We are shining our expert light on all of your questions about HDPE, applications, installation, market trends, and anything else you can come up with. From yes/no queries - to complex questions that beg an honest, expert answer, we will gather a panel with over 100 years of experience in the industry to illuminate the truth - LIVE. Start thinking about your questions and register.
You ask it - we'll answer it.
We are shining our expert light on all of your questions about HDPE, applications, installation, market trends, and anything else you can come up with. From yes/no queries - to complex questions that beg an honest, expert answer, we will gather a panel with over 100 years of experience in the industry to illuminate the truth - LIVE. Start thinking about your questions and register.
You ask it - we'll answer it.
Another edition of ISCO Insights. My name is still Will Vodak. We are here live from a huge studio downstairs. Dom, huge shout out to you and your team for getting us ready for today. We got a great presentation today. I'd love to get going into the instructions and ways that you can interact with us on this presentation. We have one of the coolest episodes we've ever done on this, so let's get into a quick set of instructions before kicking this off. All your audio and video is turned off to enhance quality. So don't worry if you're sitting at home in sweatpants, we can't see or hear you. And even better, because the people that we have here today to talk with us are the real deal. For any feedback or troubleshooting with Zoom, please use the chat box so we will do our best to help you out. Zoom expert Heather is standing by, ready to assist and last but certainly not least, this one is going to be a little different. We've asked the audience to submit questions and answers or questions beforehand. We will do our best to get to any live questions. But I think if you follow us the whole time, you'll see that any questions you have might be answered in a huge stack of questions that we have ready to roll and get answers by expert. So with with that, I'll begin to dive into our our panel of experts. Plus, Garry Bouvet, let's go ahead and start with my colleague, my colleague friend Garry Bouvet. Garry, who are you and why should people listen to you? Obviously, I'm the whipping boy for everybody else in this go. But again, for those who don't know, Garry Bouvet, with this go industry's been in the ACP business almost 30 years. I've been with ISCO 26 years in a wide variety of roles, and I am super excited to have our great friends with us today. Well, so let's let's see who we got with us today. Some of the best, I think we've learned from these individuals more so than anybody, one of them being Timmy Tipton, Technical Technical director of ISCO Industries. Timmy, welcome back to the program. You've been on here, what, now? Two or three times? Almost half a. Dozen. Three. That's a lot even better. Who are you? Why should people listen to you? Timmy Tipton, technical Director at Isco. I have been in polyethylene for the better part of 17 years and done all sorts of fun stuff. Timmy, I think you're the only guy that's read the paper handbook back to front multiple times. I don't know. Tell us what that was like. Exhilarating. Perfect. And next room, we brought some out-of-town guests. One being Dusty Langston, VP of Engineering over at WL Plastics. Dusty, welcome back to the program. You were on in the early days, right? Yeah. Then a lot of the insights. I don't think I've had six, but at least three or four. Yeah. So, welcome back. Who are you? Why should people listen to you today? So dusty, long term VP of Engineering, Quality Assurance for WL Plastics. 18 years. I bet you barely. Not even close to 30, though, but 18 years at WL Plastics, again, many different jobs within the company. But very excited. To be here. Yeah. We're going to be relying on you a lot. Last but certainly not least, dear friend of mine, the queen of HDPE Holly Link coming all the way from Colorado. Holly, welcome to the program for your first time. Thank you. Thanks so much for being here. Who are you and why should people listen to you? I'm Holly Link. I am with Global Underground Corporation in Colorado Springs, Colorado, formerly with Colorado Springs Utilities. And I have been dealing with HDPE pipes since 2004. So almost 20 years. Long time. Yeah. And it was important to me to teach people to how to use it and why, to use it and how to connect it to your system. We can't thank you enough for being here. You're an early adopter of HDPE. And so I think with this panel of experts, we can touch on virtually every facet of the industry from from sales with get with Garry through kind of production, technical services, through Timmy engineering, through Dusty and actually the ownership, you know, the case studies, the usage by the client themselves with Holly. So we've got a lot to cover today. And with that, here's how this is going to work. I'm going to go ahead and introduce your question. We have asked the audience to submit a ton of questions. We've done our best to pick the best ones, maybe combine them. If we don't get to your question today, there will be a subsequent podcast that comes out with all the the remainder questions that we are not able to get to today. So please go ahead, submit the Q&A that you have to the Zoom link. It will be able to answer those at a later date as well with our team of sales experts that will be in touch with you after the fact. But we've got a lot to cover today. I'm going to go ahead anDRead out the question. Let's keep this conversational and see where it goes and have some fun. So, Garry, let's start off. Where did the name ISCO come from? Very good question Will, ISCO started as Irrigation Supply Company back in 1967 with our founder Jimmy Kirchdorfer and he had an irrigation business and thats where it started in the back of a hardware store of his father’s HDPE pipe that thermoplastics that is our core business.. Everything we do starts and ends with HDPE pipe.. And that's it for ISCO Insights. Think about. So let's dive into the real hard hitting stuff and maybe Holly and Timmy. You guys can take a stab at this. Holly first, what are the circumstances that HDPE fails and how do you repair damaged HDPE? That's a question we often get, which is I love the idea of using HDPE. Really concerned though, that we install it. And then there's a failure and I've got a group of group of maintenance staff or or contractors in the area that aren't as familiar with it. Right. How would you respond to that question? Well, first of all, the biggest thing that you need to do with HDPE is to make sure that everybody is trained and install the HDPE properly. There are many, many different organizations there that have information for free content about repairs and that sort of thing. When it when it fails, which is very rare. But sometimes things do fail. I have to tell you, we had a coupling, electrofusion coupling that was installed and it was one of the first initial ones and early 2000s that was installed and had failed that thing held for ten years. Yeah, ten years. And then it failed. But we, we had it destructively tested to find out what happened and why the coupling actually failed. And it was installation error. It really was. When they took it apart, you could see where there was still dirt in the electrofusion area. But beginning, you know, a lot of people didn't know how how to properly prepare things completely. You had a training. Yeah. So that. Right. Training. So training and that's what we go with now. Training. But it can be repaired. There's several different ways that you can repair it once it fails. And the Municipal Advisory Board, part of PCI Institute, has even put out a booklet on how to repair your HDPE pipe if it fails. Fusion is the first best application to do, but if you can't, there is also a section in the in here that goes into mechanical couplings and how you can use it. Right. So just like you woulDRepair other pipe materials out. In your system and these things are free. So so maybe for. Was was failure a common issue? I mean, did did suddenly joints just start falling apart or was there maybe something else at play there? No, a lot of it really didn't fail. The biggest thing worry is third party damage because somebody doesn't know that the pipe is there and they don't think that anything is there. Now with national regulations of having to put in tracer wire with all underground utilities, it'll help alleviate some of that. But that is our biggest worry. Always is third party damage. Yeah, we're going to probably come to repair a couple of different times today. Tell me there's a lot of products out there for repair. I mean, you can do, as I said, fusion, you can do a mechanical coupling, flange repair. How do you look at determining what is the best case for that particular damage? In a lot of instances, it's going to be what what what do you need to get your line back up anDRunning? Right. So it's how long can it be down? So one, if it can't be down very long, you're going to go to go towards a temporary style repair, mechanical sleeve or something of that nature and then get a plan on when you can come back anDRepair it with a permanent solution or more permanent solution. Now, in a fused option in particular, yeah. We have looks like we have a little technical troubleshooting going on here, so we'll move on to the next question. What are the various methods of tapping HDPE pipe, especially for water services? Dusty why don't you maybe take a swing at that one? Yeah, this really comes down to what you're tapping and you know, if it's a polyethylene complete system, you can have a self tapping style where it will create your service line to polyethylene. That's the best case scenario. Polyethylene, main polyethylene surface. If you have a ductile iron pipe with maybe some kind of a strap on style tie in, then it's going to be a little bit different. We also have options to go from polyethylene main to a copper service. So really, we have every part out there, every fitting that you would need to tap the pipe we have available. What did you use? Did you end up using a lot of sidewall fusion saddles? Yes, that's what we use. We used always a sidewall fusion that had a corporation, a copper or Brass Corp shop insert, and so you could screw the corporation right into that. So take off with your copper pipe or HDPE. So as far as the industrial setting, not even just municipal, all of our plants are plumbed completely with polyethylene pipe. And so all those are electro fusion and with friends as well. So we can go off with, you know, a stainless steel nipple or something like that to a hose to feed a tank or what we need to in an industrial sure area. Some depth. Yeah. And then in my experience, my previous world with tapping equipment on the steel and nickel iron side, a lot of that same equipment will will tap HDPE as well. As long as you've got the right fittings and obviously the properly sized cutting tools that you're using. But many of those can work as well. So there is a variety of really options depending on size and scope of the tap that you're trying to perform. We're talking about tapping here. Holly, I want to just come back to this. I'm sure you are a big believer that you're using HDPE, one of the main benefits is, is fusion in the fuse able qualities of having a leak free monolithic system. Did you ever consider mechanical saddles or other you know, maybe bolt on connections for various laterals and services? We did try some, but we found that they weren't good in our area because we have a lot of land movement, ground movement and a lot of temperature fluctuation. So with that, the mechanical tapping saddles weren't good for us. So we always had to use a sidewalk use. Sure, we used it more than electrofusion because we in the very beginning, electrofusion didn't work for us and it wasn't related to our pressures. We had very high pressures. Where I live, it's 250 psi working pressure. So at the time things weren't developed that far. They are now because we kept asking, but but we always use a sidewall fusion and then took off with the surface line from there either copper or HDPE. We like to put newer materials in the grounDRight? Very maybe dusty as well. Let's talk about how does the cost of HDPE compare to other solutions right now? I know we don't want to maybe say, hey, the cost of eight inch TR 11 is this right now it changes. Does do you want to talk maybe about how pricing fluctuates throughout the year? And then Garry, maybe you can talk about versus other materials? Yeah. So HDPE pipe is made from natural gas. So any time you see natural gas prices fluctuate, that's going to be a direct tie in to HDPE pipe fluctuation price. But as of right now, easily the least expensive material out there compared to, you know, ductile RBC and other things. So we were commonly asked, gas is doing this, it's going up or down, Why isn't HDPE going? I mean, this is a direct correlation. Yeah. So gas, especially oil gas, diesel, those are completely separate. And again, it's that natural gas side of things, but there's a lot of other factors that play into it as well. It's not just a direct correlation. That labor freight conversion equipment, all of that. And so Garry, you want to talk about HDPE versus other materials. Over the last couple of years, pricing has been so favorable on polyethylene that has forced some projects into adopting this not newer product, but, you know, it's maybe newer to them. You want to talk about how it compares to other materials. Yeah. Will and you deal with it on a on a daily basis as well in your role. But you know, we have been very favorable and not always necessarily from a pricing standpoint as much as even an availability issue. Right. Some of those other materials are the lead times are so astronomically long that HDPE becomes very, very attractive in that situation. But it's not just the price of the pipe or the price of the material. When we look at an ACP job in a project, it's really about the total installation costs, everything from all the fittings, the other things that have to go into that, the joint, you know, the the installation methods, all of those things planned. Are we doing a, a trench list application which can really minimize your excavation costs and your downtime you're in. And there's even costs that aren't tied necessarily to a dollar, but just the inconvenience cost to your citizens and and the people around. So there's a lot of things that I think that really need to be taken into consideration. And HDPE is going to look very attractive in in most of those instances. Where you're how were your budgets affected early on with HDPE later on? Did you find that it was a cost comparable or favorable material, or were you more looking at the longevity of the product, or was it a combination of both? The cost in the beginning wasn't it wasn't more cost effective and plus there was additional time because learning, training and that kind of thing in the beginning, and which is a lot of pushback with a lot of people. But once you have the training and the familiar already with it, then it wasn't in there. And when prices started to fluctuate and come down, more than HDPE was more viable. We used it primarily in areas that where we needed to either high pressure and high corrosion, landslide areas. And if we had to bore under creek, you know, or across the highway or anything like that, we always used it in those instances. So the hard stuff was the hardest job. Right? Right stuff. We did that. Well, you touched on something else that's super important when you get into a city. We've seen adoption now across the whole country and it's the exact same cycle with everybody. It initially starts higher price because the contractor does not install at the right training. They don't understand and they're going to put a good buffer in there to make sure that, hey, if something happens that we're not even aware of, we're going to be okay. And then the more contractors that get trained in an area, that price just starts to plummet because everybody knows how easy it is to work with Phantom. And then the life cycle cost, I mean, just, you know, for the duration of the product. I mean, we're installing things now that we're hoping, not hoping that are going to last 100 plus years. Today, everything all of our legacy pipes are at their life. You know, they're all starting to fail everywhere, everywhere. And it's not only pipe, it's bridges and everything else. And something we didn't realize that corrosion was going to do to us, you know, so bad 60 years ago, you know, And so now using HDPE, you have that 100 year life and look how long you can go before you have to do anything. Or maybe never. You know. Dusty, you've seen some testing on day 101. It's that pipe just going to disintegrate. You mean. Day or year. The first 400 days? That's the part that's even one of our questions. I love talking about failure, methods of all pipe materials. And when it comes to polyethylene, the 100 years is so conservative, just incredibly conservative. Right. You know, the slow crack growth resistance is really what we worried about back in the day with the old 36, the turtles, and even back then, you know, 50 year design, life was pretty piece of cake to hit. And now the test results we have for what's called Pan Pennsylvania large test is 100 times better than those old. And so what's going on? They're saying, you know, a hundred year design life is pretty darn conservative. But no, it will not just crumble into dust at 101 years, but when it gets to that point of failure, you get like pinhole leaks, small slick crack failures that are pretty simple to repair. But again, we're so past 100 years. Yeah, it's just it's not can be any of our lifetime. I mean how does. One in to speaking on that. There was a test I believe that was done after the 10,000 cycle test on the HDPE. Oh that wasn't fatigue side so yeah. Slow cracked growth of fatigue or completely separate topics and fatigue really isn't even a design consideration for polyethylene right. 0.35 is a giant shock absorber, you know, so fatigue doesn't actually hurt it. It just expands and contracts thousands of an inch. It's very slightly, but it expands in contrast with water surge and other things. So fatigue is not a failure method for polyethylene at all. Right. We're it's definitely consideration for other climate trends. And we'll touch on fatigue a little later on. Let's keep moving down this list of questions. We've only got, I don't know, 800 more. So chance to green with get your popcorn. That's a great point. Timmy, why don't you take us through the process of pressure testing? HDPE, what does that look like? I know there's a lot of information out there. We could probably spend a whole day talking about that, but there are some maybe guidelines. Grab. This is the is there a cue card here? Grab a pen and paper. It's about to get real here, Timmy, I want to. Keep it brief. Okay. Please. We recommend following hydrostatic testing procedures. ASTM f2164 in particular. Right. So always start with water. Don't move the air unless you absolutely have to. Okay, There's some ASTM f2164 as hydrostatic testing procedures. If you get into air, there's a couple of them out there. One of them is a low pressure test, ASTM, I think F1470. Four Previously have. The same standard. Yep. So essentially I always push people to begin to investigate the standard. For the most part, we follow the exact same standards as PDC does. Okay. And maybe a little different. Maybe you're pumping. I'm letting you relax. I mean, it's a little bit more expansive, so you know it is going to lose some pressure as it relaxes into into that pressure range with. A slight over I wouldn't even call it over pressurization. But it's but we're we're pumping up a little bit more than what our test pressure is, letting it relax and then dropping into our test pressure. Yeah, it's we're talking 5%. So it's not a huge amount. Right. But you do it. You do that for about an hour and make up water, maintain that pressure for that hour. Back it off the five PCI, Start your test and that thing's just going to be steady as a rock. There's no make up water. There's no water leakage allowed. Right. It's just zero from day one. And we're following that exact procedure to the to the tooth and nail. Right. Oh, right. Tell me how you guys did your pressure testing. Well, what we did is once we had fused everything in and had installed it and buried it, let it set, you know, at least 24 hours before we filled it. And when we filled it because our pressures were so high, much higher than most people that we filled it. And then we watched it. And if nothing leaked, we knew we were good because our with our high pressures that had to hold, there was just no other option. So you took it up to the 250 or whatever that might have been, left it there. And if it didn't drop too much, you were you were confident in that system. Whatever the working pressure in that area. Great, great. Yeah. One is going to be tough. One, how is HDPE manufactured? Can we do we have anybody here that would do it well? Well. If we need to find somebody else who? So, you know, I'm getting dusty. Go ahead. Yeah. Again. Well, this is one of the largest pipe manufacturers in the United States. One of the oldest as well. Yeah. Medium density and high density. Yeah. Tell us how HDPE is manufactured maybe from, you know, oil fields all the way to two tons. Going to bring that up because we had a webinar or actually in-person a seminar that we did last week in Texas, and we got asked that question like, Hey, how American made your product? I love that question. Yes, we are the most American made product. And then even being in Texas, we are Texas made product. We were coming from, you know, natural gas manufactured or produced here in North America, and then that's going to the Gulf, you know, Houston area and being made into high density polyethylene. So we are very American made, We are very Texas made too. So that's where the base materials come from, that natural gas that's put through what's called a cracker. And it's going to be broken down into ethylene gas, which is what we're going to use as a building 0.4 for polyethylene that goes into a reactor. Other homeowners are added to it, all kinds of things. And it falls out of that reaction as like a snow, very similar to like a granule laundry detergent. That's what raw polyethylene kind of looks and feels like. And then that gets pellets and that's where we get it. As a pipe manufacturer, I will tell my microphone that as a pipe manufacturer, we get it as a natural base and then a carbon additive to make the pipe black fully you've rated for aboveground storage and use and that it gets put into a giant extruder and extruder is just a big corkscrew inside of a gun barrel. Like that's the best, easiest way to explain what that setup looks like. Yeah, exactly. And it's just pushed through, melted, mixed. Make sure that carbon black is dispersed throughout the entire pipe and it's pushed out of the end into whatever diameter pipe you're looking for IPS, dips, copper tubing, size, whatever size or air pressure you're looking for. And then it goes through a series of cooling tanks to make sure that we get it cooled down to the point where we have our dimensions of that pipe just perfect in spec to receive to be received by the customers. I'm amazed every time I go to a pipe manufacturing facility, you're expecting this chaotic, rambunctious place, right? You go there and it's kind of boring and you're watching your washing plastic mill and come back together and you guys do a great job. But the the emissions, yeah, the cleanliness, it doesn't smell like you know, it doesn't smell like anything. I mean, it's just a very clean process. One of my favorite things to talk about when we go into all these cities that we have plans with, nine plants now are built in our tent and we go into these cities and they come in and they're like, well, the buildings aren't very big compared to these other manufacturers in the towns. And we're putting 20 truckloads of it on a day. So it's very, very small footprint to be able to make all this hype and just pushing it out the door. Yeah, so it is pretty crazy, but it's very simple. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah. Well, I'm sure we'll talk. We could talk about that all day long. We'll talk about how fittings are made a little bit later on. But let's keep going. How common are frozen HDPE lines and how do you deal with them? Holly How many times did you experience I mean, you're in Colorado winters, They're a little chilly. What were your your numbers of frozen lines that you encountered? Well, we didn't really on any main line. We didn't encounter any at all because as long as there's water flowing in it, it won't start. Going to freeze. Yeah, it's just like all your other pipes. It's not going to freeze. But the only issue is in our area and high mountain areas is anything that's exposed, you know, and it's going to freeze and get cold. The only thing is, is that you can't put electricity to it like copper pipes and things like that. So thought so you have to be patient heaters a little ways away from it, blankets pipe to. You know. Those kind of things to thaw it. I've even heard of steam where you can take a steam hose and you could work it in there to find out all the way down. So did you ever have pipe break, though? Yeah, that's. That's the big question. No, that's a big question. Remember Texas when they had all of that disaster, that freeze that went through there and I got my whole thought that whole time is, oh my God, if they only had all HDPE service lines and pipe in there, it wouldn't have broken anDRuined all of those apartment buildings and everything. Yeah. So you're alluding to the fact I'll see that you can literally I mean, this is a form of polyethylene here. This can be frozen and it's not going to rupture the water, but it's going to expand a little bit. Yeah. So ice is something like 6% expansion. Sure. In the pipe can absolutely handle that. That's well within its strain. Allow it. So the pipe literally swelled with the expanding ice and it doesn't hurt the pipe at all. Once it goes back to its original size, the pipe shrinks back down. Yeah. And you're. Yeah, you're good to. Go, Garry. Yeah, well, we see that in another form of our business, which is the golf course. Irrigation. We've seen a lot of golf courses now have transitioned to HDP pipe for that very reason, right? They've got to drain their water systems out in the fall before the freeze. And with the PVC materials, with the freezes in there, you know what happens in the spring, right? You see the you see a new pond formed on, you know, fairway number three because the whole line is is cracked and split and polyethylene going in. It's not an issue you're pretty. Familiar with the ponds on fairways. Garry. You know talk about maybe and you've been involved with this a little bit too is the insulation value of HDP, right? I think a lot of people are under the impression that, you know, it's it's maybe somewhat more susceptible to the heat or the temperatures outside of it. Really not the case. I mean, the insulating value of that product itself is quite high. It is very good. And I don't know the specific r-value, I think Dustin probably can help me out with that one. But polyethylene itself is not a good conductor of heat or temperature in general. So, you know, speaking on heat, if one section of polyethylene gets hot, it takes a long time. It's not instantaneous on that pipe system. It takes a lot of time for that to to transfer. And even, you know, polyethylene pipes, surface temperature, I've I've measured pipe at 160 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface, reading a black pipe, absorbing all that U.V. and inside the pipe, it's substantially lower just because it does not conduct that heat at all. Absolutely. So, again, a very tolerant pipe. We're talking, you know, from -40 all the way up to 140 degrees for a standard HDPE pipe. And we'll touch on temperatures a little bit more coming up. Let's go next to Timmy. Can you please share some types of trenches, installation methods and how they work? Yeah. So we've got, I don't know, a handful of them. Right. So start with slip lining, which is sliding a pipe inside of a pipe. So you have a you have a hose pipe and then you pull your polyethylene pipe through. And a lot of times that's going to be used in your gravity flow applications, things that you can use the meetings number within polyethylene to downsize your pipes. Right. And keep the same flow. You've got your horizontal directional drilling for directional drilling, which was probably what from the early 1980s. And polyethylene should have been designed specifically for this. And it took a little while to figure out where we were. Good now so majority international drills. Yeah conduit gas lines. I mean, every day, right? Yep. And then, you know, you've got your pipe bursting, which is probably my favorite portion of it, replacing so much aging infrastructure. And we're able to leave the existing infrastructure in place and pull in new polyester pipe. Even larger pipes. Yeah, that was absolutely. Well, we're not really leaving in place. We're breaking it up. Right? We're leaving it in the soil, right. Living in the soil, fracturing it. And then, you know, you've got your your sweat lining. Yeah, I'm fit. And the compression fits pretty cool as well. But, you know, you're you're taking your existing hosepipe and instead of leaving an annular space or a gap, you end up compressing the polyethylene pipe through a compression sleeve or die, and then you pull it all the way through and then it expands or whatever, 24 or 48 hours after that and fits, fits and clears the air, makes it where there's no air into the space gap. It's a. Routing spacers. Yeah, tight fit liners are awesome. Yeah. Pretty pretty crazy solution there. Garry, Why would somebody lean towards a trench list? No, no, no, no. Trench. Trench. Less. Yeah, less trench insulation method. Very good. Yeah. A lot of that will is just, you know, we talked about touched on it earlier it's that inconvenient trade or that the costs associated with tearing up a street or a road. You know when you're talking about pipe bursting, you know when you can break that up and only have an entry pit in an exit pit versus tearing up the entire street. You talk about directional drilling, same thing, an entry in an exit pit going under an obstruction upon the lake river, or whatever the case may be, and not having to disrupt anything else. People don't even know it. Go. The work has been done. Right? Right. So there's just a lot of benefits and there is a cost substantial cost savings by doing those trenches methods. I've seen numbers anywhere from 20 to 40% savings over standard open traditional open cut methods. Especially for those contractors get trained in it. City of Knoxville, City of Houston, you know, Los Angeles, these guys are putting in tens of thousands of feet every week of pipe burst and that's when the costs are. Absolutely. Down, going under rivers and, uh, under major highways, you know, your major interstates, you just can't cut that. The state's not going to let you do that. You open trains to an interstate, right? Right. Which is what we do all the time. So we're the ones who are doing all that drilling, you know. And if you've. Got around one of the premier trash list contractors in the country, you guys do a great job. With that. And if there's another pipe, AC pipe that we haven't even touched on. Right. If you dig and take that out of the ground, you've got a. Whole. Different disposal considerations that exact separate your cost methods. Right. So if we can go in and pipe burst or slip line, depending on the application and leave that in the ground, a huge, huge advantage. Got to remember, though, you need to check with your state because our state doesn't allow that. Yeah. Okay. Pipe. Yeah. Just for AC pipe. Yeah. So but a lot of states are starting to come around to allowing that. Let's move on to how extensive is construction of and applications of special fittings like HDPE manholes and vaults. Tell me I can think of no better person to talk about in this industry. This is his work every day. Maybe let's start with HDPE fittings at large and then go into the specialty products. So we have it. We have a tremendous amount of PPE. Fitting options are standard fit. To many fitting options. Where we can essentially, if you can draw it, we can build it, right? So you get into standard fittings for pressure applications, elbows, tees, laterals, reducers, flanges, whatever it might be. Right. We have we have we have tremendous amount of capacity within industry to make these. Then we also have custom fittings and structures and then an ISCOrt. We have ten manufacturing facilities that handle custom fittings and structure. So we may today we may have buyer I'm trying to think of a great man building. Actually today we're about to ship 132 inch by 120 inch tool containment. Absolutely right. Absolutely enormous 50 foot base. Right, right, right. So, you know, some of that's used in landfill applications, but essentially the construct run on a a custom structure or a manhole. It can be fairly extensive. It can take a shop or a couple guys hundreds of hours to get some of these complete. Right. So and then we have other custom fittings that may take only a few hours. Right. So it really just varies upon the difficulty of what we're trying to do for our customers and applications. And I still think you probably run into and this kind of there's a question here about an energy dissipated. Those are becoming more common as formulators. I mean so many different types we really probably haven't seen the end of what HDPE can be used for in terms of a structural possibly. I've got location, we've got customers that are sending stuff almost daily on things that we've never. Seen before. Oh, hey, can you build this? Did you say flux capacitor? Yes. Tokyo. Ed, Right. Yes. So I mean, the bottom line is I think the it's quite extensive, the construction of applications of manholes, vaults, fittings. Uh, you know, I somebody the other day said the HDPE Industries standard is custom fabrication. What makes your job very easy? Have perfect. And then you want to talk about there's there's a very direct question here about energy dissipated. Have you seen these pop up? A little. Yeah. We've been we've been getting more and more into them. Right. Right. Um, essentially just throw out the design and we'll take a look at it and figure out what we can do. Great CSR drawings in and we can go can take a look at those. Here's a great question. We're all going to chime in on this one. What are the backfill and loading requirement of pipe? Are there compaction recommendations to avoid crushing or damaging the pipe? Dusty Why don't you start off telling us about the design window within 8 a.m. 55 Yep. So the very first thing ASTM standards for burial on pressure pipe or on gravity sewer pipe are the same burial ASTM standards. Like that's the first thing. Get out of the way. Let's just have one more time. DVC and Polyethylene using the same ASTM standards. Now, where it goes to m55, it's an American Waterworks design consideration Design met manual and it has what's called the design window. So this is anything DR 21 or thicker with two feet of burial at least is pre design window. You don't need to worry about calculating all that. If it's an h 20 live low the pavement there needs to be a three foot barrier. Let's break this down a little slower. So two feet, two feet. Burial. I just want to stress this because as we think we get this question all the time is a dr 1 and. Thicker DR 21. Okay. So if you've got a DR 21 pipe, you're going to. See. Right DR 17 dr9 in your case or thicker and it's more than two feet burial. Yeah. You're good to go. Okay, that's using a soil modulus from 1000 4000 piece. Correct. Which is super easy. Get to class one, class two, class three 95% compaction and you hit that number. Piece of cake. Right. So that all that works. All done for you. If you want to go above that, you want to go super deep burial. You want to go 100 feet burial. This is not something that's out of the ordinary. When you drive several hundred feet, mining several hundred feet, burial. There's calculations in the Plastic Pipe Institute Chapter six Therapy handbook. We'll go over shallow burial, too. I had one just the other day. Here we have a job site. This eight inch 11 line has already been buried, but it's only six inches of cover. And we got 80 ton haul trucks going over this thing. Are we? Okay. That chapter will help you design those calculations and you can figure that out. So that's a great resource for it. Where do you want to go? That Chapter six. How did you guys use native backfill? That's a common question that we get native soils in your backfill. Yes. Yes. A lot of times sometimes we you know, we use preferred backfill, you know, a little bit of sand. And sometimes we didn't use crusheD Rock because you don't really want to use that around. But native soil is good. Sometimes we just used cleaner soil that was easier compacted. You just want to make sure you don't have sharp rocks and stuff sticking into your pipe and that kind of thing. Boulders called. Yeah, big point. Loads, right. But you want to, you know, just compact it the same that you do with other pipes and put it in the ground. So let's maybe state some design resources for the audience. They can drop down right now and visit a little later. For more information about this interview. And 55 is one of them. Chapter six is another section. There's some design calculations online. The the FTP app is a good one. Where else can they go? Dusty There's Amster Howard's book. He's actually got the second version out now for Pipeline design and he's by far one of my favorite humans in this whole country. He is so good. And his big thing he's pushing right now is you don't compact just six inches on top of a pipe, especially S&P five ACP pipe is very flexible. And so if you get like a vibrating compactor on top of that thing, it's going to want to bounce around you unless you have some substantial cover over it first. So compacting the haunches, Crown mine, all that is a little different. But once you get to the top of the pipe, you need to make sure you have some cover on top of it before you start compacting. Interesting, start bouncing. He cares about it more because it's concrete pipes, things like that. You can actually crack and you want it hurting the pipe during compaction or as you're not going to hurt, but you're definitely going to get that thing bouncing. And another common question we get, I think it's a little later on, but this sounds like a great place to talk about it this h 20 loading. So if you need, you know, heavy highway traffic, heavy machinery, traffic in mining applications, those machines are enormous. How do you go about protecting that FTP II from buckling? Does you want to take that? Yeah. The simple way is m55 design with no, it's three feet of burial. So as long as again you get that thousand pieces of modulus, three feet of burial, you're good with age 20 loads. If you start getting into super heavy equipment, then you start getting past that age 20 into, you know, haul equipment and things like that. But let's say. 80, 85, what the train load train would do that with stuff like, Oh, absolutely, we do airport loading, which is also extensive, do that on a normal basis. Well and all those equations to calculate that same chapter six PCI handbook, all. Of that is. There. Yeah, it's perfect. All the tables. So we're just going to show Dusty and Timmy's cell phones at the end of this equation and go. From there from the air. But let's let's stay here on this trench topic here. You want to talk about maybe standard trench details, dusty trench widths that you might run into. I get a lot of questions about dual pipes, sometimes in the same trench. What are some considerations to take there? Yeah, you're actually puts all three in the same trench. You're not quite there in North America. Yeah, but they'll put water right next to sewer, right next to gas in one trench. It's all leak free. So you have to worry about having them separated by so much distance. Wow. Makes much sense, right? So if you have multiple pipe in a trench, you need to have at least six inches of separation. It really comes down to what your compaction tools look like. They do make compaction tools that you can get down into the launch areas if you want to put them even closer. Flow film makes it the don't have to worry about food haulage compaction. So it really comes down to what your design is. But minimum six inches of equation between pipelines and then same goes for trench with whatever your pipe diameter is six inches on either side. Great. Do you though put a cover on the FTP pipes before you put in flow biofilm defense? So if you wind up pouring it in lifts, So let's say you only go up to the top of the haunch, then it's not going to float. And then you go up to the midline, spray line. It's not going to float. You try and pour that all at once. You have to have something holding that pipe down. I also recommend filling the pipe with water. Now, it might not matter. You might not to hold perfect to grade on like a pressure line, but if it's a gravity line, you're putting like super stacked sandbags on the pipe every 1520 feet to hold it down. If you want to put it in one lift. But if you're not pouring that, if you're pouring several less than your. Okay. So we require that there be a six inch layer of soil before you put in that flow. So. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So protected the pipe a little bit. I think that's a great point. I mean, you took some steps, maybe in addition to what the recommended settings were here, every utility, every area is going to be slightly different. It might require some some ultimate design tweaks or considerations. So, I mean, for you going out, we're using DR9 as your standard. At first I heard that I was like, Man, that's kind of overkill. And then realizing the slopes and the grades totally, totally, you know, necessary. So I think it's important to note that, you know, we have some common practices here, but, you know, it's it's there's not one size fits all for really anything. Yeah. Especially. So again, little states like Texas and the Texas Railroad Commission is completely different than anybody else in the country. Right. So it really to state to state it does. The you just mentioned gravity applications. Thank you for bringing that up. This is a huge topic we always get asked about, which is what about pipes of gravity applications mainly what about the ID bead? And this is such a such an interesting topic because I think there's a lot of opinions, data, tests, best practices that, you know, different situations like we're just talking about you've it everything on the gravity right on the line So tell us what what went into that approach and that design method. Mainly for flow and also to keep anything from catching. Sometimes your internal bead on a pipe can curl like this and and leave you no place where things can get in there and you don't want your line to get something. So for us, we we did that, we debated it. But if we were in a really steep area and there was a lot of slope at least of 7%, then we sometimes allowed, you know, to beat. Yeah, but generally we always debate, especially on a sewer applications. Yeah. Yes. Like cities of Knoxville Cities, Houston mentioned a few times they're doing what's called pneumatic pipe bursting going for manhole, a manhole replacing clay lines, duct or whatever. And those guys I've seen anything more than 1% slope. They'll leave if you have so little. They don't find anything happening. Their differences there. And there's like in this area too. There's not a ton of yeah, there's not a ton of information out there. Would you ever do maybe a force main or is there something pressurized. We probably would to make it smooth, you know, to, to, to let it go. Garry Yeah, I mean I would, I've seen that especially in slurry applications where you know, it's going to it can potentially harden up over time like it's not going to be a constant flow. So it'll turn on and turn off, you know, flash lines, for example, will drift will be that because that stuff will hardened and it's like concrete. Once it hardens on there so will be fittings that that we manufacture even before they get out for applications like that. What size That's a question in here. What size is the smallest that you can go to in the. Largest I believe the smallest debating tool is a four tool. And the chute the largest keeps changing. I think we're now you're aren't you on a job that's like 54. We're on a 48 and 44. Okay. Right now, I think the tool goes up to 54. And so really, I mean, it seems like for whatever I mean, if you ever outside of the 54 inch line that needs to be deviated you're going to send Timmy on a skateboard or so. But really, I mean, again, there is there's a lot of different practices here in the debating world. And I do want to ask about, though, on the pressure side, whether it's sewer force, main waterlines, fire lines, it has a C factor, the pipe has a C factor of 150, and that is including those internal fusion beads. Sure. So it's much more slick on the inside surface than, you know, all the metallics that are out there, even with those internal. Timers getting away from here a little bit because I'm enjoying this conversation so much. Let's keep going here. Garry, what is the process of welding pipe and fittings with different dealers risks to that? Well, there is an ACM standard associated with that that allows you one D-R variation in your fusion process. So for example, we use DR 11 pipe and we need fittings above eight inch. It's going to be a fabricator fitting those are commonly made one D or thicker, so it's made D or nine. You can fuse those together with no issue whatsoever. You slightly modify your fusion procedure to basically the the your melt time is for the thicker pipe and your fusion pressure is for the thinner pipe. And that's kind of the per the ASTM standard for that. To be in a lot of your shops you guys are routing the fitting ends to match the same D are is that necessary or more cosmetic? It just it is more complicated. Yeah. All right. So, Garry, just start on the video on our YouTube channel on this is like a six minute video that goes through the process of different VR fusion, a single VR fusion. When you get into more more than one VR, contact us. We're going to ask some questions to be able to figure out a bit if it's appropriate for your application. Yeah. You want to touch real briefly on and this kind of comes into the DRating of PI. Do you want to talk about equivalent dimension ratio and what that means just on a general level? So in fabricated fittings change direction, you end up with a change in geometry, change so you it's straight pipe and so it requires a thicker pipe to handle the same pressure in the industry. For a long time we didn't have a good time to talk about what's frustrating of a fabricated fitting was. And so some point, you know, 15 years ago someone came up with the equivalent dimension ratio. So essentially what this says is that for a AVR 11 fitting, you're getting a fitting that is pressure to the same as a D 11 pipe. So it's called the equivalent dimension ratio. Sure, we get we could spend all now talking. I mean there is there is externally reinforced fittings there to keep the ID control. There's payable fittings, there's payable fittings. I mean, how much time do we have? Not much. To draw it. Again. Yeah. If you can draw, we can build it. Does you want to take this one DRating Pipe pressure for temperature. Do we need to account for atmospheric temperature or only the fluid texture? Great question. Here. That is. And the more I talked about these kind of figures, the less questions I wind up getting in the future because more people will watch this and learn this. Sure. But it's a very consistent question that I get. Most of the time we're going off fluid temperature, Barry Pipelines, even hot water applications. We are going off of fluid temperatures. That is the most common. Now, if you call me and say, hey, I've an aboveground pipeline in West Texas that I'm putting some other fluid there, then we're going to need to start taking consideration atmospheric, because if we have very, very high pipe temperatures in West Texas, I can see if I get up to 160 degrees, then you're going to wind up taking kind of an average temperature between your fluid and external pipe temperature. That's a very conservative way of thinking about it, because you're not going to be at that 160 degrees external skin temperature all the time. Right? It's only going to be four, maybe ten in the morning until eight at night. And so it's very conservative to take that average if you really want to get into the weeds of it. I'm sure you could figure out more of a suede pressure one way or the other, but that's the only time we really see it. The nuclear guys, they like to get really into the weeds on this stuff. And so they'll actually take ground temperature, which will be very cold on their hot water lines, because that will give them a higher pressure because they'll take the middle ground of the ground temperature, 60 degrees versus their fluid temperature, 104 degrees, and that can get them a higher pressure readings. But most of the time we're going to go off of that. If it's a buried asset, you're going off a fluid temperature. And again I hate to keep saying this, but there's no like simple answer to this. I mean, really, I mean, the experience. Fluid, right? Temperature above great. Pressure. Last question. Right. But if you want to get in the way, you have something you really need to have. You're doing like a inflatable. What was that? Oh, yeah. Blue. Oh, but if you're getting into really that much of a detail and you're doing like finite element analysis, right? The American Society of Mechanical Engineers has a great equation to figure out exactly that pipe pressure. Yeah, great. That's very intense to me. You've been dealing with lecture fusion for a day or two, I think. Why don't you talk about the reliability of electrofusion couplers? Should they only be used as a last resort due to the insulation construct ability? That's why gas uses them. You know, I'm a fan. I'm a I'm a a fan of electrofusion. Right. Right. So but the thing with electrofusion is that you have to use the right tools. Yeah, it's always about the tools, always about your prep. So, so long as you have the right tools and which are you're going to have grounding in clamps, you might have a pipe puller to pull your couplings on. You have the appropriate scrapers, not just a hand scraper, but a pillar and paper, not a sandpaper, no grinders, but you're looking at pointers, you're looking at things that are that are removing the appropriate amount of material. You know, I'm a fan of watch fusion. Yeah. And how this question came up so much that while you were on the municipal advisory board, this was a topic that you guys approached, correct? Right. Would you tell us about the generic? The generic guidelines was it may be two. And one two. 112. That's right. And may be one and two on electrofusion for smaller and larger fittings. But what's larger? How big is large? Big. It's not very big. It's like 14 and 12. But I. Would say. Smaller. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the biggest thing was, was that people were having so many issues and each electrofusion manufacturer had a different way to install their electrofusion fittings. They each had a different prep, a different, you know, what you can use, what tools you could use and that kind of thing. And we went as there may be board to all the manufacturers and asked them too, Can we please get one set of directions for all Electra electrofusion fittings so that everybody can apply the fittings, help you, you know, be able to place your fittings in the market. And they all agreed. They all got together. Every manufacturer and we came up with a generic electrofusion standard for installing them. So in and it's worked wonders because that helps in training everybody out there and electrofusion. Well, the genesis was there's not really an incentive. 2620 is guides, but fusion. But there isn't really a detailed process. ASTM Correct. Henry Right. So I mean, it mostly relies back on the manufacturer to dictate their installation methods. The document that you guys have put together, I again, I highly encourage you if you're using electrofusion to check out the Municipal Advisory Board, maybe one and maybe two most diagrams of the do's and don'ts. And it does fall back on training and installation. I personally witnessed, you know, dozens of 24 inch couplings be successfully installed in a project by somebody that has been doing it for 20. I mean, would I recommend that every day? I don't know. It depends on the circumstance. Tell me when you get electrofusion request, what are the things you're looking for on what you would Recommend? Either we use limited access, but fusion, maybe we use flanges, maybe we use electrofusion. Nautilus, I mean sizes, sizes, a portion of it, right? You're looking at how much access do you have, How many times can you go in? And is this a single shot? Like, do you have another option if this doesn't go well in, then, you know, realistically speaking, what what do you have available? Do you have the appropriate equipment? Do you have all of your electrofusion equipment? Do you have your limited access? But fusion equipment, all these things come into play on what you want to do. And you know, it is a case by case decision, especially when it comes to a repair. You know, when when you're when you've an open trench, it's a lot easier to get a fusion unit in. Right. When you are up against a wall on a Friday or a Saturday morning and you have a repair that you need to do. Sometimes, you know, the electrocution is a better option. Totally. Let's talk about the bend Radius HDPE pipe. Garry, why don't you talk about maybe the actual formula. Let's put you on the spot. Bill. I've been around formulas. You've been around 100 years. I don't know. Maybe you learn a thing or two. What is the bend Radius of HDPE? How does that work and how can one calculate that? Well, it's really dictated by the draw of the pipe. Well, and there is a whole table in the pie handbook that gives you that that bend radius. So, you know, commonly and most common pipe sizes are 11. That bin radius, for example, is 25 times the outside diameter of the pipe. So ten you've got a ten inch DR 11. Yeah. The bend radius for that would be 250 inches ten times. That will actually be incorrect. Will be called has the yield of ten inch pipe. You know thank you very much. This is why I need to continue to come to school here every day with with these folks. Yeah. So 63 times 20. Well, let me give you let me give you one key. To use, 2812 easy math equation all the time. So you're been raised with them, be 500 inches. And that is if you understanDRadius from your geometry class that from the center of your circle to the outside of that of that curve. Perfect. Now, Holly, does this mean that we can just now twist bend that pi however you want? I mean, like a like a candy cane all over the place? No. I've seen contractors who try to or I've even seen engineers design it. Such compound bends where you come up, you're coming up and then you want to do this. Well, that that doesn't work, especially with a drain pipe that just does not work. You're not going to go root. It is not going to get around that corner and you're going to have to fuse in bends. You've got to use those span ratios to be able to do it correctly and to have your pipe last longer. Yeah, it's a. Little counterintuitive, too, because the thicker of the pipe is actually the tighter tie, but the harder it is going to have to bend. So the thinner pipes got to be a little easier on them because there's more of a capability of, you know, a potential kink. Right. But we're the thick pipes. You're not going to get that stable can be very difficult to get to that point there. If you have any fittings, will in that line, your bend radius now becomes 100 times the pipe break. So just that's another so another factor. Okay. Dusty, So what would one be looking for? Let's say you take it past the point of the ability for that product to bend. How would one know that it is been kind of taken to the max and stretched too far? Well, that's a great question because if you do get to that point where you can't get like, Oh, what's my bad? You know, you're pulling it into place or something like that, and then you string the pipe back out, it will want to go back to round. But if you're wondering if you've permanently hurt it, you're going to watch for what's called stress whitening. You know, it's strained whitening. So if you over stream the pipe, you'll actually get white lines on the outside of the pipe and the ears of the kink. And if you see those white lines, cut it out, fuse it back together. Just remove that section. And you can just cut out that two foot section. If you lose a few feet of pipe. Right. And you. Well. No, no problem. Great, great stuff. Let's keep going. And we're going to hit on the hard hitting questions here. I love this one. Can you speak on the applications using ductile iron fittings, mega lugs and grooved fittings? I've seen this is a possibility, but does not seem like it is as as common in practice. Tell a story. We recently switched a large row water project from PVC using ductile iron and fittings with, you know, mega lug connections thrust blocks. When they switched to HDPE, they looked at using HDPE HDPE fittings. Holly you've used ductile iron fittings, but you've also used HDPE fittings. Tell us the difference in your opinion. Well, to me, to fuse, everything together in a monolithic system is the best if you absolutely do that. But if you get in a place where you can't get a fusion machine in there or be able to do what you need to do, then you can. You also use a ductile iron fitting to put it in there. But you have to remember too, that using these additional fittings gives you another leak point and you have your corrosion factor. And the biggest thing with HDPE is having a non corrosive system. I mean, something that's going to last 100 years, but it is possible with ductile iron fittings and there are coatings on those fittings that help make them last as long. You hope that they lasts as long as the pipe and potentially that's your weak point. Tushy HDPE fittings. Another benefit is they're fully restrained no thrust blocks required fully fused in. Do you want to talk more about that? Yeah. MJ adapter. You got to make sure that you're talking it properly. There's some design characteristics or considerations there. HDPE Pipe. Yeah, direction changes. Mm mm A Tee... mmm... zero. There's no need for thrust blocking every fusion that you perform is a fully restrained joint, so you have no need to do any thrust blocks for directional changes in polyethylene system. The other thing too, with your fittings is that you need to make sure that you have the appropriate ring. For us, it was rings on MJ adapters and that kind of thing when we had to bolt something up and depending upon which the fitting is, it was either we could never use ac1 53 ring because we broke them when we put them in, you know, we. Passed a couple of years there to that. We're getting a lot of trying to knock. Off. Three rings and San Francisco was plagued with that for a couple of years. Yeah, even if they break like that, we always required a C110 ring and on a heavier fitting, a flange fitting, it was a c207. So you just have to make sure that you're getting what you need if you're going to use that type of fitting a ductile Okay. Yeah, good question here. I heard that AWWA C901 only includes dr9 pipe not DR 11. Is this true? If it is true, why the change? If only we had somebody that knew this one. I love talking about this again. The more I talk about it, the less phone calls. But. But you were involved heavily in the adoption of age. I don't want to see. And we were all for it. You're absolutely all for it. So this started as a project from chlorine Categorizations for HDPE Pipes. So this started well over ten years ago and seen on a one was the first standard that adopted CC3 which is the highest chlorine categorization for polyethylene possible into the standard it's required of all pipes. One of the other things that we kind of shot ourselves in the foot with with polyethylene way back when, same as you guys in your fittings, there's so many options and there are so many options. And so that we were trying to get away from that. We want something that somebody is going to pick up off the shelf from any distributor across the country and it's going to work in any water system. It doesn't matter for Phenix, it doesn't matter for Maine. Just anywhere you get it, it's going to be a consistent product. Pex did this forever ago and it was a great idea for them at that time. It's a great idea for us now, right? So dr9 is the only thing available if you're doing an irrigation job and you want to. Which DR 11 there are still ASTM standards of that pipe to be made to. But if you want to put water a system and heat up a system in a municipal water, it is going to be dr9. And is that just just the background there? Why is that? Is that to get the pressures needed? It's definitely to monitor temperature. So it's slightly temperature again in those very hot areas. Phenix, Tucson, it's a very old depth. There's no frost line. So we saw burial depths of six inches and ground temperature is six inches and Phenix is 100 degrees. And actually I was in Phenix a couple weeks ago and they're saying they have wells in that valley that produce water at 100 degrees. So we're now going to try for an 800 degree water temperature. Refill, hot tubs. Right. And make sure that we have a pipe system that can handle the worst case scenarios, the most aggressive in the country. Right. And so other parts of the country. Do you need a DR9? No, you don't. But we wanted, again, something for everybody to be able to use and have a consistent across the country. And the standard previously with all those other listings and it was so confusing. You could get a two inch DR 17 for. Example. Right right. Yeah. Make it consistent. Make it consistent easy stackable for you guys like ISCO and customers like Holly, to be able to say, Hey, we know that this two inch nine is going to be and then. Those sizes we're, we're talking a negligible difference if anybody's worried about the ID. Going. From 11 to 9. I mean, you you couldn't even measure that. Yeah. So it's not going to impact, you know, any flows or anything like that. Yep. And C901 is only three inch pipe and down. Exactly. Tubing sizes. Dusty. You know, we got to talk about chlorine too when I can when it comes to that. A question here is tell us about CC3 and the changes to standards affecting the HDPE industry. So this is definitely one of the biggest questions we get across the country. Does it matter where we're at? We've heard things about chlorine in HDPE pipe. Can you please clarify? And so this goes back to Phenix, Arizona, Tucson where we were getting tubing size failures in less than 15 years. And this was the same thing I was talking about earlier with slow cracked growth, pinhole leaks, small slip cracks. That was the failure style. But chlorine was speeding that failure up. And so we first had to figure out, well, can we replicate this in a lab? And we were able to do that. We brought Jana Laboratories into it and they did a lot of testing for us so we could figure out an accelerated version to be able to get a failure. That was the exact same style failure. But in a lab situation, we got that dialed in and then we started testing across the board. All the materials are there now. Part of this was back in the 36 awake days, the 36 suites. There were some 47 hands on the scene. But it was amazing how fast the entire industry came to the table on this and got these three rated materials available so quickly. So for like a year, plastics, we had a product that was super chlorine resistant. We're like, Oh, we're going to sell autonomous. And then the whole industry, like a year later was right there with some, right. Come on. But it was a good thing. This is good. But yeah, so it's been several year five six. I'm trying to think when we got the actual ASTM standard finished six, eight years that we've been out of there and it's been in American water work standards now seen on a one for four or five years. Scenario six just adopted it, I think two years. Yeah. Yep. So now every American water work standard actually requires that CC three, which is again the highest chlorine concentration or chlorine resistance number that you can get for. Now are manufacturers like. Well and some of your your competitors are they manufacturing all with CC threes or is that need to be a special request port per your job. No especially on water pipe. I can't actually think of a resin that's available nowadays. 4010 that's not CC three. I don't think any exist in the industry at all. So if you're going to order ACP PI 4710, you're going to get CC three. And especially if it's water pipe, it's going to be mandated to be printed. On the on the label. So. 621. Right. Yeah, Yep. Yep. 1220. One Garry. Since we're talking just dust, I want you to touch base. We, I've run into a couple instances chlorine dioxide as a, as a disinfectant being used. I don't know how many of our listeners out here today are dealing with that. Do you want to touch on that, how it works in in that for those people that might be dealing working with that? Yes, there's kind of a hierarchy of chlorine or oxidation. Yeah, chlorine. I was in Texas last week, three different cities in Texas. They all use chloramine, which recently pipe is fantastic, right? Chloramine doesn't attack HDPE pipe at all. Well, sorry, it's the least of the three where chloramine can be aggressive towards some rubber gaskets, but it's the best oxidant or the best disinfectant for HDPE Pipe. Look for I mean, the next one would be chlorine, just free chlorine. And then the worst one is chlorine dioxide. Chlorine dioxide is very rarely used. It's in less than 1% of municipal applications. So if you are using it, please talk to us first before using HDPE and put it in your system and we'll try and figure out, you know, it depends on how much you're using, what your water temperatures are. There are a lot of things to consider there. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Last Question here. Let's talk about taste and odor concerns. Dusty and Holly, I mean, you've probably experienced this over the time. There's a lot of concerns out there about HDPE leaching the water or taste and odor concerns. Once you talk on that and and what the data and testing is like to back up our. Findings, the great part is there is no taste or odor issue with HDPE fibers, so much so that we actually have the first beer name in the world. I love this slide. Peter talks about it all the time in Brussels where they actually pipe their beer from the manufacturing location to the bottling plant. And if you have to worry about a taste and odor issue, you're not going to be using it for beer. And then all the beer companies like Colorado, for example, they're using it for their water lines as well. So taste and odor where it matters. It's not an issue. So same thing with your water system. There's not a tasting odor issue. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't find it. We didn't people didn't. Complain about it. Good. Yeah, this wasn't scheduled here, but maybe you could just take a second to talk about your experience. And just on a broad scale, what was it like adopting HDPE early? Would you do it again? And what do you say to those out there that are in looking at their system in a more comprehensive way to decide about what materials they're using moving forward? Um, the experience was hard at first because there were a lot of operators and people who did not want to change and that was a big thing with HDPE Pipe, you know, they didn't want to change. I talked to a salesman once who was from England, and I asked him, I said, What is it about Europe adapting HDPE so readily in the United States? Not taking it on. He Oh, you Americans, such metalheads. So. Well, in engineering school we had metal classes for all three classes. We never had plastic class. No. So but I would do it again because even though it was hard in the beginning and things have changed so much since the beginning, I mean, since 20 years since I've been in it for 20 years, that things have gotten better. And I have to tell you, you should go this way and adopt it and ask for help. There are so many people out there that are we're here to help to answer any questions. There are organizing out there to help to do HDPE work. We've ah, I've already gone through all the pain. I don't want you to go through the pain again, you know, to learn what's best, what's not. And and we're here to help anybody do that and, and work on it and change to their system or you know, replace parts or begin to move that way. And I mean, you do it by bit so you don't have to do it all at once. But we I, I would definitely do it again. All right, Dusty, Terry, Garry, any final thoughts here? We've covered a lot of ground. We only got about halfway through this. So there's going to be a lot to come. We're sorry. Any final thoughts, Dusty? Oh, I'm trying to think of any other questions that I get all the time. The lifespan of Dusty. Again. Is well over a hundred years. Yeah, and it's funny when you really start looking at the numbers, it's, it's well, it's a long time past 100 years, generation, even putting a hundred year stamp on something. We were the first to do it. Everybody else just kind of followed suit. And even then people were like, How can you say this? Like, how can you even we can't comprehend 100 year life. And so if I were to go out there and say, Oh, it's like 250 years, no one's going to believe me. But I always like to talk about the things I get most of the phone calls about because the more I talk about it, the less phone calls I get. Not that I don't like talking to people, but, you know, please send me an e-mail. That's all I'm saying. But the biggest one, I think is still going to be transitions. So let's say we do a directional drill or a river under a road using polyethylene for the hard part. And then you transition and go back with, you know, a PDC or Dr. Lyon. It's important to restrain that traction. And that's one of the. Biggest the pipe links down. Well. It depends upon what it. Can be one or the other. You get your thrust blocking. You don't need to be worried about restraining other pipe down a lot down the line. But if you're doing like a mega log or something like that, you need to make sure you're restraining several joint. Yeah So that's a big one. Whether it's a pipe burst, whether it's a directional drill, do your installation, let it sit for a while, let it get consistent with the ground temperature, let it get relax away those stresses before you're hooking it up and putting your thrust blocks. And when you do that, make sure you have enough at the ends. Also true. Yeah. Don't pull it into your. That's a mantle and a pipe burst and cut it flush right away. Let it sit for a long day. Yeah, absolutely. Tell me anything from you. Just call us with your needs. Right. Well said. Draw some really crazy stuff so that they actually can build it. I'm really curious. Very creative. They're very creative. Garry, That's been a fun one. Oh, this. This exciting. We've had on the show. Having the pad and these people carry some of the load because you get awful heavy during a normal life inside soil. So now always got to have you around. Yeah, well I think. With that we'll call it. I'd like to go ahead and talk a little bit about this great company that I work for and that is sponsoring hosting this event here is its go industry has been around a long time, only dealing with one product, and that's HDP. We've got decades of experience from materials supply, engineering services, design services, fabrication technicians, equipment. Basically, Ensco is here to support you from the very beginning. From this point, right now, you're just thinking about it through your specification, budgeting, supply the materials, making sure everything gets out there in its quality manner as possible, and that is installed safely. That's what we love to do. So please give us a call. We've got around the country ready to help out with any project that you have, whether it's up in the Yukon or down in Florida. We're here to have you covered facilities nationally as well. So with that, I'd like to thank everybody so much for joining today. Please connect with us on various social media channels. I love saying this because I feel like a true influencer. Tik Tok, Snapchat. What are we getting Snapchat? Heather We have Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube. We're posting a lot of great content there, including events like this, and we hope you'll keep tuned in because we're not going to stop here and we might even do a second one of these someday, hopefully soon. So with that, I would really like to thank our guests from coming in from out of town. And you, too, from from coming in from downstairs or upstairs. Thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it. And thanks to you all for joining us today. That's it. Until next time on ISCO Insights. In the meantime, stay safe out there and as always, happy to see us and we'll see you next time.