Elevated Excellence: PE-RT Pipe for High-Temperature Applications

Tired of long lead times and subpar performance from legacy pipes? Say hello to PE-RT pipe, the sustainable and superior alternative to high-temp/high-pressure pipe applications.

Discover PE-RT's core benefits and excellence in various applications, including:

• Commercial projects
• Radiant heating
• District heating
• Water service lines
• Geothermal ground loops

We'll cover:

• Benefits of PE-RT pipe for high-temperature applications
• How PE-RT pipe offers superior performance
• The longevity and durability of PE-RT pipe
• How PE-RT pipe solves lead time frustrations

Transcript

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Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another edition of ESCO Insights. My name is still Will Bodak. Here is your host excited to be back with you for another round of education. Today we've got a great topic and thank you all so much for joining us. Let's go ahead and pull these instructions out for everybody. First, your audio and video are turned off to enhance our quality and to avoid distractions. If you have any feedback for for Zoom issues or troubleshooting with Zoom and still haven't figured out how to use Zoom, God bless you. Please use that chat box. We will do our very best to answer and help out in real time. But most importantly, as the Q&A tab there, you'll see that that tab down below. Please go ahead and send those Q&A questions in on any topic related to HD or Garry here to talk about life and we'll answer as best we can. We have one of the industry's best and brightest and Tim Tipton behind the desk here answering questions live on air. And last but certainly not least, you have myself and a brand new headshot from Garry about. It's about time. Garry, welcome back to the program. Well, great to be here. Yeah, we needed a new headshot there. I think my previous one had the burka. Yeah, it was from. Around the seventies. I think the first one was. So we I thought we had a poll question, which was Ray Garry's new headshot, 1 to 10. But I guess we don't have that. It's all Tim. Hortons. All kidding aside, Garry, who are you and why should people listen to you today? Again, Garry Bouvet Cisco Industries just celebrated my 26th year. Here it is. Go Will. Thank you very much. It just means I'm getting a lot older. I'm project manager, get involved in a lot of different things, especially projects. Primary focus right now is obviously the topic we're talking about today high temperature, polyethylene pipe. But anything associated with HDPE, training, education, really, that's kind of what I spend most of my time doing now. You've done a lot of roles for Cisco, and that's why we come to you for all the knowledge. So thanks for being here with us today. I'd like to ask our audience a quick question here. And this is going to be our first poll question of the day, just to get a sense of who all is here on this presentation is, when did you last back in high temperature pressurized pipe? Was it in the last week? You haven't done it for a while or you've net you've never expected it anyways, these are all our poll questions here. Please go ahead and answer those to the best of your ability. I know we have a wide range of individuals on today's program. Yeah, I think it'll be across the board. Well, I don't think it'll be one one way or the other. Yep. And it looks like not about 60% of everybody answering has not specked in high temperature. So we're excited that you're joining us. So let's dive right into it. We've got a lot to cover today, Garry. The first is what's our topic? What are we pr t? What the heck is this? Well, that's it stands it's an acronym standing for polyethylene raise temperature. And we're going to dive into more about the differences between standard or conventional HDPE pipe and this high temperature per pipe that we're going to spend a lot of time on. And you've been working with this product now for how long? This is this is not a new product. I mean, it's been out for a bit now. It's new in general terms, but it's been out here in the US about seven years and I've been involved pretty much from day one. Right. Fantastic. So Garry, let's go ahead and get started. This when I first came in in the industry, I'd never thought about pipe, right? You just never thought about how things were transported from one place to another. And then you learn that this is how we've done it since you were born in the early 1900s. This is this is just crazy. We have pipe that is so old, decaying, corroded, corroded. I mean, this is a huge problem. And we continue to put the same pipe that failed in the first place back into the system. Tell me what you feel about that. Yeah, I mean, we're all creatures of habit, right? Well, and, you know, engineering and design is no different. And we see metal pipes as kind of always been the traditional materials. And you said earlier that, you know, these are all old pipes, but that may not necessarily be the case. Some of these this corrosion that we deal with can occur very rapidly depending on situation and and what's flowing through the particular pipe. But we spend billions of dollars every year trying to prevent in either repairing or preventing this type of corrosion, which is naturally going to occur with metal pipes. Over the life cycle. And that's why I always get a kick out of when we're asked to compare inductive iron IDs. And then we see this ten years later, It to me it's, you know, I think there's a better way to do it. So we're going to talk a little bit about maybe some ways that that could be done today. This is a huge problem that we're facing. I know the infrastructure bill has injected a lot of money into the into the industry in terms of being able to fix some of this stuff. So I think our main goal here is to educate on what the options are out there for replace. Yeah, and some of this will this historical usage of of metal pipes you know comes down to what used to run through it. Right. That is changing within the industry as well. Right. We're seeing heating and cooling using hot water instead of steam and. Right. We're probably ethylene. Wouldn't be a good choice. Thermal plastics would not be a good choice for steam. It's a perfect choice for hot water application. Innovation keeps. Driving. Absolutely. So that will never stop. So I think in the past, the starting logical starting point is let's go with a usable plastic here. Now we've got this great new product called HDPE. It's got all these fantastic features, benefits, pros, you know, maybe a cleaner too. We'll touch here in a bit once you start with the pros here. Why are people switching to HDPE from like Dr. Lyon Carbon steel, traditional metallic. Right this as opposed to the per pipe. This is not a new product. This has been around since the mid fifties when it was invented. So this is not new, although it may be new to some in our audience, but some of the key features that polyethylene brings in general feasible, creating a monolithic piping system. When you put a thousand foot of pipe together, it's 1000 foot piece of pipe, no joints, nothing to come apart, nothing to leak. Right, Right. Zero leakage. Right. The big another big one, you can the way you can construct it, open cut, less trench applications like pipe bursting directional drilling. Your design life is over 100 years. You're not getting that on any metal pipes. In some cases conservatively, 100. Hundred years. We just don't know. Where we can connect to any existing piping system. There's different methods for doing that. Transitions to other materials. Sure. And the sizes keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. We almost have too many options. We've got IPS, we've got dips, we've got purple, blue, green, yellow stripe. We've got, you know, if you can draw it, we can build it. So I think this is a reason why HDPE has been a solution. And talk to us more about some of the features and benefits that make it that way, notably flexibility, corrosion, resistance, UV protection and. More. Right. You've touched on a couple of the the primary ones, right? Traditional or standard HDPE goes to 140 degrees Fahrenheit down to -40. So a wide temperature range for HDPE pipe. The burst strength of the material is four times the operating or working pressure of the pipe. The hydraulic efficiency that earlier slide you showed on the metal pipe with all the to work relation. Right. Not an issue with HDPE pipe doesn't happen so that hydraulic efficiency is from day 1 to 100 years from now, it's still the same, right? You have all the aid WWE approvals, anything that's necessary for the different mediums that you might be flowing through the material. And far as the physical characteristics, lighter weight, easier to work with, maybe less equipment required on a jobsite, the flexibility you talked about that really assists in some of the installation methods that are available. It can be done with polyethylene. It really are impossible to do with other materials. The UV protection if you want to really that pipe above ground. No reduction in life, no UV issues, contamination there, fatigue and surge tolerant about four times. It's working pressure. That's a huge safety factor, seismic flexibility. We're seeing more and more of that as it's ground shifts and movements. Right? We're not because we're one continuous piece of pipe refused, nothing to come apart. Sure. All of these and more. Garry, are really a reason why. I mean, we've seen such a dramatic increase in CDP projects, especially over the last couple of years, where material availability with some of the competing materials wasn't as good, pricing wasn't as good. Looks finally like a more attractive option, at least from just a, you know, a cost standpoint. Right. And now people have tried it and they're using it on a now a project by project basis for water wastewater and others. There is one thing that we do need to talk about, though, and that is heat, right? So HDPE is a great solution for a lot of projects out there. Not so great a solution for projects above 140 in there. So let's talk about that. Yeah. That you know, everything has its limits and standard. HDPE pipe has a temperature limit for pressure applications up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit and even above 80 degrees Fahrenheit. You see here on this table, this chart, it actually gives you a temperature compensation multiplier, meaning that we have to kind of drape the pressure capabilities of the polyethylene as the temperatures continue to increase up to and not exceeding 140 degrees Fahrenheit. So there if we go to 140, you can see it's a 0.6 multiplier. So these are 11 pipe. It's rated for 200 PSI and 74 degrees Fahrenheit is now rated for only 101 hundred PSI working pressure. Right. So and once we get above 140, we technically can't can't separate that pipe right at that elevated temperature. And Garry, why is that? Is it just from from a chemical standpoint with the plastics, it just gets to a point where the heat and the pressure is too much for the HDPE to rebound from? Well, anything with thermal plastic is susceptible to temperature. So the higher the you know, the softer, the more viscous, more fluid that material becomes. Right. And that's really just where the limits where the testing and applications have stopped. And that's when, you know, when we start talking about PERT, that's the window that brings the advantage back to thermoplastic pipe. Yeah, absolutely. Everyone, I really appreciate the questions on here. Garry, let's take just a moment to answer some of these just about HDPE features and benefits in general. Do HDPE fittings and water systems need to be restrained or is but fusion sufficient? Great question. Fantastic question. The neat thing about the entire fusion joining process for polyethylene is that all of those fittings, if they are fuzed, do not require any type of restraint. Again, it's just like the lengths of pipe that fusion is one continuous material from fittings or pipe to pipe, so no restraint is required there. So also talking about expansion and contraction as expansion contraction of E, how do you do You need expansion loops, you need expansion fittings. What is the most generic answer there that we can get? It's kind of depends on a couple. Not sure there's. A generic answer, but to answer a question, typically we do not need any type of restraints or expansion loops. Now there may be requirements for some when we transition to other materials intermittently. Right. Going back to traditional metal pipe and or a bill and spec adopt a liar those are not restrain themselves why are the polyethylene is but that transition point the weakest link are the bell and spigot joint. So we may need a thrust block or we may need to restrain two or three joints down on the non restrain pipe to prevent any type of pull out. Absolutely, we can we could spend some time talking about that. The whole our session. Mark's got a great question here. I think this is going to transition us into the next topic, which is can PE 4710 resins handle higher temperatures? What's the difference in the 4710 resin versus the 36? O8 As you get up into that 121 3140 range. So temperature question. Mark, temperature range didn't change from 3608 3406 to 4710 So they still that 140 is the magic number for pressure applications, right now. Those those standard HDPE pipes will work up to 180 degrees for gravity applications but anything pressure stops at 140 That's where the PERC comes in. That's the sweet spot, 140 and above. That's where the polyethylene raised temperature product comes into place. 4710 is just going to have a higher hydrostatic burst strength. It's going to have a better pump test. It's going to have all the static pressure. Capacities for the same DRT. Even at that one. Again, 120 range. But the temperature didn't. Change. So let's talk about, guys. Great questions. Please keep them coming. This is this is great when we can have interaction like this. And Timmy is also I love whoever can stump Timmy gets the prize for that. So so Garry let's talk about what is PERT. So we've identified the challenge challenges. We've got a lot of metal pipe that is not behaving very. Well right. Now. We try to get some polyethylene here. It works for a lot of lot of applications except in heating hot water. You know, anything above 140 degrees, that's where it comes in. Let's talk more about what PERT is. Let's start with maybe this. Let's back up. What's the difference between HDPE and PERT? Well, there's a lot of similarities. It's the same. It's still a 40 at its base. At its core, per pipe is a 4710 resin pipe. What it does have is an additives that have been included into the resin that gives it the ability to handle higher temperatures under pressurized applications. That is really the difference. So when you look at the two products side by side, if you didn't see that that grape. Is dry, you wouldn't be running down the side. You would know which ones 4710 versus PERT. So it is it is not a separate it's not a separate product line. No. It can be designed the same way. It can be fuzed well designed in mostly the same way it can be fuzed. Same way that same fittings. It's it's it's on steroids. That's what it is. Exactly. Right. Yeah. So now I'm surprised you haven't asked me. Well, what's the secret sort of secrets? Are this one of those things? I can't tell you? I think it's like the 11 herbs and spices. You know, the home of KFC is right. We don't know what that is. But boy, is it good. That's what whatever it is, it's good. So all of these things are still applicable. This is a used monolithic system that is not going to leak when installed correctly. We've got a 50 year design life on the PERT. I think that's probably due to it being a little newer maybe. And yeah, some of the additional testing, if you well you won't remember, is before your time, right You know standard back in those 3608 days. 3604 3406 those had a 50 year design life. Sure. When we moved to the 4710 additional testing was done and so forth, we were able to elevate that life cycle to 100 year design life. And I think perch probably in that same window in its infancy. Right, Right. But in terms of the features and benefits, you and I, we're kind of laughing putting this together. We could talk about the same thing in the ACP, but it's it behaves almost identically the same story. Exactly. So all the things that you know and love about all those inherent benefits you're getting switching over from italics, you're going to get with this. But the increase in the rating up to 180 degrees. So let's talk about this here. Yeah. So now you can see, you know, we've got certain pressures where they look pretty similar up and to a certain point. And then when you get 100 above 140 things are no longer can't do. But they're they're doable. They're there. Right. So tell us about these pressure ratings. Yeah, exactly. If you took the column on the far left, 73 degrees Fahrenheit, that is the exact same pressure rating of standard 4710 HDPE pipe at 73 degrees. So it is the same pipe. It is 4710 pipe. It's just, as you said, that 140 degree temperature threshold, once you hit that standard, HDPE is a no for pressure. This part now has the ability to handle pressures. Now they're still reduced. They're not at the same pressures because as I said earlier, the same principle applies to your thermoplastic. You increase temperature, you're going to reduce your pressure. But at least that we're getting listed, published and from pressure ratings exactly up to 180 degrees Fahrenheit, that puts us into a really good temperature range for heating hot water applications right there. What else do you see PERT fitting into nicely? We're going to talk about that a little later on. In terms of application. I mean, we talked I think we've got a slide later on, Will, that shows some of the different markets that we've been in and that continues to elevate it. Primarily. We had been focused on district energy, college campuses and the like, but we're seeing order, you know, projects in oil and gas. We're seeing projects and landfill, as you know, extracting methane out of the landfill and the heat inside. The sewer project. Sewer project. Right. We've got a project. There's a pulp and paper mill project. There's a refinery that's a sewer waistline, high temperatures, renewable, natural gas. And we're collecting methane and a dairy farm and turning that into energy. So a lot of different applications more and more keep popping up every day. So, Garry, let's talk a little bit about our friends over at Performance Pipe, who are the ones that are manufacturing PERT right now. You talked earlier about availability in terms of size range, in terms of national presence. Performance has been great for us to be able to manufacture this. This is being exclusively offered through performance. Yes. Right. The resin, the core makeup of the material is a Dow chemical product. The the resin that they use in performance is the authorized manufacturer of the pipe. And molded fittings in the out of the present. Sure. Yeah. Moving on. You just mentioned fittings. So what types of fittings are available with PERT? Is it is it largely the same amount of fittings? Is it? And we're going to touch on size range here in a little bit as well. You know what, what can designers expect to be available in terms of support to not only the pipe but fittings, Right. So molded fittings up to eight inch the the minimum sizes, two inch, that's where PERT starts. So that that window is two inch. The small sides or eight inch fittings are molded elbows, tees, etc.. Right. Then we get in above the eight inch, then we get into fabricated fittings where your elbows are, miter your teaser on miter sections fuzed together there's transit and fittings to steel, welded steel, threaded steel. We can transition. We've got flange adapters, we've got electro fusion couplings, there's a TS available, there's branch saddles. So a pretty wide range of of sitting options available in the PERT. There are some, some limitation irons that we have from the standard ACP into the PERT, but pretty much whatever we need to get to for attention we can get, we can get there right. And fabricated fittings above a certain size range are also available and correct? Yes. Like I said, anything, Once we do that, then we get into, you know, reducing ts with branch saddles, Fuzed on and so forth. Gotcha. Yep. So we've already had a question about installation. Can you let's go through some of these questions before moving on here. Size range available from performance in PERT. So the real limiting factor on we said the smallest size is two inch. Yep. Really when it comes down to it's really the thickness of thickness. The D-R the right there's a limitation because of the resin, the proPERTies of it, it extrude a little bit differently than traditional 4710 resin. So there's a limit in the wall thickness that can be produced with this pipe, with traditional pipe extrusion pressure. And that is about 2 to 2 and a quarter inches thick, right, is the limit. So we've done projects to date up to 42 inch d r 21, that's two into the wall, right? That's right. So that's so the o.D really isn't the issue. It's more the thickness. Yeah, but, but. Up until, you know, the standard size ranges, right? Eight 1216 d r 11 that's all very 20. Four inch D-R 11 is very doable. Is that we've done those. Yeah, very doable. So let's, let's talk about we have a question here about ten miles is asking can PERT come insulate it a lot of times Garry we're seeing PERT in situations that requires insulation. We wanted to spend just a little bit of time going over some of those options for you. Right? So really, we've got two ways of doing it and it might depend on we times, it might depend on a jobsite conditions, it might depend on the contract and how how things are broken out. But oftentimes we are selling a completely pre insulated system so that the contractor simply needs to worry about making pipe to pipe joints, maybe a couple of fittings put in joint kits and fitting gets insulation, gets over those areas and moving on. But largely the insulation is already complete. You want to talk about this? Yeah. So pre insulated, we do see that quite a bit, particularly in those district energy applications that we talked about earlier, where they want to maintain that temperature from point A to point B, if you starting with hot water at 160 degrees, you don't want it to be £141. You're not going to lose all that energy. So so pre insulation, particular climates up in the northern area, really this is pretty standard in those applications. What they do is we take the polyethylene pipe, the per pipe and they put a jacket, HDPE jacket and inject foam into that air, that area around the pipe to encompass that leaving amount of pipe outside of that insulated area. So you can do your standard fusion to be a choose which will show or later on. Right. And then that area, that fusion area, once it's completed, it's filled in with the what they call the sealed joint. Right. Kind of like you with your ice cold bud light on the golf course. You know, you put a koozie around that is going to keep it colder. Than I wouldn't know. Don't let there be a better be a Mountain Dew or. An Arnold Palmer. That's it. So we've got the pre insulated option. Now, this is an engineered system. It does take a little extra time to be done, but boy, it does save a lot of time in the field. Yeah, it does. You know, but there's, there's challenges, there's things that they have to account for when putting these in some of your fusion equipment. Right. You've got a smaller the carrier pipe that's got one size a jaw to do the fusion. Then you've got to hold the pipe around the insulated jacket. So you have a bigger insert on the back end, right. So your machines have to be sized accordingly, not just for the got to be. Yeah. There's some coordination. Exactly. You can't just take if you're doing an eight inch, you can just take your 28 and make welds all. Exactly. A little underpowered. Yep. Additionally, we can also do this on 4710. So insulation on chilled water, for instance. 4710. We do see it in some of the southern climates where that you know that. Absolutely. Yeah. That might be an issue. Yeah. Very, very common process down here. Another thing that we see quite a bit is docility. This is has become common on a couple of different jobs. I'm not as familiar about it. I'd love to learn more from you. I know that I see those bags on on jobs everywhere and oftentimes that someone is either way overestimated or we underestimated the erotic also need it. Yeah. So this this is a foam powder that's poured in to the to the trench area. Once the pipes are all laid, it's got to be compacted down and tamped down works works very well. I haven't had as much experience with this. There's been a couple of projects that I, you know, I've been involved with the part or even with standard HDPE pipe, but it works works very well. You don't have the jacket. You're not worrying about that extra size. You know, when you start talking about insulation, it's are two inches thick around a pipe right now. Your trench just even got a little bigger doubles up right with your when you're putting in a lot of multiple pipes in so plus pros and cons to each of these different applications. Going back to a quick we had a question can the jacket on pre installation be made with different piping material? I do believe they have a PVC jacket option as well. I think they do. But I this 90 99% of right that I've ever done I've been involved in has been HDPE. I think sometimes I've seen maybe PVC for more above ground uses. I guess in. Stainless jackets above. Stainless. Yeah I have seen. That you know obviously you can do a field installed insulation that's not as robust as as an insulation kid as this is. But yes, you can have different materials in the insulation. So so let's talk real quickly about joining methods. For those of you who are not familiar with HDPE or PERT, Fusion is what we like to preach about here. This is our main way to join HDPE Pipe or PERT together. And there are several different types of fusion fusion sidewall fusion electric fusion are the three primary ones. You've also got socket fusion in there. We also offer mechanical couplings. But Garry, let's talk on about but fusion just real quick for those that aren't familiar, you know, when when we're sitting here preaching about, you know, joints so people understand why there's no joints. So we're taking two sticks of pipe, how do we get them together? Yep, exactly. It's a tried and true process that's been proven. And we basically use heat and we use pressure. Yeah, those generate and allow us to do what we call a fusion on the pipe and that's end to end of pipe for the bulk fusion. And if we've got a video that shows that, we'll walk through that process. Yeah. Bradley Cooper decided to make a cameo here in. Our. Fusion yard. So there he is, ladies and gentlemen. He put. All the. Way. I wasn't going to say so, Jerry, why don't you walk us through this, this fusion here And I've never seen look. At the speed. The dexterity and speed that you have out there is is pretty impressive. Look at him. Go, folks. So what we're doing here is we're simply clamping the pipe in the jaws. Your outer jaws are really holding and securing the pipe to allow us to do the other steps in the fusion process. Those inner two jaws that we tighten are just simply there to align the pipes and hold the pipe in place to allow us to do the work. So now we've dropped in a pacer. That pacer has blades on both ends, and what it's doing is it's trimming the ends of those pipes, squaring them up, making a mirror, images of each other, as well as removing any oxidation layer, dirt layer on the outside of the pipe, getting down to that virgin polyethylene in the fusion area. Now we're checking, checking our high low, our alignment of the two pipe in making sure there's no gaps, there's no daylight and since the dirty globs of Bradley, when you touch the pipe like he wasn't supposed to, we're taking a little bit isopropyl alcohol and we're just wiping the end of that pipe. Now we bring in a sheer plate. That heater is about 425 degrees Fahrenheit, and we're going to bring the pipe in together. Notice one jaw side moves to the other, we make contact with the heater plate, we reduce. Our pressure. And we're literally just soaking those two pipe bands against that hot heater plate. It was a creative sequence, by the way, Really, really smooth there. Everybody watch here. You'll see these pipe bands come together and form. That infamous bead is what we're always talking about. Explained more. Garry. Yeah, so that is the visual indication that diffusion has occurred. So what we had molten and we pushed them together under pressure, determined by the size and thickness of the pipe, and we hold it there until it's cool, remove it. We now have, we have now taken two pieces, made it into one. So if we do that times on some projects, one 10,000 more crystals, you're getting a single long pipeline. So the one monolithic piece. So when people ask me what the heck does monolithic mean? But we love that word around here just basically means you're getting one continuous piece of pipe provided everything has been used. So again, that's how we can do fittings. It's how we can do transition pieces. There are other ways of uses, of course, that is our preferred method. Highly reliable PERT is no different, right? The usual process. Exactly the same that we do for traditional HDPE pipe. Your equipment's the same. There is no difference. So if you're doing a chilled water line in one aspect, the same equipment, we'll do the hot water line the next fantastic. So moving on here, I'd like to take this opportunity to ask our audience a second pool question now that you guys have learned a little bit more about PERT, how likely are you to use it coming moving forward? Garry, we're off to a hot start. Literally, right with the PERT that's. You know, it's a really good job. 51% of audience members are responding that they'll consider it, but also 25% very likely that they're going to be using PERT. I think there's going to be some PERT specked into projects here coming up very shortly, which is what we love to hear. So you are about to time travel in the future. Your project is finished and we're going to doing a case study on it right now here live on ASCO Insights. So let's talk about some of the different markets that, you know, PERT has been used in and we think are a good fit moving forward. Yeah, we met we talked touched on them earlier, Will, but quickly people can see them here, you know, industrial energy applications, the oil and gas market right. They're extracting hot you know, fluids out of the ground. Right. And district energy has been a big use. College campuses, corporate campuses around have been using using that for the mining application, pulp and paper. We talked about that. I think one of our case studies is a pulp and paper chemical plants, renewable natural gas at that dairy farm. I was telling you about collecting that. Yeah. That they present. Right. The manure. Right. Landfill again. And these continue to seem to to pop up new new applications. Something new when somebody. Hears about it. Right. And never thought of that one Right. Yeah. One of the early adopters in this instance was Texas A&M University. They had a big challenge going on in their hands. Our friend Ruben down there was was looking at a number of different solutions. Ultimately, Garry, they were having a lot of problems losing a bunch of water and it was really impacting, you know, their plant, their budgets, the loss, their students. Tell us more. Yeah, I mean, you know, people know Texas A&M. I mean, this is a campus of over 60,000 students. I mean, that's a it's a pretty good sized city, right, that they're providing water to and they are struggling, losing, you know, they were up to 50 gallons per minute every day of water, lost a lot. They've paid to treat and be, you know, you're not getting to use. So they need to do something, you know, decaying of the existing pipelines. They were getting heat loss under hot water. They're shutting down dormitories because of the water loss water. So that had a big impact on the students that are obviously paying to be there. So that was their challenge and they were looking for options. They were familiar with HDPE Pipe. They've been using it on their chilled water lines for. Texans for come on, that's what they. Do. And you know, so when this PERT product came about, boy that really opened the door gave them the opportunity to really convert their entire system, their not only their chilled water now, but their hot water as well. So they battled this all at once. You can see here is supply and return line for both chilled and heating water. And look at this. This is now they haven't they haven't switched their entire campus over to my understanding. No, it's still it's still in progress of 60,000. You can figure the side cost. Yes. The amount. Of. Of switching from metallics to pur and HDPE, they've already reduced that only 3 to 7 gallons per minute. Yeah, I would just probably, you know, impacting. This probably gotten a little better. That's I'm sure that's a couple of years older in terms of that timeline. So it's probably even better now. But the larger pipes that you see on the left, those are your chilled water lines. Obviously, in south Texas, they're a lot more chilled water. And then the two smaller lines on the right, those are the hot water lines. Now, you don't see the gray stripe that we referenced on the platinum stripe per pipe, because that pipe is pretty insulated there. Ruben has been incredibly pleased. With the mechanical joints of steel, direct barrel carbon, steel pipe. And just like anything else, it all decays in the water, the ground. And we've been having we had multiple leaks and and we looked for a and turned it away not use the Tyler pipe and some would last longer and that would have interrupted the students on campus, especially during the winter months. We were the first we are the first and some bunch university are asking questions to us and we've been having good luck with this part. We hadn't had any issues and it's it's it's different and but it's in the long run the benefits are great. A normal day we could see 50, 40 gallons a day. I mean, a minute, you know, because we had leaks here, leaks there, and we prepared all the bad spots and now we're down. I mean, we're down to single digit numbers and you don't see that at all. So we're able to between 3 to 8 gallons a minute a day on main campus. That's a drastic drop, some short on heat water. I think we're down to 3 to 6 gallons a minute. And that's through the whole campus. That's about 60,000 students, strong campus. And that's that's pretty significant. But it used to be so you heard it from Ruben. They're essentially they're very pleased with HDPE. They're glad they went to power. And that's been the new standard for the university. And my understanding is moving forward and there have been a lot of different that's that's one example of, you know, colleges have been very early adopters. This especially those that are moving away from their traditional steam systems. There's not, you know, condensate lines running everywhere at 205 to 10, there's hot water coming from different plants. And steam is a very expensive steam system is very expensive to maintain. Exactly right. And you've got, you know, dangers and issues, safety issues that have have to be in place as well. So Miles just said this is his homeland. I'm not sure if it's Texas, which I can for you to opposite ends of the spectrum, Miles, but we're glad you're here. Anyways. There's another pulp and paper mill that we have, Garry, that that was an early adopter of using PERT. They frankly were pretty sick of some very corrosive leach systems for their paper plant. You want to tell us more? Yeah. I mean, they have been using fiberglass for and having struggles that you see here where you see the spider cracking total de lamination. And if anybody's worked with fiberglass, very time consuming to do any type of repair, you know, you've got to let things cure set. You know, you've got all of this whole elongated process to try to put the white fiberglass together. Takes a lot. So they were looking for an alternative is steel really wasn't because of bleach and the corrosion with the steel polyethylene works great you know from a just from the chemical resistance standpoint they hadn't it was new. They went ahead and looked at it and tried it out in trying to come up with a better solution. And so they were presented with a HDPE pipe. Really, this was for them. Like many, it comes down to dollars and cents, right? Yeah. And You know, at the end of the day, these are all great. At the end of the day, I also want a Ferrari I'm not going to buy a window for. I'm not like you Garry. I haven't figured out a way to get that into my contract. But you know, at the end of the day they needed to look at this from a budgetary analysis. And it wasn't just the materials here, it was total installed costs. Tell us more. Yeah, I mean, it really was. I mean, this was a obviously an added benefit. They needed something that was going to last longer than the four or five year lifecycle that they were getting out of their current system. So they were really looking at the polyethylene and the part it ended up being that the material cost for part was less than the the fiberglass pipe. So another benefit, right, the installation was over 11 times faster. Again, you're talking about doing a fusion weld on a pipe for an hour and a half to 2 hours versus doing one or two completions on fiberglass in an entire day. Right. So, know, big, big advantage there. Your pipe lengths, 50 foot length. So all of those came into play. And I think there's a summary on the next page. This is what they did. They replaced the fiberglass with 30 inch HP pipe, two different as the as the if fluid move down the line, the pressure reduced so they were able to go with the thinner right they were able to to install the polyethylene pipe the part right next to the existing line so they could keep it in service. Don't have to shut the the mill down while they're putting in the new right. The new line ended up being about total about $2 million in savings when you factored in all the labor. I mean, look at the. Material. Looking out here. Yeah. 3200 feet. Yeah. At 30 inch. So you're looking at a minimum 20, 80 hours basically. Yeah. To fuze that. But then look at that from a. Compared to the fiberglass it Yeah. Seven times that. Yeah. That's we're talking substantial weeks, weeks weeks. Right. You know installing. This. Yeah. And you know the able to reduce because of the flexibility that we talked about with polyethylene pipe and then being able to sweep that pipe around they were able to eliminate some large diameter fittings which adds additional increase and helps improve the flow as well. And then the last thing was this one was kind of unique was using a data logger on the fusion, which we really didn't talk to. That's in one of our fusion segments, a whole section on data logger, but data loggers, a way to monitor the fusion process that the operator is using the right temperature and pressure on the machine, doing it right using that data logger there. Like we don't need to do a hydrostatic test. Right? We we already know that they got data right here. What's the fusion? Right? Why do I need to bring in enough water to fill a 30 inch diameter pipe? I think that's great. And you know what's funny, Garry? When you reached out to them, you had a comment about box basically like, yeah, everything's great. Yeah, they, they hadn't looked at the installed for I think close to eight years on a year. Yeah. They haven't even looked at it. Yeah. Which means they. Haven't had any issues. They haven't had to touch it. Right. Yeah. It goes to show you. I mean this is a great option everyone if you're having issues with metallic piping systems or if you're having issues with we see wood piping systems, you know, from the 1900s that need to be replaced or slip line. We see that on a week notice. You know, Jobs said, oh, I told you, producers have told me I should stop making fun of your ancient age. But regardless, we've got basically, you know, a great option for yeah, we'd love to continue this conversation. So we hope that you'll keep reaching out in the future. We've got a couple of questions, Garry, but first, I'm going to tell people who ESCO is. Ensco is a national solutions provider for all items related to start in the late fifties. This go specialized in irrigation before transitioning into more industrial municipal applications and end users ultimately ending up in a diverse product range of nuclear systems through landfills, aggregates, geothermal. We are constantly finding new ways and avenues to use HDPE to help customers with this product line. We also have rental equipment to help to use it. Technical assistance from guys like Tammy and Garry. When you have some questions about design, we've got an engineering department that can kick out some some CAD drawings and some technical design resources as well as custom fabrication. So we've got a pretty large footprint and we hope you'll give us a call for your next HDPE Your piping challenge, even if you just have an idea and want to talk about HDPE, please reach out to your local resource. It is. So we've got people everywhere where you are, including in Miles location up to somewhere in Canada and we'd be glad to help. So we appreciate you letting me share that. And also please connect with us on social media. I'm trying to become an influencer here, Garry, and I know ESCO is doing a great job with that. So in all seriousness, we're kicking out some great content and some really good resources, some entertainment, some education. So please go ahead and follow us on these social media channels and platforms if you need to use very, very important. We are offering to use for this course that you've taken the time today we have to generate these manually. So please go ahead and visit HD HTTP. Basically it's go text icon backslash EU and that'll get a C EU request form. Please fill that out. Give us a week or two and we'll kick that out as soon as we can. We have hundreds of people that attend these and we promise to get you guys all them as soon as we can. But it does take some time and addition, we'll be following up with you on some of the questions that you have there. And let's go through some of the questions that we have today. I've been saving this one for a bit. This is a great situation. Greg uses a lot of black HP for construction, water supply from city fire hydrants, the tanks to fill our water trucks. Water is running out of presses of 75 to 125 psi in the desert. The pipe itself will get to 140 degrees in the summer, but the water inside is not. We have been told the regular pipe is okay. Is it. Great? Is 100% correct, Right. Greg's right. The neat thing about polyethylene, Yes, that surface temperature, it's really hot, but polyethylene itself is not a great conductor of thermal temperature. So he's fine. Sure is 100% fine. We've got thousands of miles of pipe running above ground all throughout the desert in different areas. And that's not a problem. Now, if you're moving that pipe grade, you may want to make sure you have some gloves. That pipe surfaces pretty hot to hold on to. It's going to be hot. Garry, a question that I'd like to ask you. We get asked a lot. Let's say someone is running a gravity line or a low pressure system that's operating around 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Maybe it might see occasional spikes to 140. Are you going to recommend that they move up to current or is that still a 4710 traditional application? It would be in my mind, it would be a 4710 application. But I will tell you that I've had some engineers and I've had that very conversation. There's potential. It may be a spike above the 140. They don't know how long the duration would be necessarily, and from a safety standpoint, they went ahead and made the decision to to go with the part, even though my recommendation was, I think you're going to be okay with the standard 4710. I mean, these are not finite. You know, you fall off a cliff type of scenario if the temperature exceeds that. But, you know, again, I leave it to the ultimate decision of the user. The engineer for that. Project makes all the sense in the world. And we've also got some questions I saw throughout this process about pricing, about market pricing per pound. My answer there is please reach out to us. We'd be happy to work on some budgetary analysis for you all market change on a sometimes weekly or monthly basis, depending on a lot of different factors and being the largest buyer and seller of both FDP and PERT in the country, we're more than happy to take a look at your individual application and come up with a, you know, a good cost estimate for where things are going to be. And it's hard to pinpoint. It's always moving around. We've had some great questions, Garry, but I think that about. Does it anything you'd like to add? No. I really thank everybody for joining us today and we'll set it earlier. If you you've got an application that may or you're not sure there's a you know, does it meet that threshold where might be on the fence? Give us a call. We'll be glad to talk to you about it, walk you through the the scenarios, give you our recommendation and help you make the best decision for this system and application that you need. Garry, thanks so much for being here, as always. It's always a pleasure. Jimmy, Meet you guys. The best to our audience. We're going to finish with this you screen because I keep fumbling the delivery of that line, but I would like to, on behalf of all my colleagues here at ASCO Industries, thank you for attending today. We really appreciate your time and your passion to learn more about HDPE. Please reach out to us in the future so we hope everyone has a great safe 4th of July weekend and we will see you next month for a brand new episode. Very excited about this one, all about a fusion joint from start to finish. Back to basics. Tell your kids, tell your wife, Come on in. We're learning about fusion. So in the meantime, everyone stay safe out there. And as always, happy fusion.