Contents · How to Read This Book ⟶
Preface: Breakdown in a Mechanical Room
“What the hell am I doing?”
I stood alone in a dimly lit mechanical room, staring at a problem I had no business struggling with. It was nearing midnight as I hand-pumped drums of chemical into a day tank at a textile plant in St. Stephens, South Carolina. A fellow rep had loaned me their electric transfer pump for the task, but it died the moment I plugged it in. No warning. No explanation. I was too proud to call for help. Just two months into the job, I didn’t want anyone knowing that I couldn’t do this.
So there I was, armed with a cheap plastic siphon pump, trying to move seven full drums of chemical into a storage tank. And I was making an absolute mess.
Thankfully nobody had checked on me for hours, because the room was a disaster. The plastic hose kept whipping out of the manway, splashing chemical over my boots and across the floor. My shoulder ached from the repetitive draw-and-push of the pump as I toiled away like a Victorian well-boy.
Every few minutes I’d stop, look around the dim, humming room, and wonder if I had made the biggest mistake of my life.
A few months earlier I had finished my master’s degree in chemical engineering and taken a job with GE Water. I’d studied water in school, and had a pretty good background in water chemistry. None of that prepared me for the gritty reality of transferring chemical at midnight in a mechanical room, praying no one would walk in and see exactly what I felt like inside.
I felt like a fraud.
Around 1 a.m., I finally finished the transfer. I found what I hoped was a makeup hose bib, filled a five-gallon bucket, and did my best to dilute and mop up the chaos I’d created. I packed up and snuck out quietly back to my truck.
The long drive home was filled with silence.
“This job is stupid,” I told myself. Over and over.
I had just started my career and already convinced I was going to quit. My days were filled with menial tasks and endless titrations. I was intimidated by the steel mills and power plants I visited. Every site felt enormous and inscrutable. Nothing felt connected. Nothing felt meaningful.
–
Whether it was inertia or grit, something kept me from walking away.
Fifteen years later, I can see that night for what it was: not a failure, but the beginning of a long initiation into a complex and often unforgiving field – one that rewards humility and perseverance as much as intelligence.
I made countless mistakes in those early years. I nearly shut down an international hydrocarbon processing plant by opening the wrong valve. I’ve been fired from customers. I’ve been asked - more than once - if I’m “completely full of shit.”
At the time, I lacked context. I didn’t understand the overall systems to know what I was really doing.
And yet, I kept being drawn deeper into water.
The deeper I went, the stranger it became. Patterns started to emerge. Systems began to speak. And eventually - quietly, unexpectedly - something changed.
I fixed something.
–
I was troubleshooting a deaerator that wasn’t providing acceptable dissolved oxygen levels to two high-pressure boilers. The facility manager was furious. Leaks had developed in the feedwater lines, iron levels spiked, and he wanted answers.
I stepped outside his office, fixed my composure, and walked the system.
I traced the piping, and it didn’t take long to spot the problem.
The deaerator vent valve was barely open. Maintenance told me they “didn’t want to waste steam.” I also discovered that the condensate return tank was isolated and overflowing - good, hot water being dumped to drain.
I walked back to the facility manager’s office, with more than a hint of trepidation. My ideas made sense, but why would I know better than the experienced maintenance staff? God, I hoped I was right.
“I think if you open the vent and return more condensate, you’re going to see an improvement,” I told the facility manager, far less certain than I sounded.
He reluctantly agreed to try it.
It worked.
It worked really well.
The plume of steam exiting the deaerator increased, and the dissolved oxygen level in the feedwater dropped from over 100 ppb to less than 5 ppb. The condensate return tank was put back in service, returning nearly 80 gallons per minute of liquid gold to the boiler system.
The result was no more leaks in the feedwater lines. No more iron in the boilers. And over $300,000 a year in water and energy savings.
When I presented the savings to the customer, I was hooked.
For the first time, I didn’t feel like someone pumping drums in a dark room. I felt like a consultant. Someone who could read a system, understand its intent, and improve how it operated.
The knowledge I had accumulated finally connected to something real.
–
When I started in water treatment, I saw only the surface: drums, pumps, pinks and blues, corrosion coupons. I didn’t yet see the blueprint - the underlying architecture tying all those pieces together.
Industrial water treatment sits at the intersection of physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. It is essential.
Water is the circulatory system of modern civilization. It quietly enables power generation, semiconductor fabrication, food supplies, hospitals, universities, and the buildings we occupy every day. Water treatment is the work of keeping this system alive.
When you understand the blueprint of water - the basic principles that govern its behavior - the field stops being a haze of procedures and becomes something coherent, elegant, and surprisingly beautiful. The fog lifts. The mechanical rooms brighten.
In recent years, I’ve focused on distilling these principles into durable mental models. I did it first for myself, to become a better water treater. Then for technicians and engineers beginning their own journeys.
This is the book I wish someone had handed me on that lonely night in the mechanical room. A book to explain not just what we do, but why it matters.
Because water treatment does matter. Far more than I ever understood at the beginning.
–
Understanding water eventually brings responsibility with it.
This is a good thing.
In many regions, the water we manage comes from non-renewable groundwater – ancient reserves that support entire communities. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. That reality changed how I saw the work. It stopped being only about chemistry and started being about consequence.
Three years ago, our team at IWE committed to saving one billion gallons of water at our customer facilities by 2033. Not through heroic intervention – through disciplined water treatment. Correcting overflows. Tightening cycles. Recovering condensate. Managing systems the way they were designed to be managed. As we add up the savings year over year, we expect to hit our target by mid-2026.
My hope with this book is that it helps you take the most important steps in water treatment: moving from technician to consultant. And once you’re there, I hope you’ll start improving your own corner of the world.
It is needed.
–
This book is for anyone that’s ever stood alone in a mechanical room and wondered what it was all for.
It is my attempt to reveal the hidden blueprint of water - and to show how understanding it unlocks the entire world of industrial water treatment.
I hope that once you can follow the blueprint, everything else begins to make sense.