and also go through the air in that water, which is, that's what makes the VPCI vapor phased.
but this is an example of how the vapor phase inhibitors work. This is steel wool in a bottle of water. The chemistry was added to the water and it volatized or evaporated out of the water into the airspace. And we use steel wool because if you look real close, it's got a much higher
surface area than if you were just using a carbon steel panel or a corrosion coupon. This will rust within 15 minutes if you put it under normal conditions on here. This bottle was done in March of 2021 and what it shows is how the vapors leave the water, go into the airspace until it reaches saturation, then it no longer leaves the water.
So you have a reservoir of inhibitor in the liquid. But it puts a one molecule coating on that steel wool and has a hydrophobic tail. So it protects the steel wool against oxygen and water. And that's the secret, what we call the secret sauce in the chemistry. if I were to take this off, you don't get a rapid loss of chemistry.
you're getting a slow migration trying to reestablish equilibrium because of a sense of the change in pressure. So consider this like if you were like in a boiler layup that uses nitrogen and you opened up the boiler up that was under nitrogen blanket, what's gonna happen? It's gonna be gone, right? But if you close this back up,
when it comes on, when you close it off, the molecules are still releasing out of the water until it re-establishes equilibrium and then it stops, like a light switch, it stops evolving, leaving the molecules going into the airspace on there. That's, I say this will be what, five years old?
This is the bottle that I did.
11 years ago. It's been so old that the water is leaving out of the bottle just through the natural plastic. And you're like, well, it looks rusty. The water is rusty. Because when I did this, put the steel wool in water and waited until I saw rust. That's why I said it would go 15 minutes. But I added the chemistry afterwards. And within 24 hours, that surface rust was displaced off the steel wool.
and that's why the water is rusty looking and there's a little bit of iron on the bottom of the water. But the steel wool is still protected. So that, we weren't able to cover that when we first had our conversation I think, but that's right there. There's a time lapse video you can see on our website. It's a YouTube video that shows those two side by side, how fast it goes over a period of like 11 or 12 days.
And I can certainly, I can send you that link too on there, but.
Eric Johnson (08:56)
Yeah,
I can put that in the link description as well.
Steel wool, I've never thought about this. Like if you put it in water and it rusts, is it essentially going to disappear into tiny little iron molecules?
Scott Bryan (09:09)
pretty much it'll eventually do this ⁓ until because right in this case right here this was this this is this is five years old I had this is exactly what you just asked me this is the one that's 11 years old there's no more steel wool in there it's just down in the bottom in the the right so you're right
Eric Johnson (09:26)
Yeah.
I don't think I've ever kept Steel wool around long enough to see it rust. It's normally just like wipe, wipe, wipe, and then throw it away.
Scott Bryan (09:37)
Well,
think of like an SOS pad or a Brillo pad at your kitchen sink. You use it, leave it on the sink and what's it going to do the next day? It's just a rust stain on your sink, right? So same thing.
Eric Johnson (09:47)
Yeah, that makes sense.
So along with water treatment products, going into the importance of water treatment into a boiler or any vessel, but talking about boilers here, the importance of water treatment? Cause I think water treatment is probably the number one killer or most expensive part of, not the water treatment part, but the damages effects of
Scott Bryan (09:51)
Bye.
Eric Johnson (10:13)
poor water treatment is the most expensive part of boilers. You see it all the time, retubes, corrosion, replacement, boiler replacements due to poor water treatment, and even from improper layup. So what have you seen just as a general overview for, what did people get wrong? why is water, like it seems like with all the...
internet and information we have now, like why is water treatment seem to be still a mystery to most companies?
Scott Bryan (10:43)
There's a couple of ideas that I have or theories to explain that first off. First off is it's hard to break the cycle of this is the way we've always done it. a end user, and first of all, let me clarify one thing as a company, as a manufacturer of products, we don't sell to the end user. We sell through
are a network of distributors. And in this case, we sell through almost any water treatment company out there. They have access to our chemistry that they can incorporate into their solutions that they provide their customer, which may be a hospital or university or a power plant, doesn't matter where. it's overcoming that the objectives that the end user, the facility manager or the maintenance manager may have on trying something different. It also is overcoming
the water treatment rep who may not be comfortable about our chemistry enough to present it to their customer and risk their professional reputation or their business with that customer on something that they don't quite understand. So that's the challenge of why chemistry like this might not be incorporated in there. There's an old saying in the water treatment industry,
is a worse alternative to not having a water treatment program in a facility. You know what that is?
Eric Johnson (12:07)
having a water treatment program that doesn't work.
Scott Bryan (12:10)
That's right, exactly right.
Having a bad water treatment program, that's right. Because your customer is paying for it, paying for the, to have the protect, the equipment protected and yet it still fails. So where does it fail? And that's the, that is, that has become my message. I talk about, I incorporate ASME's guidelines, ⁓ EPRI's guidelines.
for the layup of boilers, their recommendations, the consensus for that. However, I challenge those consensus procedures in a way in my training to try to show if your solution is to use a desiccant in your boilers. But if you don't basically read the fine print of a proper use of desiccants for maintaining
a dry space in a vessel, if you don't dry it out first, if you don't maintain a monitoring of that desiccant during that extended period, whether it's three months or six months or a year, you have to check it routinely. If you don't, if that desiccant becomes saturated, absorbed with enough water, it'll start releasing it and it's going to cause corrosion in the very spot where that desiccant was sitting.
When you look at that and says, okay, I call that a low bar to failure. If you look at dry air being blown through a boiler, which is the second option that EPRI and ASME recommend, that's it. Think about the physics of what air is doing blowing through a water tube boiler. If you have it blowing into the one end of the steam drum and blowing it out, or maybe the mud drum and going out the steam drum, whatever parameter it works.
How confident are you that you're getting that same amount of air going through every one of those tubes? It's going to go just like water. It's going to have path of least resistance. So maybe you're getting 60, 70, 80, maybe 90 % of the tubes. Maybe you get 95. But what happens in those areas of tubes that don't stay dry and have that moisture? You're going to have the same effect long term as you did with this, as that steel wool that wasn't protected. You're going to have the corrosion take place.
Pass fail, I would put that as a fail. On top of that, they're doing what they're supposed to do, but look at the energy that it takes to maintain blowing hot air through a boiler on the water side of the tube. If you add up the energy that it takes to do that for the whole period of time, the cost of doing that solution is much higher. And what happens when somebody flips the breaker?
And it goes for some period of time, nobody realized it wasn't blowing air or you were in a spot of a facility that had no power to begin with. So that's that one. The third one is a nitrogen blanket or purge. And we show in an additional training that we do that why nitrogen is so easy to fail. You have to meet all the drying criteria. You have to make sure
maintain two to five psi, and if it's a large boiler, know, boilers normally, especially those in the field, when do they really seal off? It's as you start bringing up, heating them up, and the metal starts expanding a little bit, and that's when your seal's set and you get a little pressure, they set in place, right? So if you're cold iron, drained, and put nitrogen in there, how effective is that seal against holding two to five psi of nitrogen?
I'd say it's not that that's why the cost of nitrogen can be so much higher because you're constantly adding nitrogen daily or weekly monitoring it to maintain that pressure. And if you don't, then you end up having corrosion anyway, in spite of having gone through the expensive process of the nitrogen. Our chemistry was developed to be to replace those options. You put it in the system, you close it up, it doesn't have to be sealed.
You could have a handhold and just put duct tape over it, and that's sufficient to hold our chemistry inside the boiler. And once you've put it in there, you don't have to take it out. Unlike, say, desiccant, that if you don't take it out, you're going to have a you know, a pretty bad mess of what happens when desicca is, you know, the boiler is filled and brought up to speed, and when that desiccant is going to start melting and moving everywhere.
If you or your followers have any pictures of that and they sent those to you and you can share them. I'd love to use them in my presentations. So that's where I think I went around the world to kind of explain why Cortec chemistry is an option that is easier to do. It's more dependable, less reliable on the in a facility and yet it doesn't have to be removed.
most all cases.
Eric Johnson (17:03)
you mentioned layup, and I didn't realize blowing hot air through the water side of a water tube boiler was a layup procedure, but that makes sense. But can you explain dry layup versus wet layup and when you would do each one?
Scott Bryan (17:21)
A sure. And there's the definition, you know, or how you use those terms can, can vary in the industry. we developed a definition to help walk through which product we would recommend, to use to lay up a boiler. So for example, a dry layup, you know, it means that the boilers in our terms, it's our definition, the boiler has been shut down, drained, opened.
Kind like an annual inspection. You do your inspections and then it's going to stay offline for 30 days, 60, 90 days, six months or a year. Whatever. That kind of rolls into like, if it does that every year, it's a seasonal layup. So that would be a dry layup. It's shut down and left in a drain state. Not dry as in going in and getting all the moisture out, just drained. I think it's a...
I think it's a sound recommendation in any water treatment company that a drained boiler is in a much better state of condition than trying to leave a boiler full of water, especially untreated water for an extended period of time. But a wet layup is you put chemistry or preservation product in the boiler water and leave it full.
and that would be the difference of a wet layup. Why would a wet layup be preferred over a dry layup? If you're in a facility, it could be a hospital, it could be anywhere. To bring a ⁓ boiler that's been drained and left dry, closed up and sealed, but just drained, it takes it much longer to bring it into service to operating temperatures and pressures to make steam to do whatever its purpose is.
It takes a lot longer to bring a dry boiler back into operation as it would a boiler that's in a wet layup. So that's why some end users will stipulate, gotta have a wet layup. In cases where
When I talk about seasonal layups and I use a hospital because they have such a redundancy of capability that in the summer, in the winter time, they may need four out of six boilers. In the summertime, they may need two out of six, but they leave all four off that they're not using in a wet layup. Or they rotate them weekly or every other week. That again is a consumption of resources that...
just don't need to be used. can identify the three boilers, for example, that you're gonna put in dry layup, have one as a backup in a wet layup, and then able to use all those, the better layup option for three of the boilers that you know you're not gonna need. If one boiler has to be brought online, that gives you time to bring a wet, I mean a dry layup boiler up as well if you have to. Assuming to say one of the two boilers
Maybe it's had a leak or had some kind of mechanical issue that had to be taken offline. So you're taking, you're protecting a boiler in a way that you're not subjecting it to all the, you know, the thermal, the constant heating and bringing it up and down, up and down. Water tube boilers, you know, don't like to be brought up and down. They're designed to be running. Fire tube boilers are a little bit different. You can, you know, you can run them and drop, you know, just
You know, run them, shut them down, run them and shut them down. You're still going to have issues if you don't do it correctly, you know, over firing it. You're going to get your, you know, the, the, the tube she's going to start springing some leaks, you know, and that's all assuming that's all based on the assumption that the water treatment chemistry is staying effective throughout that whole cycle.
Eric Johnson (21:05)
Okay, so as far as a dry layup, say we're gonna do a dry layup on a fire tube boiler. is the process to do that? If I have the boiler, shut it down, it's still full of water and hot. Obviously we want to let it cool off a couple days, now the boiler's cold. How do we do a dry layup and what of your chemicals do you recommend?
doing a dry layup up with.
Scott Bryan (21:34)
Sure. Dry layup under that scenario, fire tube boiler, we don't drive how it should be taken out of service. Our recommendation is take it out of service as whatever your boiler, following the practice of your boiler manufacturer. Each one might have just a little bit different taking it down out of service. Our product, whichever product that might be, is used pretty much right after you've opened it up.
It's been cool. He's cooled off. You drained it and you opened it for inspection, all the things that are going to do. And then once that's done, you would, uh, if it's a, um, a good size boiler, I say, you know, but I'll just say the boiler lizard would be the first product. And the boiler lizard is a powdered product that is, uh, packaged in a water, uh, polyvinyl alcohol, uh,
water soluble bag. It's about three feet long, about three inches wide, and it looks like a big sock. A lot of people call it a sock. But the boiler lizard is designed to, if it's a fire tube boiler, you get from the top of the boiler, you lay it down across the top of the tubes, and then you cut it open on the top, kind of like a baked potato. You don't mash it or anything like a baked potato, but you just cut the soluble bag so that
you're getting it directly exposed to the air so that sublimation process starts kicking off like that. You put one boiler lizard for every 1,000 gallons boiler volume. If you have a 200 horsepower fire tube boiler, rule of thumb, I learned this a long time ago and I went through a series of
talking to different boiler manufacturers, and it's pretty close. There's some nitpick numbers a little bit off from a rule of thumb, but about 5.25 gallons per horsepower would get you pretty close to the full volume of that boiler, of a fire tube boiler. So a 200 horsepower boiler should have around 1,000 gallons. You would take one boiler lizard. If you have a 400 horsepower boiler, then that's
five times the four gives you about 2,200 gallons roughly. And if you're shutting it down for less than a year, then two boiler lizards would be what you would lay down on the top of the boiler. If you have a small boiler, let's just say it's a 75 horsepower or 100 horsepower, but it's so small, maybe like a Miura boiler or some of those vertical boilers.
where there's not really an access big enough to place that three foot long lizard in. We have a product that we introduced a few years ago. It's called the Boiler Gecko. And the Gecko is in a non aerosol spray can. It's a chemistry, a liquid chemistry that's in the air bladder so that one can will treat 100 gallons of boiler volume.
and they come 12 cans to a carton. effectively, one carton of the gecko would treat around the same amount that boilers would do. There's a little extra on there. But you would just empty the contents inside the boiler. You can have an application extension on it. Snake that up through a valve or a sight glass or something where you can empty the contents in there.
And that basically, when you do that, you close it up and that's preserved.
Eric Johnson (25:05)
Can you put too much in as far as the gecko or the lizard?
Scott Bryan (25:10)
You would have to afford to work or not work. No, you would it was just from a cost standpoint Yeah, yeah would be but to have it the only time and I would say the closest you would overdose it say you had a 1000 I mean a 1000 horsepower boiler and No a 200 horsepower. Let's go back to original example 200 horsepower call for one boiler lizard and you decided I'm gonna put
10 boiler lizards in there. The only thing that you don't stop the chemistry from working, but look forward to the day that when you're going to fill the boiler up and you got to have enough water that as you fill it up, that that powder is going to go into solution quickly. It goes into solution under normal dosing and everything very fast, within minutes.
If you have, it's kind of like trying to take a cup of sugar and put it in a glass of cold tea. You've exceeded the solubility and you can have that. Is it going to hurt it? No. Will it eventually dissolve? Yes, but that's the risk of just having an impact to that solubility part of it, temporarily or otherwise.
Eric Johnson (26:26)
But
yeah, I'm sure most people aren't going to do that, but if they're like, like one, maybe enough, maybe one and a half, let's just put two in there. There's no drawback to that.
Scott Bryan (26:37)
No drawback on that. fact, if you had a 20, like in the case of the, uh, 400 and it's 2200, uh, gallons and they say, well, I'm going to lay it up for a year, maybe longer. would, I would actually bump that to three boiler lizards then, uh, just to be on the safe side, just be on the conservative side of making sure, uh, because in the case of something being up that long.
chances are it's going to be opened up. Somebody's going to open something up or whatever. If they open up, you lose a little bit, you close it back up, you've got enough product in there that's still going to replenish and reestablish that equilibrium on there.
Eric Johnson (27:19)
Is the product like, I think like SDS at places like, if you bring in a chemical product, you gotta have an SDS. And then you're saying that it goes into the air inside the boiler. Like is there, like if I open up a hand hole, do I need to be wearing like a gas mask or anything like that?
Scott Bryan (27:41)
No, not really not. You don't. If you were to go into a boiler, actually physically go into the boiler that's been dosed with it, first off, I would think you would have to go through the normal confined space entry permits that would blow air through it, gas it out. You don't have to remove the product, but you do want to put fresh air in there because it's going to be concentrated space.
It's not a poison like it would be if you were nitrogen or something that would asphyxiate you, but you could have sensitivity to it. So you would blow the air out, I mean, ⁓ or get air current in out of there. If you have to do a lot of work on there, we would recommend removing the boiler lizard. You can take a heavy duty shot back, pull all that out if you had to go in there and say retube a boiler type of thing on there.
But it's not a SDS normally. referred to, yeah, there are SDSs that come with that. And we'll also have other handling procedures that to go for that.
Eric Johnson (28:43)
Yeah, I just imagine chemical companies saying, hey, we're gonna put this chemical sock inside and then it's gonna distribute in the air. And then the next question is the manager, the safety person saying, all right, well, when my employee in three months, six months wants to open up a hand hole and we're gonna inspect it, what is the procedure like to, know, kind of like if you're pouring muratic acid, which is hydrochloric acid,
Scott Bryan (28:54)
That's
Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ absolutely. Yeah.
Eric Johnson (29:09)
You you like get vapors in your face. Like I didn't know, I didn't know
if there was like, you pop open a hand hole and you need to shine a flashlight in. Like if there's any like that you should have a fan blowing or something, or if you're like, no, it's fine. And like very, very low concentrations because there's no active movement of air through the boiler in that point. but if you left open the hand hole, it would start coming out eventually.
Scott Bryan (29:20)
D.
That's right.
Eric Johnson (29:39)
very very slowly.
Scott Bryan (29:40)
Yeah, if you let the hand hold open, it's going to, it's not going to rush out. will leave at a rate of the diffusion process and, or any air current that might cause it to do it. I can give you an example. One hand, I got a call from a hospital one time in the mechanical room. They had laid the boilers up with the lizards and then in the industrial contract and mechanical contract had come in to do something with one of the boilers.
They opened up the hand holes and the man hole up on top and left it, left them off over the weekend. And they came back in the next, you know, that Monday and operators were smelling this, they had this odor in there. It was kind of the, you could smell it. It's not aggressive, but you knew it's something. And, and they found that. So the call was, did we lose protection?
You didn't lose protection in the system. If you put the close back up, there's enough residual powder and everything in there that would reestablish for that short period of time. But it did illustrate just how effective that product is going to go from an area of high concentration of low It was seeking to create a preserved state in the mechanical room. But it wasn't something that people had to rush to the hospital or had to come in and blow air out of the space on there.
or anything like.
Eric Johnson (31:00)
That makes sense. So if I am gonna lay up a boiler for a year and I put the boiler lizard in, do you have a recommended inspection intervals? Because most people are gonna wanna know or find out like, is the product working before you open up the boiler a year later and ⁓ there's rust. Yeah.
Scott Bryan (31:20)
It didn't work. Yeah.
There are, there's, there's a couple of ways on that. And, and, ⁓ we have been doing the boiler lizard has been around for, it was one of the first products in the water treatment industry for introduced, 35 something years ago, or longer. we, we've just had cases and I mean, repeat, applications with once they see the results that it works, it just becomes part of the maintenance.
With that aside, when we do seasonal layups, you could do, I look at a difference between a seasonal layup, something less than a year versus something more than a year. If you go more than a year, like two years or longer, that's no longer a seasonal layup. That's a mothball, mothballing a piece of equipment. And anytime you can use the same chemistry, but our approach is going to be a little bit different. A mothball, I may not use the boiler lizard. I would use something like the gecko or
the bulk equivalent of the gecko, which is the boiler dragon. I would fog that liquid product in there. and then I would, we recommend implementing what we call a corrosion monitoring program. Anywhere you have hand holes, you can hang a corrosion disc or a coupon. And when you just open, you pull the, open the boiler up to where you have it, take that disc.
take a picture of it and record it in your report and then put it back in there and close it up. When you don't see corrosion on that corrosion disc, you know the chemistry is working. If and when you start seeing corrosion on that disc, that means the chemistry is no longer working. And that could be explained by being left open or you crossed over from 12 to 18 months, 18 months to two years. We say the lizard, for example, will treat up to
12 months, we know it'll treat longer, but we don't want a customer to go from a seasonal lab into a mothball without knowing what the other prudent monitoring recommendations might involve on there. And it could be the water treatment company doing it, it could be the mechanical, the boiler maintenance company coming in and doing those things, but just that information alone will help do that. And if they want to do that every three months,
⁓ Pull, look at a coupon, make sure. That's something you could do as well.
Eric Johnson (33:37)
And as far as a layup do you recommend or have any experiences with like the fireside? Cause I know some boilers can have, if you're not careful, they can have some pretty good draft through them when they're off and that can bring around a lot of condensation. Do you recommend layup procedures on the fireside as well?
Scott Bryan (34:02)
Yes, we do. the chemistry that we talk about the water side works just as well on the fire side. Now, the one thing you got to do is you have to close off that exhaust stack, you know, so that you don't have the air moving in and out. Cause if you did, then it's just going to carry the treatment product away with it. and so there's ways you can put a temporary flange or covering the top for every
Example I give on how to do it The the folks at that facility are going to come up with a better way of doing it Usually I just say you just want the air not to move on the inlet side from the fan usually the fan the blower is enough does not keep air going through there, but if it's you know, like a Whether it's a fire tube or a water tube, but absolutely we do we lay
We recommend a procedure for laying up the fire side of the boiler anytime that that's an issue. Especially if you think about ⁓ HRSG units with those fin tubes, those are so prone that they'll rust in a New York second,
Eric Johnson (35:08)
how do you calculate it for a water tube, like, I don't know, a big water tube boiler? I haven't looked at the manufacturer of a custom large water tube boiler, whether they spec like how much air space is in the boiler. How do you calculate? Do you just rough it?
Scott Bryan (35:25)
You basically take the dimensions of that firebox and the whole airflow and then as high up as your, wherever you're going to be able to flange off or close it off, calculate that basically, you can say rough it. You figure out what that volume is and you're going to fog that in based on the cubic feet. When I mentioned the gecko earlier and said one can treats a hundred gallons.
I didn't give the true dosing rate. The dosing rate on that is really one, anywhere from a half a fluid ounce to one fluid ounce per cubic foot. That's the true dosing. So when you look at the fireside, you're going to do it for a year, you would put one fluid ounce per cubic foot. And once you've established what that volume of that internal space, regardless of the tubes and paths, you were just taking the volume.
And then you calculate that into how many gallons you're going to need to spray that in.
Eric Johnson (36:24)
When you're spraying that, I don't know what it looks. Does it literally look like, is it like foggy air chemical? Can you see it?
Scott Bryan (36:32)
You can see it. You can see it. I, I was involved with a, a mothballing of a, ⁓ of a, trash burning. They don't, that's not what they call it, but it's a, a power plant. use comp, they used, just, wood and everything else. And when we were fogging it into the steam drum, we established a
industrial size shop vac down at one of lowest drains below the, at the lower end of the facility, on the ground level. I was about 120 feet in the air and down there underneath the surface condenser. we just put the shop vac on there. As we were fogging it in,
later, after we put them out in there, we went down and I broke loose the shop vac and that had created just enough of a current that you could see the fog. It looks a little cloudy like a fog mist that was coming down through that drain. So we knew we had gotten it all the way through that system on there. So there's some tricks to the application. So the more involved a boiler is, this boiler design,
then you look at different ways that there's tips for applying the product. So you might have to do more than one location. Sometimes it'd be four five. One of things we talk about too is don't just look at the water side of the boiler in any boiler application. You know, what is going on with the feed water tank or DA tank, condensate tank? Do they want, if it's going to be down for a long time, is there, should they consider doing something with the ⁓
with the feed water line or condensate line or even the steam line and other heat exchangers out there. We look at the total preservation of the system and not just the water side.
Eric Johnson (38:22)
Is there a way to know? So I've calculated I need so much of your fogging product. Do you just add it all and then trust it's full or like, is there a way to know or inspect that you've calculated correctly the volume?
Scott Bryan (38:41)
there's not a direct measuring of.
of some products that others, is a, like in the drag, I mean, the boiler lizard, there is a, like it looks like a pH strip that you could put into the vessel and it measures the constant, it says it's present. Doesn't tell you how much is in there, but it's just as present in the airspace. And then we're always looking at ways to try to verify that. But just through history of when you know you fed it in and you know you've
Like in the case of a water tube boiler, large one, and your plan is feeding it on the one side of the steam drum and on the opposite side, you open the mud drum and that's where you've got a fan pulling the air. Once you see that mist coming through, you close that off and finish that concentration. You know you've got enough in there because just...
of the dosing recommendations that we do. The only time when it really gets a little maybe tricky is someone's trying to cut edges and if our recommendation is 0.5 to one fluid ounce per cubic foot and someone wants to get in there and just go to 0.1 fluid ounce per cubic foot, the key is to have enough of that material
in the airspace that it's going to continue to diffuse. And if you put, if you under dose it, it may not diffuse all the way out to the right amount through the whole system on there. But when you're seeing the fog coming through on the other end, mean, just through years and years and years, no, we've known we were getting the right amount. So we don't measure that part of it chemically, just...
But it's the same thing. You could still put the coupons in or a corrosion disk in. And no, it's not how much chemical you have. It's what is the amount of chemical doing for you? And that's what we just show that through the monitoring side of it.
Eric Johnson (40:37)
And on a large water tube boiler, would use the fog on the water side and the fire side.
Scott Bryan (40:45)
Sure. Yes.
Eric Johnson (40:46)
Okay, so then customer is ready to start the boiler up. What are they? Do they just blow the fog out or?
Scott Bryan (40:52)
There's no need. Once they start, they fill it up with water. And ⁓ as they're filling up the water, you your normal, it's the normal startup of a large boiler like that is there's a lot of steps involved, right? Before they, before they actually send steam to the wherever it's going, what being a turbine, being into a plant for heat exchange processes and a thing. By the time that chemistry or that boiler is filled up with water, the, the
the concentration of that product in the water has dropped really low. At the same time, if they vent as they fill, because they've got to get that air out of there, well, they're pushing a lot of the vapor phase portion out. And once they start bringing it up, heating it up and firing it up, and they're bringing that up to operating temperature and pressure, the chemistry that was fogged in there is thermally decomposed.
So you're not having a residual of a chemistry around anymore.
Eric Johnson (41:50)
What about boilers that have steam with direct contact with product or even like food? Is there concerns there?
Scott Bryan (42:00)
Yeah.
Well, our dragons, we only have one product that's, that's being released actually, ⁓ at the end of the year, the next month, is for a wet layup of boilers that require NSF G 6 certification, which is direct injection into edible food.
We've worked to develop that product specifically at the request of a customer who wanted a wet layup in a, in a, in a food plant for that same reason. They want to be able to bring it up very quickly, but, um, and they wanted a better way than using the traditional wet layups like sulfite. and, and, know, you put a 200 PPM of sulfide, jack the alkalinity up. And that's been the recommended wet layup procedures
since the nineties, last reference I saw, the thing is, go back to, and I'm answering the question. I'm just kind of coming back. Why, why this is different? The, when you have a wet layup using sulfite and the alkalinity, it is incumbent on that operator to test two, three times a week, possibly water treatment rep should be checking that. And because if you don't check that sulfite level and it starts dropping below.
then and you having some oxygen incursion for whatever reason, that oxygen is going to start causing a reaction, rust, corrosion and pitting. Even more is that that boiler is left at normal water levels and you have that airspace. All the sulfide in the world is not going to take care of that airspace. And if you've got oxygen coming in, that's where you're going to have the corrosion taking place. So our chemistry
are for wet chemistry, or wet layup with the NSF G6, you put it at normal levels, you don't have to monitor it as frequently because you're not dependent on a sulfite level, but you're having that VPCI chemistry reaching through and going up into the airspace, just like that steel wool earlier. You're protecting it all three phases. And then you don't have to drain the system out, down, to bring it back online, which defeats the whole purpose of a wet layup.
Now, if you're using the lizard, which the boiler lizard is NSF G7, you can use it in a food plant where the steam is not directly injected into edible food, then the G7 does not need to be removed. there's two other options. If you're doing the dry layup with the lizard in a plant that has a NSF or FDA certifications required.
is you go in and remove the boiler lizard or you fill the boiler up and drain it and then fill it back up again. That's extra steps that says, that's kind of an extra step, but you're getting the benefit of the layup, the full benefit of a dry layup, but you're actually taking an extra step to remove the product. And I would submit that that's no different than if you were trying to use a desiccant to put in there. You got to go in and remove the desiccant.
And if you don't want to go in there and remove it, just simply filling it and draining it and then filling it back up again, the boiler lizard product is gone. It won't be in there. So that.
Eric Johnson (45:08)
So the
whole, the sock material and all the powder is made to dissolve, not leave any residue on the metal that it contacts. And if you drain the boiler, it will be a hundred percent gone. And then you refill it and you essentially should have a clean boiler that's been protected from rust and corrosion. right. And in terms of
Scott Bryan (45:17)
That's right.
That's right.
Eric Johnson (45:36)
corrosion for clothes systems like hot water boilers. Do you have any products for that?
Scott Bryan (45:43)
We do. There's another animal, there's another reptile that we'd have to put in there. we have, there's three different products that we would use in, especially in the hot loops that are depending on the type of closed loop that you've got.
We've got a few different products for closed loop systems. Good thing about it, one of the things we promoted last year, brought out was after a field trial was done, which is show how effective
Eric Johnson (45:59)
systems.
Scott Bryan (46:15)
our chemistry is in an closed loop. Compared to the traditional sodium nitrite borate or molybdate or silicate kind of programs, if you were using that while it's operating, it's so much easier to put it into a layup mode because you might just top off the dosage that you had in there.
new development or one that we've been promoting a lot from a couple of years on there. And we had all the field studies and the cost evaluations of the two. But let's just say somebody's not using it for their operating system and it's a hot water boiler, non-steaming boiler, and you wanted to shut that down for the season. You could add the liquid product to it and circulate it and shut it down and that's
that's considered a wet layup and that works for that type of system. Very similar to what it would do in a chill water system or the condensing water of a cooling tower system. We have a product that will, eight different products are designed to go in each of those different kind of systems, whether it's boilers, non-steaming boilers, chill water systems or hot water systems.
they're compatible, whatever the chemistry is in it. And you don't have to remove it when you bring it back online at some point.
Eric Johnson (47:38)
All right, that makes sense. Going back to the steam boilers, I was just thinking about, is there any concerns about, say we have a water tube boiler outside, we drain it, fog it, and we're gonna put it through, I guess two years, we're gonna keep it off, and we're in a cold climate. So it gets cold, it gets warm, it gets cold. Is there any concerns there or extra precautions for?
a boiler that's gonna be negative 10 degrees and then in the summer it's gonna be 80 degrees as far as having to treat it.
Scott Bryan (48:12)
I would go, and for how long was this going to be for? A while, more than two years. Well, that to me is where the corrosion monitoring, the disc would really play a factor because those swings in the heating, especially a hot day, cold night, even if you did that over a spring going from one, may not be a true leak.
Eric Johnson (48:16)
years. Yeah.
Scott Bryan (48:35)
But there may be the shrinking and slight contraction of any opening or seal. You might lose some of the chemistry just through that extraction and contraction of going in the system on there. having it, so one is for the longer system, you would go with a higher dosage. So it gives you longer before you lost so much of the chemistry that is no longer working in the system. And the second thing is if you start seeing
the corrosion disc, maybe monitor that every other month, or every other month, seeing that during the springtime like that, once you've reached a stabilized operating climate, they're really not gonna see that much change from a ⁓ contraction expansion of the boiler openings. ⁓
But that seasonal changes doesn't hurt what our chemistry is going to do inside that boiler.
Yeah, I would do that during that two year period. Yes, just to establish the baseline, show that you you have it, it's good. And so you don't come out to two years and open it up and find the disk is corroded and you have some corrosion inside. Where if you had done it, you know, in the first month you might say, hey, we didn't get a good seal here. Something's still open. You might find a hand hole that it didn't get closed up or left open on there. That's Murphy's law. That's going to happen.
And the other area of concern might be is, there any areas of that boiler that might have water remaining in it that you had to be careful about freezing? Our chemistry is going to stop the corrosion, but as it is, won't stop. The first thing I think about non-drainable superheaters, if you have water sitting in them and it gets the really cold temperatures outside.
that you gotta be careful about what's gonna go on with that. so there's not a whole lot of options on there, but I look at boiler manufacturers to say, what do you do to protect that? Do you try to inject it with some glycol? Or do you try to get in there and remove that water through some other means? And that's a little bit beyond the scope of my experience.
Eric Johnson (50:47)
How long have you seen a boiler laid up and then brought back?
Scott Bryan (50:52)
we have case histories of where they've been laid up for years. I, I don't know that I've had, well.
Maybe around a year, a little over a year. The difference is that I'll get involved with our distributors, whoever's working with the company, whether it's a mechanical contractor or a water treatment company. And we talk about this on the upfront, but I don't really ever get notified about the boilers coming back into service later unless there's a problem.
And I've not had anybody, I've gotten involved with a different power plants that were, that they were going down for 18 months because they were doing a major outage and turn around different retrofit or whatever they were doing. And, ⁓ and we, we treated the fireside water side and all of that was done. I don't get, I don't get feedback that says, well, it didn't work or we had problems. And I think, I think we would have, you know, so, ⁓ the
Eric Johnson (51:51)
Yeah, nobody ever calls and says how amazing your product is when everything goes right.
Scott Bryan (51:57)
That's right, except for the folks at CAT, you know, when we started talking about a while ago with the engine test, they told us the product worked great.
Eric Johnson (52:05)
Do you have any horror stories about, I know you mentioned other methods of layup, blown hot air or nitrogen that like you've been called in or had a rep to call you or something to consult like, hey, they turned off this boiler for a year and then they thought they laid it up correctly and then now they opened it up, the corrosion coupon is corroded or something like.
At that point, like one, do you have any stories? then two, like, what do you do if you found out that, you know, somebody didn't have the correct layup? How do you, how do you save that? Is it just, you got to replace everything or like, is there a way to save and try to reduce that corrosion?
Scott Bryan (52:46)
you
Well, there's a couple of ways to answer that. I'll start off saying one approach is you take a great product, and apply it incorrectly and get bad results. example of that was that an HRSG unit was being laid up with the recommendations at the time, our recommendations.
using a powder of product that is blown in there like using a shop vac. 20 something years ago, 30 years ago, that's the standard practice. It's still effective for different types of application, different pieces of equipment at different periods of that equipment's life cycle. In a boiler, it's a little different, especially for long-term layup. The thing that took a good product and made it a bad application was they put a product in there that
it was not designed to go into a high pressure boiler. It had silica in it as a anti-caking unit, but it was clearly listed on the product, clearly listed on the product data sheet, on the safety data sheet. And yet the decision was to use that product, blew it into the boiler, and when they brought it up, the silica numbers as they brought the boiler up caused, was creating all kinds of problems.
And so that's a horror story of using a good product in the wrong application. Another one is where I was involved with the mothballing at a refinery. They went through the process to do a layup of the cooling water system because there was a lot of different heat exchangers they wanted to protect on that. The boilers, however,
The decision was, well, we're just going to leave them open and let them stay dry. Well, in that part of the country, they don't necessarily stay dry. The humidity is enough and the seasonal changes that ⁓ when they looked at them six months later, there was a lot of rust going on. Could you make the decision, we're going to put something in there now to stop it? We could put it in there and stop it from getting any worse.
or they go through a cleaning process, but that was beyond the scope of what we would typically get involved with. Other companies will come in and do that. Once they cleaned it, we might come in and then offer a preservation of it. And then...
There was an application, I guess it was in South America where they chose not to ⁓ lay it up, do anything. then maybe they, I don't remember the exact details on there. They either change in management or change in ownership. They came in about a year later, saw what it was. They wanted to go in and conduct an online cleaning, acid cleaning.
of some type of rust removal and then to lay it up. So it's, when you start talking about the layup of a product and you use the right product for the right application, the cost of that chemistry, it really is that, know, penny wise dollar dumb or pennies on the dollar to fix the problems because, uh, can it be expensive to lay a boiler up? Yes, it can be, depends.
⁓ but if that is avoiding the expense of retubing the boiler, then the cost of laying it up pales in comparison or, or what happens if that boiler fails in the middle of operations and you blow a tube or, or, or you have something else fail. Denying denial of services to whatever that steam is going is one thing. The cost of shutting that boiler down is another. The threat of injuries because of that.
boiler failure is even worse nightmare. And then having to bring a temporary boiler on site to make up the steam that that boiler is not going to be able to make. The cost of all of that would be a magnitude higher than it was just to simply lay it up the right way to begin with.
I have a project this year and it may be something that you or maybe some of your listeners would want to be involved with and we could collaborate. I would love to see projects where a system was not, a boiler was not laid up and what the cost of that decision was at some point. You know, it's not going to fail after the first year, but anytime you see a boiler tube failure, water tube with oxygen pitting,
I wager it's rarely ever due to the operating times because when the boiler is operating, you have somebody dedicated to make sure the chemistry is there. I meant to say this earlier, was that EPRI and ASME, the majority of boiler tube failures are result of poor layup practices. And that's the case of doing it. So it may not fail this year, but it might fail next year or the year after.
And so the developing a way to say, it costs you $2,000 to lay your boiler up, for example, and that's a big number for me, when it's far as what it would take for the boiler lizard, for example. If it costs you 2000, do that, but yet you're saving or avoiding, you know, a hundred thousand dollars on there. Who would not make that decision to spend that $2,000?
the most of the time is because, we've never done it that way. And so they think that they're the guinea pig. Well, we lay up thousands of boilers every year through our distributors. But if we say we did 10,000 boilers a year, how many boilers out there? 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the Department of Energy came out and said there was like 600 and something.
industrial-sized boilers in the United States. That's a lot of boilers. I think there's a lot more. that seasonal layups are not being done in a way that protects them the best way.
Eric Johnson (58:54)
That makes sense. Yeah, the tricky thing about water tube boilers is when you have corrosion, doesn't just like corrode one tube and then go to the next one, go to the next one. It's a little bit on all of them. And even if you do get one bad tube, it may be on the inside of a bundle and you have to remove 10 tubes in order to get to it. And you've already pulled off the whole side of the boiler and like it's no like just
Scott Bryan (59:06)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Johnson (59:21)
On a fire tube boiler, it's a little bit more like, we could pop it open, pull the tube, put a new one in. But a water tube boiler's very much more involved. And when you corrode, the trouble thing with having a bad layup or even bad water treatment, once you start corroding those tubes and they start popping during operation,
at certain point in time you just need to bite the bullet and do a full re-tube and a full re-tube on a water tube is gonna be six figures plus depending on the boiler size and I imagine, I don't know what the actual number is to ⁓ do a proper layup and have proper water treatment but I always know it's less than a full re-tube ⁓ but I would think rarely companies do the
Scott Bryan (1:00:04)
you
yeah.
Eric Johnson (1:00:11)
do the both, like when you make the comparison, the first, know, ⁓ of course we would have proper water treatment and proper layup procedures, but I don't, I think a lot of it just comes from, yes, we've always done it this way. People are scared to do new things and it's also, it'll be fine because we can't see it. And like that's, I think most, the explanation of most boiler problems is.
it'll be fine. We can't see it. Like if people could, if you could turn the boiler inside out and see that corrosion happening every day, they'd be like, why is it corroding? Like if you go out to your car and it's just like turning rusty by the every single day that you park in a parking lot, you wouldn't be like, yeah, we'll just wait another year and try to fix that. You'd be like, why is my car rusting?
Scott Bryan (1:00:57)
And you want to take steps to fix it. I was, I spoke at a, boiler's user user group, a couple of weeks ago, was a mechanical engineering group, in England. think I've told you, I was going over there and one of the, I sat in, I was able to sit in on the other presentations and they showed exactly that what you just said, Eric, about the, one tube in this case, it was, ⁓ they were, ⁓ it was,
a tube failure not from layup procedures, but it was the soot blowing to knock off the deposits. And that cut into the, over time, cut into the metal of the tube. And when it started blowing steam, it started cutting into another one. But in order to replace that tube, you're taking out multiple tubes. If it was within the first...
depth of the tubes, that's easy. But when you get a foot back into the, into those down comers or the generating bank, that's, that's a very involved process. And the same thing can happen with the, with the poor layup procedures as well.
Eric Johnson (1:02:00)
Yeah, and the tubes are not go to Home Depot and buy a tube. Especially on a larger boiler, they're probably custom bent, custom from the manufacturer. You'll call them up and they may have one or two in stock or they go, hey, yes, we'll get you tubes. It's going to be a month and a half. And then you're wondering why the boiler startup is all delayed and re-tube is delayed because you can't get tubes. it ends up being a very, very messy process.
Scott Bryan (1:02:04)
No.
Eric Johnson (1:02:28)
Hindsage is 2020 and oh man, if we only would have laid it up properly, then none of this would have happened. Yeah.
Scott Bryan (1:02:35)
Yeah, we have a really good case history. Again, it was done with one power plant that had two combined cycle plants being laid up for two years. They used our technology for one and they used nitrogen for the other. it turns out the things I kind of talked about earlier about if you don't have a good nitrogen, if you don't have a good seal with the nitrogen, that ongoing monthly cost,
If you add that up for the full cost of 24 month layup, the VPCI chemistry was, this was in pounds, but it doesn't matter if I use pounds as a measuring or dollars, but it was 3,000 pounds to lay the unit up, one unit up, the initial cost with no additional cost. With the nitrogen, it was 2,000 pounds to initially charge the nitrogen in that
in that other unit, but it took an additional 2000 pounds per month for the 24 months. So when you looked at the true costs of one option versus the other, it costs 50,000 pounds to use nitrogen for two years, as opposed to 3000 pounds for the VPCI. That's a very powerful comparison to show the difference between the two. But that's where we get involved is
If someone wants to evaluate that or look at options or why would you use one product over another? Every plant or every boil that's going down might have enough of a unique difference to it that it might make you sway to go to one product that we recommend versus another on there. But that's where we come into play to provide that kind of recommendations and advising.
both to our water treatment companies as well as to end users.
Eric Johnson (1:04:23)
Earlier you were saying that you were going off the recommendations of ASME and then what is the second organization?
Scott Bryan (1:04:31)
EPRI is the Electric Power Research Institute.
Eric Johnson (1:04:35)
Okay, I'm yeah, I'm not familiar with them. I'll have to look it up.
Scott Bryan (1:04:39)
They've been around for a bit. I don't know how many years they've been around, but it's an organization that members, usually it's power generation plants on there. But ⁓ they have the paper route, and I have it somewhere, a hard copy of the consensus for laying up boilers. The ASME has that.
book out as well. And so I went through and read what that's what I've done when I developed my approach on why is VPCI chemistry different and and yes I'm biased but why is it better and it's better for a lot of different reasons but it's the fact that it's more dependable and less likely to fail even if you do everything right on those other other approaches.
Eric Johnson (1:05:32)
Yeah, I would say that most contractors or water treatment reps, the, not that they're dumb, but the education level is pretty low and they just want, they don't want to spend all this time trying to figure out, are we laying up this boiler properly? Are we not, you know, what's the margin there and all this stuff. And if they know a product works and the directions are very simple and it's, hey, this is how we need to do it. All right, great. And then,
There's no like constant monitoring process or like, if you don't do this, it's going to fail. You know, like you, you can do a, you know, the corrosion coupon and everything to check it. But, you know, like with nitrogen, it's easy to add nitrogen. Somebody thinks that you're done. And then, you know, the, leaks out or loses the charge after three months or something. And, somebody.
may not be educated enough to know that you have to keep up with it or some other way. like the easiest process to lay something up with the least likely amount of failure is, I would say is the best process as long as the application is correct because you just wanna remove all the variables of failure that you can engineer out of the equation.
And a lot of those are human's lack of knowledge and also managerial. Like the contractor can say, hey, we laid this boiler up with nitrogen, but you need to fill it once a month. You know, are you going to pay us to come back and do it? no, we'll do it. And then a year later, the contractor finds out that they didn't do it. It's like, ⁓ okay. Like, and then, but then they look bad a year later because the boiler layup didn't work.
Scott Bryan (1:07:10)
you
There's another thing to consider about a boiler that's being laid up with nitrogen, and especially if that boiler is indoors. If that nitrogen has to be replenished daily or every other day because it's being lost, you need to ask, where's that nitrogen going? Because nitrogen is heavier than air. That's why it's able to displace the oxygen. It just moves the oxygen out and creates that inert environment.
But it wasn't that long ago and you can go back and Google searches where nitrogen was used in a boiler room when it was constantly leaking. And it accumulate down in the pit where the pumps and other pieces of equipment were. Well, that nitrogen accumulated down there to such an extent that if an operator goes down, is not aware of it, they go in and they'll die.
because they'll not notice the nitrogen has already, you know, they'll fall out before they're able to get out. And it just becomes a cascading effect. And that's the worst part to me. Having some corrosion in a boiler, okay, you can live with that, right? Or you can, ⁓ you'll pay for that part of it, but to lose somebody because the nitrogen wasn't being monitored, you know.
somebody griping about spending $1,000 a month on nitrogen ought to be saying, where's that nitrogen going? Is it creating another problem that's going to be even worse than the cost of the nitrogen in a boiler room? And I hope that I've never been personally involved in something like that. I hope I never am.
Eric Johnson (1:08:55)
Yeah, I would I've seen a lot of those in boiler rooms like steam tunnels or connecting tunnels pits return pits kind of say pits and a lot of operators I mean, I've rarely seen atmosphere atmospheric monitoring systems down in those areas and I guess I mean nobody nobody really thinks about it because It's invisible and it's not really a confined space
Scott Bryan (1:09:14)
Until it happens. Yeah.
Eric Johnson (1:09:19)
So there's no like, ⁓ to climb down into this giant pit, you know, like that's a normal process or to walk through this tunnel, that's a normal process. But if you are releasing a gas that is heavier than air.
You know it floats to the bottom and you know if you could I guess if you could put some kind of coloring in that you would see this slow layer of gas just floating along the floor and pour it over into the pit. I know there's been representations done with like because it's hard to imagine but you know if you pour it you can pour like nitrogen into like a glass and then you like pour it out over a flame and the flame goes out. But it's weird because you would think
Scott Bryan (1:09:42)
Yeah.
Eric Johnson (1:10:00)
that nothing's in the jar, but like there's nitrogen in the jar and you...
just think that always gas just expands, but it's held in the container because it's heavier than air. So it sits down. Yeah. But that's, that's another reason, you know, Hey, we don't have to worry about atmospheric monitoring. If we don't use nitrogen, if we use something else. And I mean, that's a, could be a safety concern for a lot of customers. You know, safety is the number one thing talked about and, yeah, not having to atmospheric monitor. And.
where that nitrogen is going. If you just remove it from the equation, I would think that's a win for me. So.
Scott Bryan (1:10:36)
Sure. It's
another, it's another factor to, to, know, to weigh in on there.
Eric Johnson (1:10:43)
So if I was a water treatment rep listening to this and I'm intrigued, how do they learn more? Who do they contact as far as like trying to, I don't know, sell your products or get your products into their customers' hands or use their products in their treatment programs, what does that process look like?
Scott Bryan (1:11:07)
They just contact me. can go to our website and they can sign up to ask us to contact them. We have a part on our main site that says Ask Cortec. I think it might even be on the Cortec Water Treatment website. I don't have it right here in front of me to read that off, but it's a...
⁓ and either way, there's a way to ask for that and ⁓ it would get forwarded to me and, ⁓ and, or, somebody on the water treatment team would be able to, would reach out and, or my email address. If you include that on here, I can, you can, you can send me an email directly on there and we'll, what to do is set up, ⁓ if you want to learn more, I do a, I can do it.
20, 30 minute training over introductory overview. And I just to learn and then it's a way of sharing my, what I have to offer and also to learn more about what that individual rep is trying to do.
Eric Johnson (1:12:02)
And then if you're an end user or a contractor and they want to learn more about these products or they got a boiler layup coming up, they would ask their water treatment rep or how would they find somebody in their area that carries these products?
Scott Bryan (1:12:20)
That's another really good question. one that where I, it's what we're challenged a lot of times is if the end user contacts me and I get, we get contacted a lot of times because of the way our message gets out in the social media and other publications. I consider that the end user is going to pull our technology to their facility, either through their water treatment company who
may or may know about us, it's an opportunity for me to meet that water treatment company, coach them on what our products are, if they want to set, if they get set up to do it. If that water treatment company for some reason is not going to support their customer with our product line, then I'll get that end user in touch with somebody who will bring the product in. And it can be...
There's a couple of different, what I call channels to market to the end user. Primarily, we like to work with the water treatment companies because they own that process for the majority of the life cycle of that boiler. I think of boilers as, or any of the equipment that we've been talking about, it's in one of four stages or cycles, the cycles of operation. It's either running, it's not running, you're either shutting it down or you're starting it up, right? So if you think of that as that.
You know, it's running, you shut it down, it's out of service or idle, then you're starting it back up again. Well, the water treatment company is purely looking at the operating side of it. That's where their chemistry works. So if I can get them on board on how to use our chemistry for the rest of the cycle, the shutting down and the idling and the out of service and then bringing it back into service, then
they're able to bring that total integrated solution to their customer, as opposed to somebody else coming in and saying, well, I'm just doing the layup and he's doing the operating system. Then something happens and it becomes a finger pointing game. So trying to bring the water treatment coming in so they own it, they know how it works. And that usually works. You're right, I would never call a water treatment service rep, you
dumb or ignorant about our products. It's a couple of things. Either their company has not brought our chemistry in or their customers have said no enough in the past that they didn't really push our chemistry that much in other applications. Or the other part is they just didn't understand how our chemistry works. Like I said earlier, and they were ⁓ just hesitant.
to bring that to their customer's attention. But if an end user wants to know more about our product, we will talk with them and then we figure out a way to get them in touch with the right company to help them bring that product on site. I got an example of a story of a water treatment company. He called me out on the West Coast.
took, taken over a new account and they were coming at the end of their boiler operating season and the customer manager said, Hey, last year with that other company, they brought the boiler lizard in and laid a boiler up. Can we do that with you too? And the guy says, sure, sure. Let me get some more information for you. So he left, went out to his car and he Google boiler lizard, found Cortec, then gave me a call and said, I just told the customer I could get him a boiler lizard and I had no idea what it is.
So those companies exist out there. I the water treatment company, it doesn't mean they're not good. It doesn't mean they're bad. It's just that they don't know. the platform like this with you and those that are listening is for me another way for them to hear about.
Eric Johnson (1:16:05)
Yeah, that's the biggest thing. would say like, like everybody, most people think that we have an information problem and it's, the information is out there if you look hard enough, but most people either don't wanna look hard enough or they just don't know where to look. And that's where the whole relationships thing or being introduced to products or even trade shows, like trade shows theoretically should be obsolete.
because the internet, like, well, you know, they can find me on the internet. But if you walk past a booth and you're like, Hey, we have this problem. And you walk past a booth and you're like, wait, they solved the problem. And we didn't even know this company existed. And that's, and that's where like, talking about the products and different solutions. And it's not that like people, like, once getting dumb or uneducated, but it's.
They, yeah, everybody's busy and they only know what you know until you don't, nobody knows what they don't know until they don't know it. And then, you know, they hear a boiler lizard and I'm sure some contractors out there thinking like, man, I wish, you know, we had some simple solution like that. I need to get a boiler lizard to put in, you know, that boiler, you know, that we've been going around with this customer trying to get a layup and, you know, we weren't sure for this or.
Scott Bryan (1:16:57)
They're busy. They're busy. Yep.
Eric Johnson (1:17:25)
We weren't sure for that. That sounds like a great product. And it's been on the market forever, how long? And it just comes down to awareness, training, and getting different solutions in front of people, which is the name of the game.
Scott Bryan (1:17:39)
And training is not one and done with any water treatment company. I do webinars and seminars just with water treatment companies. I do them within users as well, but just introductory overview. I talk about the comparison of what they may be using versus what our product offer. And one of the things I do ahead of time is a pre-webinar.
survey, 10 questions. But one of my questions is, you ever heard before the seminar or webinar, have you ever heard of or worked with a Cortec product? And it's consistently about 30 % of the people that are going to come into that webinar have never heard of Cortec. And yet it's a company we've been doing business with for years and I've done training with over a couple of different years. And you'd say, how do you explain that?
world of water treatment, the turnover is 25 to 30%. People either people retire and they're leaving or going somewhere else and you got new people coming in. And when they, if they don't get it in their onboarding and training, then they're again, they're not gonna know about it unless the customer asks about it. And if that rep is worth their salt, they're gonna start looking in and finding out what it is. When the customer is asking you about it, you better find out, right?
Eric Johnson (1:18:57)
Yeah, that's, that's the important part is training. Training is something you do, not something you've done. There's no, there's no point where you can say like, ⁓ yup. We've checked the box of training. Everybody's trained. We're good. And just go out there and sell and solve problems. It's this constant constant awareness, even if you're a company and say, all right, we understand layup. It's Hey, are there any new procedures? Hey, do we have any weird things?
Scott Bryan (1:19:11)
Yeah.
That's right.
Eric Johnson (1:19:25)
you know, maybe we have a boiler with some different metals in it or a different kind of heat exchanger or something. And is there anything on the product market for this or versus that? And it's having this awareness of, know, we don't know everything, but we want to always constantly be learning, which the internet provides great resources for. think podcasts are for, you know, this is a great conversation for people to learn.
I learned a lot from podcasts and all, you know, this always be learning mindset of, you know, I don't know what I don't know until I don't know it. And then I want to learn it. So yeah, that's, that's, I had never heard of Cortec and I've worked, ⁓ you know, not that I'm a water treatment person, but I've worked around water treatment companies and a lot of contractors and everything. And I never heard of the boiler lizard till we had talked, ⁓ previously the first time.
Scott Bryan (1:20:00)
That's right. Yeah.
Eric Johnson (1:20:17)
But now I'm like, oh, that's great product and so simple to lay up a boiler or even the gecko or the dragon. So yeah, I think we covered it all. there anything else that you want to hit on?
Scott Bryan (1:20:31)
No,
think that's ⁓ we did, I think we did cover it all. We
I think it was great to be able to appreciate the chance to come in and talk to you like this because it just takes one or two people listening to this that says, I've not heard about this. Or they turn around and tell their customer and say, Hey, you need to listen to this because this is what I've been talking about for the last couple of years. Now you can hear other people talking about why we should go this path on here.
Eric Johnson (1:20:58)
Yeah, just looked it up. Cortec has 41 videos on their YouTube channel. Yep, one of them is the corrosion. See the difference, VPCI, corrosion protection and action. Is that the video you were talking about earlier? Yeah, with the bottles. But look up Cortec on YouTube, C-O-R-T-E-C Corporation.
Scott Bryan (1:21:15)
That should be. Yeah, that should be. Yeah.
Eric Johnson (1:21:24)
you'll find that they got a green, I don't know, plus sign logo. I don't know what that...
Scott Bryan (1:21:30)
Yeah,
that logo is, they get a nerd again on my nerd hat here is that's a positive negative charge that those molecules have when they're in that vapor. Because that's technically what's happening is that molecule has, it either has a positive charge or negative. So when it is attracted to the metal surface, it's neutralizing that electrical surface charge.
That's what takes out the corrosion potential in addition. So that's a positive and negative symbol that represents that molecule in the air.
Eric Johnson (1:22:07)
Got it. And I'll put a link in the description to the seasonal layup products for, and then you'll see the boiler lizard and other products. And there's some PDFs there, SDSs, so that people can easily find those. And also I'll put your email address if that's all right. When in doubt, contact Scott and he'll point you in the right direction.
Scott Bryan (1:22:26)
Sure, absolutely.
Eric Johnson (1:22:32)
and give you the answers or direction that you need. So thank you for coming on.
Scott Bryan (1:22:37)
Thanks for having me.
