IER News Issue 9
December 2022

A Letter from Doug Kelley, President of IER

Hi Everyone!  It’s Christmastime!  I hope you all enjoyed Fall’s change of seasons, with Mother Nature giving us those glorious colors before going to sleep for a few months.  Now the snow is rapidly building in the Cascades, and the skiers are hitting the slopes!  Later this week we’ll have daytime highs of only 5oF in Spokane with overnight lows of -10oF – bbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!  

This is when we do our best to help our customers get through the cold weather months.  Please don’t ever hesitate to call on us if you’re struggling with the cold.  Nothing worse than frozen pumps and feed lines that can be avoided with a little proactive attention.

In this newsletter, we share a story about a customer that ran a trial of our new ALKA-Mag+ product right through the cold of last winter in an uninsulated thin-walled poly storage tank!  The quality of ALKA-Mag+ along with their proactive efforts definitely helped them make it through the winter without losing chemical feed.  The ability to maintain reliable feed of a slurry product regardless of the weather was critical, as wintertime in Washington state is the time of year when incoming flows are at a peak and alkalinity is at a minimum.

Since the terms “pH” and “alkalinity” are used so closely, we thought it would be good to include a short technical discussion on the difference between the two.  Hopefully it will help to better understand the importance of maintaining a strong buffer in your wastewater processes so that incoming “surprises” will not result in upset conditions.

Finally, in this newsletter you will be introduced to my better half, Theresa!  Being a relatively small company, members of our Administration Team need to “wear many hats” in order to keep the rest of us organized, and Theresa is amazing in her ability to manage our bookkeeping, accounting, and HR functions . . . not to mention helping to keep me pointed in the right direction!