Water Treatment Fundamentals – Part 1

Transcript

Speaker 1:                           00:00

Good morning. How’s everybody doing? Good. All right. Excellent. Yeah, let’s jump in. Um, my name’s Dave Smith and what we’re going to do today, it’s going to be pretty flexible. It’s going to be based on whatever the feedback is that we go through, but I think that the objective that we want to do is kind of talk about water treatment, water in general, and then get to kind of point that towards conversation towards what the solutions are for particular problems or for particular things that are affecting the water. Um, and I think and then kind of of straight into this area Australia yesterday a little bit, but it’s not necessarily that there’s a problem with the water, um, as much as it is, are we getting the water to where the customer’s expectations are? And that’s different from whether it’s a homeowner versus if it’s a coffee shop versus if it’s somebody who’s running a boiler or something like that.

Speaker 1:                           00:52

So all of those expectations and with water quality is going to be our very. So the and the solutions that are attached to those are going to, as you can imagine, it going to be, they’re going to be different. They’re gonna be all over the place. The good thing is, is that no matter, no matter what those expectations are, no matter where the water needs to be and where it started from, you’ve got a good platform, you’ve got a good foundation to start from for who can provide those, those pieces of equipment, the knowledge and background, and then your points of contact for who you’re working with. So if there’s questions, you know where to go. Um, I like working at Pentair. I’ve been a Pentair now for 26 years. Most of it’s been, most of it’s been on the valve side of the business where we make valves up in Wisconsin.

Speaker 1:                           01:36

I’m one of the big things. I enjoy those, that over the years, over these last 20 years, gaining those businesses in addition to the bowels and then learning what all those things, what they do together has been. It’s been a lot of fun. So I, I get, I get kind of excited about talking about all the different things and learning about everything that’s happening on the field. I worked on the line at a, at Brookfield where we make the vowels. I worked on the line for 13 years, putting vowels together, putting them in boxes, shipping out to customers, and in that 13 years I learned how I learned how water flows through a valve. I learned how to read the flow, the flow meters on what the expectations were, put the valve on, turn the switch, turned on the pressure, read the meters. But I didn’t know anything about what they were being used for.

Speaker 1:                           02:23

I didn’t know anything about what your customers were asking you, what they were facing out in the field. So within the first couple of years of actually getting out and being on the field and seeing the things that you guys are seeing and dealing with the things that you’re seeing on the field. I learned. I learned more in that first year, year and a half. Then I had the entire 13 years sitting there on the line and building bounce. So that’s, that’s what I enjoy. So if there’s questions, don’t be afraid to ask questions. Okay. We’re going to try and keep this going. Uh, I like to keep it kind of open format if there’s questions, if you got, if you have interaction, if you, if you have a question like, I don’t understand that. I think you’re wrong. Old Man, I think you’re wrong. Don’t be afraid to say it.

Speaker 1:                           03:03

All right. And we can work through that. I’m not saying you’re right, but you know, might be the case. I’ve been. I’m not averse to going off script a little bit. All right? So hopefully that helps everybody. I want everybody to get something out of the day to day and uh, as we go through this we’ll have fun. Is that fair? Okay. So where we’re going to start is kind of from foundationally how much, just out of curiosity, how much experience would any of you, I think just working with rusty yesterday. You were around and we were asking questions. I mean, you were around, they were with the nice and everything about asking question about water treatment, everything. How much? Well, alice month and a half or whatever it is, how much experience with water deal have, is it pretty, is it the starter or is it just as kind of. They asked for a particular component you’d give it to them type thing. Water treatment, yeah. Okay. Well, hopefully after today it’ll be a look a little bit more than not much. Um, the good thing is that you get points of contact like with joy and then with Pentair and general with Jenny and, and you’re, you know, via if you have questions we can address all those questions. Alright. So where are we gonna start from?

Speaker 1:                           04:24

Let’s talk about Pentair a little bit, um, where and where the stuff comes from. All of the things that we talk about today are going to be pentair components. They’re made in a variety of manufacturing facilities. I’m going to focus in on these right here. Um, our manufacturing facilities in Wisconsin. We have two facilities. Brookfield is the one where all of our manufacturing is done. So if anybody, if any of ya’ll are traveling through Wisconsin and, and you’ve got some time on your hands like, Hey, I don’t want to go do a plant tour. That sounds exciting. You’re with your wife, you’re on your honeymoon or whatever. Let’s go do a plant tour. Don’t be afraid to reach out and we can set that up. I always throw that out to everybody because we enjoy having anybody who’s using our stuff come through and we’ll walk them through Brookfield and show them where the valves are made.

Speaker 1:                           05:14

Um, I’m not, I have a lot of familiarity with Brookfield and, and, and I know the people there. If you want to do a plant tour and Sharon, where we make the tanks, we could probably make that happen. I’d have to, we’d have to reach out to some other people. But the main thing is the, what we have here is a partnership. What we have here is we’re making things. I filters putting them together and you guys are disowned, distributed, and we want to make that work is best for everybody. So I look at it as a partnership. If you want to come up and see where the stuff’s coming from, come on up, just let us know. Right? All of these manufacturing facilities in the United States actually make components for North America. So every single valve that you’re getting on a softener, on a backwash filter, commercial, residential, whatever size it is, is coming from Brookfield, Wisconsin and that plant has been there for about 40 years now.

Speaker 1:                           06:10

Little over 40 years. And it’s kind of impressive when you go there because it’s not a huge building. So when you think about all those bowels that you’ve been working with out in the field, if you go driving around the neighborhoods, you see him out in backyards or whatever. The fact that they all came out of that building is, it’s kind of. I always used to stand on the floor and look around and be like, because we’d be pushing out 250, six hundreds a day, 250, $600 a day, boom, boom. And at some point everybody’s going to have one, right? Like where are these ongoing? Um, with that being said, water treatment in general. So water treatment in homes in the United States and Canada, someone got about a 15 percent penetration rate now, but when you consider like the pitcher filters and things like that, you get up more and between 40 and 50 percent. But truth is there’s a lot of opportunity out there and it’s kind of inherent on us to, to let people know what you can do with your water in general. I’m going to throw this out there. In general, would you say water quality is getting better or worse?

Speaker 1:                           07:17

You think it’s getting better now when you say that, do you say okay, from the city, from the supply that you’re getting? Yeah. Okay. I would say that the general impression and other areas like Florida and places like that is that water is getting a lot worse or quality. Um, and it has to do not with just how waters and what’s your name? Jp. Jp. That’s not just because of how water’s coming out of the ground or out of the river, out of the lake or whatever. It probably has to do with how we’re using the water, how we disinfect the water. What we put back into the water and then it probably has a lot to do jp with what are we looking for in the law? Yeah. It’s like a lot of that stuff might have been there the whole time and now somebody brings up awareness of it as an emergency issue.

Speaker 1:                           08:01

Yeah. Some something the kitten consider. It’s kind of like the air quality, greenhouse gases and all this and know that everything’s going up and we’re headed towards doom. Um, some of the things that we do as human beings and that we’re introducing back into the water supply are becoming more and more prevalent to like all the pharmaceuticals that people are digesting. And then that goes back into the wastewater system and then that goes back into the water supply system. There’s no treatment process for that stuff. There hasn’t been historically. So now those things are starting to come back around into our water supplies as well. And I think that our focus on that and how do we take care of that is becoming more and more of an issue. Sharpness where we make all of our pressure vessels for North America. So every tank that you get, no matter what color it is, no matter what size it is, is coming from Chardon, Ohio, east Cleveland, um, beautiful area right there on Lake Erie.

Speaker 1:                           08:58

And, uh, again, huge facility, that’s a big facility because we’re doing pressure vessels there in the United States. Every tank you get is made in the United States. Every valve, every take he gets me in the United States, our manufacturing facility in Dover, New Hampshire is where we make the filter cartridges. I’m going to. One of the things we’re gonna talk about today is starting off with filtration is some of these cartridges, I think the general impression is, and we talked about it yesterday, like a lot of people doing water filtration, they’re looking for a cost, they’re looking for price and there’s not a lot of focus on value. There’s not a lot of focus necessarily in quality. It’s just what’s the cheapest thing. Um, and I think that what that leads itself towards is that the point of view as well, this stuff’s coming from overseas. A lot of this dust manufacturer, it’s commodity, it’s diamond doesn’t.

Speaker 1:                           09:46

So it’s all being manufactured overseas. The truth is a lot of the stuff that we make a Pentair, even in cartridges, like this cartridge right here is manufacturing in the United States, so we’re still doing a lot of the maiden, the market for the market and I know for, in my experience a lot of your customers that, that means something to a lot of the customers. If it’s made in America, we could probably do a better idea, a better job of letting people know of saying that we do what we do. That’s something that we’ve been working on, but I think it’s important to be able to say that to people all the way down to chain, all the way from the homeowner to the person who’s installing the system, replacing the cartridges all the way through all of our partners in distribution and an assembly and everything as well. So a lot of the stuff we have manufacturing plants in the United States that make stuff for the United States.

Speaker 1:                           10:36

Say anybody ever heard the herd law history about what Pentair, where we came from. It’s interesting. Uh, I don’t know if it’s interesting, I’ll fudge they’re a little bit, so pens era, it’s been around since 1966 and it started off as five guys who all got together. So five, that’s where the Penta comes from. Penn, there’s five guys who all got together and they had and then they added, joined at a common enthusiasm for ballooning. Um, that seems a little weird. Uh, I’ve, I’ve never, I’ve never been part of. One of those crews were let’s go hot air ballooning this weekend. Shelly.