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San Antonio — The seventh Emerging Water Technology Symposium returned as an in-person event for the first time in four years, bringing together industry, manufacturing, water utility and government leaders from around the world.  A focus of this year’s event was on resources communities require to build safe and resilient plumbing systems as well as meet the growing list of challenges to America’s drinking water.

The esteemed panel on Effective Risk Management of Building Water Systems for Pathogen Control included (from l to r) Julius Ballanco, president, JB Engineering; Kurt Steenhoek, International Representative, UA; Janet Stout, Executive VP and Founder, Special Pathogen Laboratory; James Dipping, Director of Plumbing Engineering, Environmental Systems Design, Inc.; Christoph Lohr, VP of Strategic Initiatives, IAPMO; and Matt Freije, CEO, HC Info.

The May 10-11 event at the Westin Riverwalk, San Antonio was co-convened by the Alliance for Water Efficiency (AWE), the American Society of Plumbing Engineers (ASPE), the International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials (IAPMO) and Plumbing Manufacturers International (PMI).

Pete DeMarco

“As an industry we have a number of high priority research needs that relate to water quality as well as water and energy efficiency,” IAPMO Executive Vice President of Advocacy and Research Pete DeMarco explained in discussing the importance of the symposium. “This year’s event brought together some of the brightest minds industry has to offer all focused on how we make our plumbing and mechanical systems safer and more resilient to meet the challenges ahead.”

In his opening remarks, DeMarco pointed to a number of accomplishments for which the EWTS has served as a springboard, including the development of the Green Plumbing and Mechanical Code Supplement (now the Water Efficiency and Sanitation Standard WE•Stand); ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 188-2018, Legionellosis: Risk Management for Building Water Systems; ASSE 12000 series on infection control and water quality, which is in IAPMO’s Uniform Plumbing Code (UPC^®); and IAPMO’s Water Demand Calculator, whose second version was released in 2020.

“This symposium provides a much-needed platform for stakeholders across the industry to gather, discuss the latest research, and then discuss how we can take action,” he said. “It is a highly valuable event, and I look forward to seeing it continue to grow in the future.”

Kerry Stackpole

PMI CEO Kerry Stackpole spoke at the event and said the relationships between the organizations represented at EWTS had likely never been more important than they are now. He said that while the best and brightest among us devised medical solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic, the plumbing industry also played an important role.

“What’s also important is how our industry responded,” he said. “Our industry’s experience and our focus became touchless faucets, antimicrobial surfaces, water purification systems, all kinds of energy-efficient devices focused on safe and responsible plumbing. We all had a contribution to make and I think our industry stepped up.”

Stackpole said wildfires, flooding and drought that different regions of the United States are experiencing put those in the industry in a position to shape the future.

“Your active engagement here, in your communities back home, and in the marketplace of ideas, where we will have opportunities to share ideas with one another, will make all the difference,” he said. “You actually are able to turn the dial on this, and I think that’s really exciting.”

A day 2 panel saw (from l to r) Ed Osann, Senior Water Policy Analyst, NRDC; Dain Hansen, Executive Vice President, Government Relations, IAPMO; and Stephanie Salmon, Washington Representative, PMI, talk about the implications of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act on Drinking Water and Wastewater.

This year’s keynote speakers were Robert Puente, president and CEO of the San Antonio Water System (SAWS), and Don Johnston, senior operations director, Indonesia, for Water.org.

Puente’s presentation looked at three ways in which SAWS, which serves 2 million customers over four counties, uses innovation to deliver water to its customers: advanced metering deployment, “smart” manhole covers, and conservation.

“It’s all about innovation,” he said. “And I think if you talk to our employees, although they will tell you that it’s their idea, we know that they got their idea from coming to events like this. Every good idea, you should expect it to be stolen, to be used by someone else, and you should be flattered by that. I think anything that you look at here started somewhere else, and we went to conferences in other cities and were able to bring back the ideas to SAWS to really get the innovation aspect in this.”

In delivering his keynote address remotely from Jakarta, Indonesia, Johnston spoke about the global water and sanitation crisis’s impact on low-income households — one in nine people lack access to safe water, one in three do not have access to a toilet — and some potential solutions. Working with financial institutions and water utilities, as well as sister company WaterEquity, Water.org helps bring affordable financing to people in need of water.

The Hub’s John Mesenbrink asks the hard-hitting questions during the symposium.

“In about 19 years of work on the ground, we’ve seen water and sanitation access reach more than 45 million people through more 10 million microloans disbursed to households with capital of $3.7 billion mobilized,” he said.

In his presentation, Phillip White, manager of plumbing and mechanical inspections for the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, shared how his city addressed the problem of insufficient sewer capacity when it came to capturing large amounts of rainfall through water reuse technologies. One development, the Oakridge Centre, utilized the IAPMO Water Demand Calculator and is expected to have the largest non-potable water system in North America.

Janet Stout

Another speaker, Special Pathogens Laboratory Executive Vice President/Founder Dr. Janet Stout, looked at approaches and products for mitigating the risk of Legionellosis in point-of-use and point-of-entry building water systems. Improved water management requires knowledgeable Legionella prevention and water service providers, which can come from certification to ASSE/IAPMO/ANSI 12080 for Legionella Water Safety and Management Personnel.

IAPMO will provide sessions from the EWTS on-demand in the near future. To be notified when they are available, register at www.ewts.org/2022-ewts.

Our latest Hub On The Road series video brings us to RIDGE Tool company to see the making of their iconic pipe wrench.

The world famous cast iron pipe wrench is started at the Urick Foundry in Erie, PA. We get the very first public look into this decades old manufacturing facility were the molten metals are poured into molds, sand is cast and robots work alongside dedicated employees with years of service.

From Urick the guys take their fresh wrench to Elyria, OH to RIDGID’s world headquarters and factory floor to finish the process of grinding, painting, assembling the plumbing and piping industries most iconic tool.

This video is a first ever look behind the scenes of this American made legend. We at MH thank whole hearteldy our partners and friends for welcoming us into their house and allowing us to make this video.

We sincerely hope you find this entertaining,

Team MH

This is the first in a multi-part series on the history of geothermal heating and cooling in the United States and beyond. It focuses on the efforts of two men: Dan Ellis and David Hatherton, the latter having trademarked the WaterFurnace name back in 1981 in Ontario, Canada.

David Hatherton and Dan Ellis

David Hatherton is the son of a water well driller with business operations located in Ontario, Canada. David first noted the energy available in the ground during one particularly cold winter day in Ontario. He still remembers inadvertently placing his hand into the water flowing from a newly drilled water well. He recalls how startled he was that it felt so warm. That’s when he realized that there was truly thermal energy available in the ground. He realized that this is an unlimited resource; if only he could just figure out how to tap it and turn it into heating for home buildings.

In 1980, David’s father passed away, and David did not want to continue in the drilling business. Instead, he put together a water source heat pump that he tied into one of the water wells on his property. Shortly after that, he came up with the name “WaterFurnace,” and trademarked it in Ontario, Canada.

The First WaterFurnace Installation & Trademark Paperwork

Interestingly, many folks did not like the name WaterFurnace. But as Dave shared, the name told the story of the water source heat pump. Instead of a furnace that combusted some type of fuel, the WaterFurnace heat pump used the energy from water in the earth to provide heat.

Meanwhile, Dan Ellis was in the business of saving oil and energy. Starting in 1978, a year of double-digit inflation, Dan was working out of an old van and had started a company called “Genesis Energy Systems.” His idea involved a water source heat pump with a solar thermal boost. You can see the first article that ran in 1982 about that system in the Air Conditioning, Heating & Refrigeration News.

The News Article from March 15, 1982

This article piqued David’s interest, and he traveled to Fort Wayne, Ind., to meet Dan Ellis at the office of a successful HVAC contractor, Command Air, at which Dan was a division manager. They had dinner with Harmon Hensley https://www.ahattersley.com/our-story , President of Hattersley and Sons in Fort Wayne, a man of means that caught this vision of what they wanted to do.

About the same time, the late Dr Jim Bose of Oklahoma State University (OSU) started working with Gerald Parker on geothermal closed loop science, coming up with the first equations for piped heat transfer in a horizontal closed loop exchanger. That effort eventually spawned the International Ground Source Heat Pump Association (IGSHPA) in 1987 https://igshpa.org/about-us/.

When you consider the date on Dave’s certificate for successful completion of the Closed-Loop Earth-Coupled Heat Pump Workshop, which was signed by Dr Jim Bose, it gives an idea of how far ahead they were.  The date of Dave’s attendance is February 24, 1983, and IGSHPA was organized at Oklahoma State University 4 years later in 1987, with Dr. Jim Bose as the Executive Director.

David’s 1983 OSU Closed-Loop Certificate

The pair was set to be a prime distributor for Command Air, on which they planned to affix the new ‘WaterFurnace” label, but the deal did not materialize. They went on to work with investors to create WaterFurnace International in April 1983 in what they affectionately call the “carpeted warehouse.” You can see the harvest-gold carpet in the image in which they are standing proudly in front of the first WaterFurnace booth.

The First WaterFurnace Trade Show Booth

Dan wrote a letter to get Dave a visa to come to U.S. to work as the Executive VP of WaterFurnace. By January of 1984, according to the letter, Dave’s distribution company in Ontario had sold $500,000 worth of WaterFurnace equipment and was the largest single distributor in North America. As a result of their alliance, during 1984, WaterFurnace set up about 20 distributors, enlisted the support of electrical coops to monetize geothermal heat pump rebates in their areas, and had completed some significant commercial projects involving as many as 324 vertical boreholes.

Employment Letter from Dan to David

At this time, the Carter Administration still had federal tax credits on the rolls for heat pumps, but those were eliminated by the new administration in 1984.  Even with that, WaterFurnace sold $2.2 million in geothermal heat pumps by the end of 1984, showing a $300,000 profit.

When the Command Air part of the deal failed, Dan Ellis arranged for the purchase the water-source division of McQuay with the help of investors, which bootstrapped WaterFurnace fully into the manufacturing business in 1985.

In the next segment, we’ll share information on Dave moving back to Ontario where he worked with the utility to get 7,300 systems installed in three years, Dan moved over to ClimateMaster, and guided them from the red to a $200M company in 10 years.

Jay Egg is a geothermal consultant, writer, and the President of Egg Geo, LLC. He has co-authored two textbooks on geothermal HVAC systems published by McGraw-Hill Professional. He can be reached at jegg@egggeo.com