Most people don't appreciate the extraordinary ingenuity of the critical infrastructure that supports our lives - distribution of electricity, water, natural gas, telecommunications, reservoirs, etc. God Bless the scientists, architects and engineers who design, build, and operate these life-sustaining processes.
@@kaylawuvscookies Sorry, but that's not how it works. Profit incentive is what makes these things possible at all. Besides, you're the one who has to demonstrate why the shit you just spewed is true.
4 года назад
On that topic, let me recommend the RU-vid channel "Practical Engineering": ru-vid.complaylists
Yep. Then some jerk-off bureaucrat thinks they know more than the operators and the engineers to make the process "better fit" his/her political agenda.
The builders and maintainers of our infrastructure are greatly misunderstood and highly under appreciated. I love them all and thank you for everything! I appreciate you every single day.
Just in case you are looking for inspiration for new videos, I suggest physics. You have a way of explaining, that makes things very simple. Thank you for your videos
I started watching your videos starting with what happened with Chernobyl. This is awesome that you went to a treatment plant. I'm barely starting out as an OIT at my local wastewater treatment plant but I'm really proud of what I do.
1:06 For us European followers (a bit rounded): 50 m³/minute, 75 thousand m³/day, 25 million m³/year. Flushing a toilet 20 L, shower 75 L. Total usage 380-570 L/d/person.
Now this is a dirty job. I remember Mike Rowe visited a sanitation plant and had to wear a breather mask at one point to prevent suffocation by hydrogen sulfide. Thank you sanitation workers !
I have a way to reclaim the effluent waste water from the treatment plant. You could actually sell it as bottled water to pay for the filtering and have profit left over. If you could get me in contact with the plant manager, we can start testing.
might have been a cool idea to fill up the room with sewage 26 times during this video! on second thought, ... p.s.: this was not a waste of my time. really good stuff!
My first real job was in the labs on a sewage treatment plant. All this time later I discover that I had pictured the sed tanks and the ASPs in the wrong order!
I managed and have since retired from a small SBR (sequential Batch Reactor) treatment plant. Did I miss something? Where was the all important disinfection portion of the process usually after filtration? It's done by some form of chlorine/de chlore or ultraviolet process. Did this plant not have disinfection as part of the process? I would think your NPDES permit would require this step.
johanponken No, the plant I managed discharges into a stream and our permit required us to be below a certain count of bacteria (fecal coliform) which we achieved by UV disinfection. I doubt you will ever see wastewater effluent being used as potable drinking water in the US. Many states are allowing water reuse for public irrigation (class A) but it has to be even a lower bacteria count and monitored very closely.
When mixed with all of the other wastes people flush, bleach and anti-bacterial substances are so diluted that they do not reduce the viability of the microbes.
Is it windy enough there to use a windmill to run a compressor to provide some/all the air for the bacteria? Also would solar over the facility be a cost effective way to help reduce power requirements? Could you produce bio gas and use that to run onsite generator to provide power? Thinking about it both from a financial standpoint and a redundancy stand point so that the facility could keep running if it lost grid power.
Methane production is typically created through anaerobic fermentation. They purposely cause the opposite of this, aerobic fermentation to occur. The gaseous by products would not be suitable for combustion I believe.
@@connorrivers798 They had all the "stuff" they filtered out in the first phase they were just tossing into land fills. Seems like there's something you could do with that material like turning it into a bio fuel to help run the treatment plant if it was cost effective to do so.
@@matthewconnor5483 A lot of landfills capture methane to be used to produce electricity. The amount of electricity these plants use is massive In comparison to what they could offset with renewables. Im sure they're is research into using wind turbines to pump air, but many existing plants would not have the funds nor capability to be retrofitted.
@@matthewconnor5483 Biofuel for vehicles would require alcoholic fermentation or whatever the diesel process is. There would not be enough sugar or fats present and would likely result in energy lost. The waste simply doesnt have enough possible energy for it to make sense.
@@connorrivers798 Our local treatment plant does capture methane to generate power on site. They typically run right around the power they need. Sometimes they have to by power. Sometimes they sell it. We're processing close to the same amount of water by population compared to this facility
I really want to know what happens in accident or mass release events. Like when a immense amount of salt water enters the sewage system enough to destabilize the flora that eat the poop. Also for my local waste treatment, they release deoxygenated water killing all the fish in the creek sometimes. Just why are they having an oxygenation problem in the effluent? I’m thinking they don’t get it as clean as here, it’s a pretty small treatment area.
Thanks for asking. Various organic substances that are naturally occurring make foam more stable. I've seen foam downstream of dams in the fall. I have assumed this was associated with leaf degradation as the river was often colored with tannins. At UCSD, the foam dissipates a short distance downstream. It has never been a compliance issue. It seems to be associated with the nitrifying towers. There is no foam upstream of them and when they are taken off-line for maintenance, the foam disappears for those days.
This is incredible, but it all seems tremendously expensive and energy-hungry. I wonder if there's a less capital-intensive alternative that would get you "good enough" results...
They could fit solar panels over all the pools to provide power and heat insulation, which would be a cheap way to reduce power needs by 25%. Some plants also have an anaerobic section that produces methane for power and heating. The latter is more expensive than solar, but provides power the whole day.
@Joe Average unlikely he meant Litres as the US don't use that as a standard measurement. Maybe 5 gallons is just the standard that facility uses as a means for predicting flow.
I use a bucket of already used water to flush. So yeah, sometimes it takes almost the whole five gallons to manage to get some of those huge logs down. I aim to produce dirtier water then everyone else.
Actually, 5 gallons (19 liters) was the standard volume of water used per flush for toilets in the US for a very long time. Since toilets don't really wear out, that is still what is in most homes. You are correct that low flush toilets, which are currently being sold, do manage to only use 1.5 gallons, or about 5-liters, or less.
