The Shape of Things to Come

As the Solid water treatment products have become more popular and accepted in the market, there have been questions as to how the use of the products can be expanded. Early on, after the initial introduction of Solid cooling tower and boiler products, it seems, at least anecdotally, that the products were being pigeonholed to “small” accounts. It wouldn’t be uncommon to hear at trade shows and meetings something like, “the Solid products are really good for small cooling towers …” but certainly those of us at APTech hold the belief they can be made to work at accounts of all sizes.

It seems that this may have become a real life example of perception becoming reality. In actuality the chemistry that we offer in the Solid form will work on cooling towers and boilers of all sizes. We will acknowledge that as the cooling tower system gets larger there will be some challenges and there may have to be some creativity employed to make the chemical feed more convenient for both the water treater and the customer. As a system gets larger thus using more make-up water, the 11 pound Solid bottles are consumed faster and have to be changed more frequently. While many users in the market are willing to work around this to realize all of the benefits of the Solid system (see www.endurosolv.com for details) many are not.

This posed a challenge for APTech … how do we eliminate these concerns and further open up the market? Many customers have seen the successes of Solids on the “smaller” systems and want the Solids on all of their systems. With this knowledge in tow, APTech has been able to work on alternative packing and delivery of the Solid scale and corrosion inhibitors for cooling towers. The idea was to take this product out of the bottle and consequently be able to load as much product in a feeder as needed.

In 2011 APTech and EnduroSolv will introduce new six inch diameter discs of the cooling tower inhibitors. These discs will weigh approximately five pounds each and will load into a feed system that is currently under development at Hydro Systems. These discs will allow for more than 20 pounds of product to be loaded into a feeder at one time … twice the amount in a bottle. And along with twice the quantity of the product, the other benefit will be that the system can be loaded with more inhibitor at any time. No more waiting until the bottle is empty!! This can guarantee long runs of interrupted feed for towers of all sizes.

We believe this concept can further expand the market and acceptance of the Solid cooling tower products. The benefits are clear and people are becoming aware of that … now we need to make the benefits available to all who want to realize these benefits!!

Matt