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Having worked in the water and waste water industry for the last 22 years here in the UK, i can say your video is 100% correct, apart from the flocculants we use are polymer not pool cleaner :)
only for US residents. "we currently require all Wealthfront clients to have a U.S. social security number, a permanent U.S. residential address, and currently reside in the U.S due to financial regulations. "
The small scale demonstrations are what set this channel apart from the rest in the beginning. I hope they never go away. I really appreciate the work.
As an Environmental Engineer, it's amazing that wastewater treatment is getting the exposure that it deserves. This can go a long way into shaping people's opinion in processes that are crucial in our lives but are oblivious to.
Couldn't agree more, im a maintenance tech for a water company and people seem to think that Sewage just, kinda goes down the drain and disappears to some magic location?!
@@BringDHouseDown Grit, as it is commonly called can be removed manually in small-scale plants. Large scale plants employ bucket s calpers, pumps, or screw conveyors. Sludge ( biodegraded material) is removed every 3-4 years ( depending on system design), dried and sold as fertilizer.
Hey i've got a question: These circular clarifiers are called Dorr-type clarifiers right? Dorr clasifiers are often used in mining so there is where my question stems from.
When I was a teenager I seriously considered going into wastewater management. I visited to treatment plants and I found the process pretty darn interesting. In the end I picked a job that would pay better, but I sure love clean water
@@ChevTecGroup - You don't even notice the stink after a while. I worked on the headworks upgrade for the Boston Harbor cleanup project about 30 years ago on the equipment that moved the grit and screenings material up to trucks six stories above at ground level.
My three little boys ( ages 7, 4, and 1) always come running for these waste water videos :) They are fascinated by our small town's sewage treatment plant and are so very disappointed that they don't give tours. These videos have been the next best thing. Thank you for another excellent video.
Keep these public works videos coming! I manage a small municipal electric, water, and sewer utility and these videos help me better understand some of the fundamentals that our crews work with on a daily basis.
It's always great to see the head guys learning their crew's jobs better. That usually means less unreasonable expectations and a better working relationship.
I'm a California Grade IV wastewater treatment plant operator and I take pride in what I do. Job security for sure. Excellent presentation you gave. Thank you
As a grade 1 operator I have to admit I didn't think the job would be as fulfilling as it actually is, but I take pride in knowing I'm helping to keep my community's water clean and safe.
@TheWicho46 Congratulations! I'm hoping to shoot for my grade II soon, but our facility has been a bit understaffed lately. Fortunately the city I work with paid for the classes and exams to train me in both drinking water and wastewater.
Thank both of you for being the 15% or so of the population who are the absolute backbone of this country.... Hard working people like you... Along with all the great tradesman out there are the unsung heroes that allow us to live our lives in such convenience every day...
My father in law was a pipefitter in Chicago so we got to go to the grand opening of Stickney Treatment plant. They showed and explained the different steps and processes used to separate things then put us on a sludge train. At the end of the line they has a HUGE field/ train yard that the sludge was dump into, then turned several times like compose. They would sell this as fertilizer.
Selling composted sludge as fertilizer is all well and good until you think about the industrial waste included in the treatment plant's feed stream, some of which gets into the sludge. The composting process (theoretically) kills harmful bacteria but mostly doesn't affect heavy metals (lead and mercury, for example) and other industrial contaminants that you definitely don't want in your food. Personally, I wouldn't want to eat food derived from this fertilizer. The fertilizer may be ok for non-food crops (flowers, trees for wood, biofuel) but not food.
In my specific field we have a wastewater pretreatment process called "metals precipitation" which uses hydrated lime and flocculant to "settle" and separate the metal contamination out so we can release clean water. It also uses a clarifier and at least one "polishing tank" to allow the sludge to descend, and a clear water layer to form and flow out of the plant into the sewer system.
In my previous field we did second hand waste management survival, called fill metal perception, which uses hydraphobic particle acceleration through flocculant construction of contaminated sludge.
@@Blox117 in my cosmic field we drink psychotropic water so our urine contains psychedelics to pass on to our children. Mushrooms are our wastewater treatment.
As a non engineer working in the civil engineering world, these videos have been incredibly helpful in understanding not just the process flow but the math behind the processes I see in my day to day.
As a student engineer in Toronto, I did a work term co-op at the Queen Street sewage treatment plant. 32 years later I can still smell it when I think about those days. It was a huge factor in choosing to focus on Structural Engineering.
I grew up in farm country so i already knew that i could never handle sewage treatment, definitely glad I chose Electrical Engineering. PS: "liquid manure" is so awful that my neighbor could smell the "honey wagon" of it drive by while he was milking his own cows. (Liquid manure has extra nitrogen added which results in more bacterial growth and makes it a better fertilizer, this also makes it one of the worst smells on earth)
@@jasonreed7522 Electrical engineers will visit sewage treatment plants too.... The pumps often are driven by variable speed drives, and there are many control systems. Fortunately I can say that my entire time spent at a treatment plant was measured in hours. My employer's equipment was having repeated warranty failures so I got sent to investigate.
@@matthewbeasley7765 fortunately my company mainly focused on "clean industry" and universities so its mostly clean rooms and lab buildings for our work. But we do/did have a single project for installing an anaerobic digester for a farm to make biogas power. Fortunately that was being done by another office and so I wasn't on that project, but i did see pictures. (I'm wasn't bothered, once i walked through my neighbors barn in rubber flipflops and i don't know why my dad let me do that looking back) Also mechanical field work for such places is much more involved than electrical field work since we just need panel and machine label information. To an EE everything is just a black box with power requirements and a transfer function. Sure an electron microscope may have facinating physics going on but at the end of the day it comes with a spec sheet that has a list of its power needs (ups, low noise, nema plug number, voltage class, power draw, ect). Feel bad for the commissioning department who has to make sure it works after its been installed.
minor correction, at 6:16 , it should be "all particles settle when t_d < t_l " because, as you mentioned, you want the time it takes for particles to settle to be LESS than it takes to travel the basin's length. You then performed a multiplicative inverse which changes the direction of your inequality symbol to get your overflow rate. Great video nonetheless, very informative.
I work for a municipality in the US and it is amazing how fast water treatment plants can clean water. One of the plants we have can take sewage and turn it into water clean enough to discharge in only about 24 hours; it really surprised me when I was discussing it with our Public Works department. An treatment operator is a good job, I consistently see openings for these positions. Urban areas and water treatment needs are only going to grow.
To my knowledge, wasted water goes in a water treatment system will remain in the system 5-7 days (to be treated by said system). The treated water that goes out is the wasted water of 5-7 days prior, 24 hour mark is flush gate opening cycles. Or maybe the plants you're talking about running different system. Cheers.
I love your channel. I have been a wastewater treatment plant operator and am currently a potable water treatment plant operator. It is gratifying to see the processes that underlie the functioning of modern society explained in laymen's terms.
I learned engines by working with my dad at a waste water treatment plant. They had 4 big natural gas Cat engines (that we maintained) that turned the blowers to aerated the sewage as it entered the plant. I learned a lot, not only from dad, but from the engineers, operators and chemists at the plant. Really, really cool!
Dear Grady, great to hear such a complicated topic presented so easily. I am working in the wwtp field with newest technologies such as electro dialysis, ultrafiltration or reverse osmosis. In case you need contacts to a full scale plant almost everywhere in the world, to shoot videos or do interviews, don't hesitate to drop a comment and I can forward you to some colleagues. Cheers
Awesome job! This episode hit home. I was born and raised in Chicago and now live near the Northside water reclamation plant in Skokie IL. The plant is connected to Stikney by 16 miles of pipe. The Skokie plant sends the primary and secondary settling tank sludge to Stikney to be digested and dewatered. The sludge is composted and used as fertilizer. My wife has covered our front yard with the fertilized and is planting native plants in place of our lawn. I guess you could say that my yard is the final step in the settling tank process. :)
Taking extremely complex systems and simplifying them is something that you do best with these videos. You did a dang good job explaining the basics of WWT in a 11 minute video. This video could be 30 hours long with how complicated and elaborate water treatment can be.
I work for the SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) department at a municipal water and wastewater management company. These videos explaining how our wastewater systems work is phenomenal. Thank you for your hard work and the informational videos!
When you find someone with the same occupation as you do in the TH-cam comments section ❤️ Do you generally use citect, geo/clear, Honeywell for your SCADA?
I'm a process engineer who specialises in coagulation and brine treatment, and I really think you did a great job of explaining the sedimentation. Also your coagulation demo was very neat, quick and informative. I will definetely use that one for future presentations. I hope you'll do more water treatment videos in the future, even though it is not entirely in the field of civil engineering
I worked at a wastewater treatment plant for 13 years before becoming a teacher. This was a pretty good explanation of clarifiers, but you skimmed what is done to the particles that settle out to the bottom of the clarifier. At my plant, we pumped them back to the head of the aerators for further treatment as the mostly cleared water goes over the weirs. I worked for the Clayton County Water Authority in Georgia. We won all kinds of awards. People from all over the world toured our water and wastewater plants to learn how to improve their own systems back home.
Don't forget belt presses Grady! Thanks for doing this series! My dad was a wastewater plant operator when I was growing up, it was a lot more interesting than people would think, especially when the state would audit them because their lab results showed the effluent exceeded state drinking water standards. . . And then the audit would reveal they WEREN'T falsifying their results! 🤣
The fish absolutely love the output of our waste treatment plant, the water is so clean and well oxygenated. Thanks, ever increasing EPA standards, and thanks, increasingly expensive water bill.
I'm a biological wastewater treatment plant operator. This video did such a fantastic job explaining some of the principles used in treatment and how the plant works. Thanks for putting out such informative videos.
The precasting company I work for has made a few parts for these facilities. I've definitely drawn up walls for clarifiers and digesters, along with pumping stations. They may not smell great, but these places are absolutely critical for civilization.
Great starting video. I was a construction/distribution manager for a water treatment plant and would really like you to do more in depth videos on these subjects. Many thanks.
GF works at one of the Seattle area sewage plants, on the solids side of things. "Polymer" is a big part of getting the solids to separate from the liquids. Once settled out, the solids go to enclosed digesters where the "material" is more or less composted in an anaerobic process. The resulting methane is used to help provide process heat for elsewhere in the plant. Once sufficiently digested, the solids are dewatered (the watery "mud" first goes on a separating belt to let liquid drip out, then into centrifuges to spin out more water) to the consistency of wet soil and shipped to eastern Washington for disposal, er, I mean application as fertilizer on agricultural land. Seattle area folks - if you've ever seen double dump trucks on I-90 with "Loop - turn your dirt around" you now know that is what's left of Seattle's poo.
Poo in a truck beats San Francisco style! I really appreciate water and sewage workers, just think about what kind of a community you'd have without their efforts.
I love the concept when someone presents a lesson where they explain to have gravity work in your favor. An example of having gravity working in your favor is with removing a heavy object from a box. Instead of straining to lift the item out of the box, a person should tip the box on its end so that the lightweight box is lifted-up while the heavy object remains on the floor. That way you are having gravity working in your favor to remove the box from the heavy object.
@@CGT80 I agree! There's been times in life when working smarter didn't bode well with my bosses; as I came up with the idea and they didn't. Bosses like that may indicate their insecurities.
I have been over-joyed by this series, I work for a DWR and visit our plants on a regular basis. Seeing it taught in a fun and interesting way is just awesome! not to mention seeing the ways our process is the same or different from other municipalities. You're awesome Grady, keep it up!
Wastewater Treatment Operator here, I love this industry. Seems like its complicated but you learn your plant quickly and your city inflow characteristics as well. I like to describe it as a cruise ship, nice and slow with slight changes. Thank you for these videos, hopefully we can inspire the next generation of Wastewater Operators!
So excited for this! Great video; I am a PE who focuses in wastewater treatment in Michigan. Glad to see this information getting out there in an entertaining way.
I'm thinking of entering into the industry! I'm an environmental science student. Any tips on what I should do to secure a good placement year within the industry!
It warms my heart seeing the very thing I work with being brought up on your channel. Now my specific area is industrial wastewater from a pulp processing plant so there are some adjustments to the biological portion of the process to deal with but the core principle is still intact as you describe it. Since I was a little boy I have been fond of water as I grew up close to a small picturesque freshwater lake and just beyond that the Baltic ocean. It pollution and waste in the water compelled me to study biology and the ecology of watersystems on a molecular scale at University. So to now work with it after all these years and have it brought to attention by you is truly wonderful! Thanks for the great video, as always!
Dear Grady, I have an interest in engineering and technology topics and I absolutely love your videos. I think they make said topics much more friendly and accessible to everyone, and are truly inspiring. Sure, there's so much more about engineering than what you show - so much more math, for example 😅😱 but I'm sure in my heart of hearts that it is possible to make videos like these even for the most complex mathematical aspects of the things you show here, to make them just as accessible. Keep it up!!👏
As a flood defense engineer in the uk I find it really interesting to watch these videos with the demos. Great videos keep them coming. This is my only subscription on TH-cam! I check for new content all the time!
Hopefully you do a video on aerobic and anaerobic digestion. Sludge is such a critical part of WWT, and I feel like it is often overlooked. Great video!
Me and my former process and maintenance tech colleagues at a waste water treatment plant used to refer to ourselves as animal caretakers in that same line of thought ;)
I do video from aerobic and anaesthetic digest from anorexic parts of both wwt and wwt3, but only fine columns of sludge can be transferred at a time. I love physics!
@@SonsOfLorgar the "bugs" can be quiet temperamental. A plant that I worked at had too little water entering the plant so were heavily impacted by summer heat. We had to occasionally get a transplant of sludge from a nearby municipal plant to restore the biodiversity.
I love how you focus on the general principles, such as flow rates and sedimentation physics, and only use the modern facilities as examples, instead of focusing on the facilities with the general understanding used only as extra examples. If I wanted to build my own small scale sewage plant, whether in urban, rural or even wooded environments, I'd still know what was needed to be done (not everything, such as contamination mitigation, but you get it). Your content really makes the world a better place. Thank you!
Collecting the sludge is also important for just making the whole process work economically - because by readding some of the sludge collected in the clarifiers at the beginning of the secondary stage, it is possible to have the solids retention time be many times higher than the hydraulic retention time, which is set by the volume of the secondary stage and the flow rate through it. A quite high solids retention time is necessary to give the bacteria enough time to sufficiently degrade dissolved organic contaminants.
@@Dth091 That's the other method that is used in some wastewater treatment plants too, growing the bacteria as a biofilm using something like a trickling filter or a fluidised bed bioreactor. Those can be more space-efficient than the normal activated sludge process, but also more complex and expensive than just a few big concrete basins.
Hey Grady, water/wastewater process engineer here- Great video! Have you considered making Continuing Education versions of these? Might be another way to get some revenue for the effort. I'd rather watch your vids than any other CE providers.
This was an awesome video! I work in wastewater, typically the screens that take out branches and trash, but I also work in sludge thickening, which is like your pool cleaner demo. For sludge thickening machines, the inlet sludge is typically 0.5 to 1.5% solids, and after being treated with chemicals (polymer) and sent through a process machine, it can come out anywhere from 5-10% solids, which is an 80+% reduction in volume.
I've slung a lot of concrete building these they weren't that big but it brought back memories from 25 or more years ago. Thanks for the refresher course. From the first hole to the reestablishment of plant growth I did it all being .young was fun
I worked at a brewery with a waste water treatment plant for brewery runoff. I never worked in the plant, just the brew side, but I learned a lot about waste treatment. This video was so informative and I found my self thinking about ways my previous employer could improve their system. Grady, you're awesome, and you're content is quality 👌 Thank you for doing what you do.
Having had the opportunity to visit both waste water and drinking water plant here in the Netherlands, It is interesting to see the similarities and differences across the pond. While the wastewater treatment is largely similar, for drinking water the sediment separation is not done with chemicals but electrostatically. Furthermore, we use ozone and UV sterilisation so the water does not contain much if any chlorine. Tap water here is the same quality as bottled drinking water. To keep the water supply safe, waste water treatment is very important! The sediment of waste water gets pumped to a fermenting plant where they evaporate the water and then let the residue ferment. The resulting gas is used to generate electric power, and the remaining residue is burnt and its residual heat used in the same electrical power generator.
I work in water and wastewater engineering in the US. Ozone and UV disinfection are both known technologies over here, although I’ve only seen one ozone plant in my, admittedly still early, career. UV is much more common, and is arguably displacing chlorine in wastewater applications. It is less popular with potable water because unlike chlorine, UV disinfection provides no ongoing disinfecting effect after the water leaves the plant. Residual chlorine in the distribution system helps to prevent microbes from developing in the pipe network. The downside is that, if any of your pipes are metal, corrosion becomes a concern over time.
Excellent explanatory video Grady! I’m an Operations Manager at Beckton Treatment Works, which is the largest in Europe and treats the waste of nearly 4 million Londoners from Bazalgette’s original 1860s Sewers. We have 16 enormous Primary Settlement Tanks (PSTs), and 88 Final Settlement Tanks (FSTs). You’ve nailed the sheer effective simplicity of the settlement process - visitors to site are often astounded that, bar dewatering/sludge thickening, the treatment process is exclusively gravitational and biological. Keep the fab videos coming :)
I've been trying to reverse an old, over sedimented pond and this was interesting for that purpose. One idea for a video would be how lakes/ponds silt over time with dead leaves, sticks, etc resulting in stagnation and methane production. (And how one could go about fixing one in their backyard without a backhoe 😅)
Easy. Explosives. Or hire Elon Musk to have one of his rockets grab you a microasteroid and drop it to impact at the center of your pond surface. Seriously a dozer can also do it. How was it dug in the first place or was it natural?
A friend who is a civil engineer says he watches your channel to learn about othet things he's less familiar on / how to better synthesize complicated issues. Both professionals and everyday people learn alot from you. Thanks! (also, appreciate links to other videos.)
I kinda love how we really just use a ton of pretty simplistic processes in series to create the miracle of clean water, when you break it down each step is fairly simple but we just do it on a huge scale and in clever combinations and get clean water. It's almost as much a triumph of construction as it is engineering.
I love water treatment plants!! I did my thesis on one of those stations with an emphasis on biomethanisation which can save tremendous amounts of energy for the plant. Such an important and unknown part of our society, glad you shed some lights on them, Grady! 🥰 They are also quite sensitive, as the workers there! Dont throw just about everything in sewage water, people, it can cost a lot to your whole community 😙 Just a little note, sedimentation bassins are *not really* the very first part of the journey, there is a whole system of grids and filters that comes first, or all the subsequent infrastructure would get clogged with, and potentially damaged by, macroscopic objects, plastics, wood, and so much more! And floculation and flotation also serve to get rid of fats, which remain on the surface when the rest sediments :)
I always love these in depth looks you do on science/engineering projects. It would be cool if you did a collaboration with Destin from Smarter Every Day.
Great video. As a wastewater treatment operator, I'd say you took all the complicated stuff and made it easily digestible for the average person. What you failed to mention, however, is that the engineering firm that won the bid to design and build the facility was the lowest bidder, they did the absolute minimum to get paid, and were long gone by the time operations started running the facility; left to "make it work" because all the genius engineers couldn't have been bothered to listen to us lowly, unclean operators, and consider what we said we needed vs what they decided we needed
Most engineering contracts for public infrastructure in the US are awarded based on qualifications, not price. In addition, most firms awarded large contracts like this have long-term relationships with the clients and definitely maintain a presence and relationship after a project is complete (with the hopes of winning the next one).
I work as a plumber, and when it comes to sewage disposal on a mass scale, your video was very informative. When it comes to settling particles with an electric charge, Mark Rober made a video awhile back about how I believe P&G made a packet compound that does exactly what your experiment showed, to purify water in Africa and more poverty-riddled countries. I recommend everyone to check that video out as well.
Very interesting and very informative. The narrator is also very clear in telling the story. English is my second language (I'm a Filipino) and I sometimes find myself relying on subtitles to fully understand the video I am watching. Not so with this channel. His voice is crystal clear and soothing to my ears. Thank you!
I'd love to hear and see more about how they collect and remove the sediment/sludge after it's out of the water. How often do they have to do that? Is it as gross as it sounds like it would be?
There is a pipe at the bottom of the clarifier that takes the sludge to a sludge basin. Then the sludge from the sludge basin is pumped to a belt press, which presses the water out of the sludge. The water then goes back through the process without the sludge, and the sludge is put in a dump truck and hauled to the landfill. Hopefully that answers your question.
I am currently working on an expansion of Hawaii's second largest wastewater treatment plant to full secondary treatment. This video is awesome! I love taking your plain language explanations and use it to communicate with the different stakeholders on the project.
Recently started a position as a lab analyst at a treatment plant. I run tests for alkalinity, sludges, and total suspended solids. I work with these samples every day but don't really have a clue about the steps they go through, so this is a much appreciated series.
Hi Grady, I enjoy watching your video's and demonstrations supporting the subject being discussed. A point that could be mentioned here is the city of Chicago only has a single sewer system that collect's house hold waste, business waste, and storm water waste. Over many years, decades, the city drilled a tunnel system to collect this combined waste water during heavy rains to prevent flooding and sewer backup's into house's. The waste water is then pumped out of the tunnel system to and ran through, at a later time, this treatment plant. This tunnel system is also connected to a old open air stone quarry located on the south side of the city.
As a wastewater operator I’ve been asked “how does it work?” more times then I can count and just like you said I simply put it as “separation of the dangerous materials from the water either by physical, chemical, or biological means is the easiest way I can put it”
Being an Environmental Engineer and a professor teaching these subjects (Wastewater Treatment Engineering, Water Supply and Treatment), the positivity and enthusiasm regarding this topic in the comment section does put a smile on my face.
As somebody currently designing a wastewater treatment plant for my senior capstone course in college, seeing Grady post these videos now makes me happier than I could ever have imagined
We used clarifies in the gold mines I worked at in Nevada. We used them to recover the slimes, and dispose of the overflow. The “slimes”as we called them were the concentrated gold ore. We were trying for 50% density by time the recovered ore began its refinement. Good video as always!
One of the really interesting things I wished you had covered here is tube and plate settlers in this stage. When I was researching this topic it was really interesting to see how the surface area introduced at different angles decreased the clarification time needed. This whole series is great for people to start understanding!
yep. Many older plants have had plates installed to increase their capacity without having to build new sedimentation tanks. A video about what happens with the sediment would be interesting too.
I worked in a water treatment plant in Nigeria 🇳🇬 construction work by Salini Nigeria Ltd. Your explanation helps more and it is valid. We constructed Lamellar Settlers to assist the clarifiers.
I work as a process engineer for a company in the UK that supplies modular treatment systems to the municipal, industrial, and construction sectors - and I have to say this is the best layman's explanation I've ever seen for how clarifiers work! Since most of our clarifier/settlement units at work are modular (i.e. small, mobile units that can be prefabricated and transported to site on a flat-bed) we use lamellas, it would have been cool to see you expand on the overflow rate (or upflow rate as we call it) to explain how a lamella takes advantage of this principle to reduce the required footprint (maybe a little companion piece for a future video!). We also make chemical dosing units, MBBRs for secondary/tertiary treatment and DAFs (mostly for HST applications) so hope you cover some of these technologies eventually.
Thanks for the video, it’s really nice to see. I have a question, why you can states that “All particles settle when tD > tL”, should it be tD < tL? please explains thank you
I work at an automotive paint facility and handle their process wastewater using various chemicals to eliminate paint waste (sludge). I manage 750,000 gallons so i’m a small fry compared to the mammoth showed here.. Absolutely loved this video!
Your videos should be required curriculum for elected officials that often randomly modify budgets without understanding what havoc they cause. I am the Utilities Electrical Foreman for a city and we're currently working through multiple wastewater process improvement projects including replacing the entire aeration system and adding UV disinfection. Currently using biogas to offset electrical usage and we'll be adding adding a methane-powered blower for aeration. Keep the videos coming!
Every kid in school should tour water treatment plants, waste water, power plants, and some agriculture too... too many people take for granted the armies of people working behind the scenes to make their lives comfortable and modern.
I was so excited when I saw that you had made a video on this topic because I have been wondering about what those facilities are and how they work. I was not disappointed. Once again you deliver quality info -well done.
I love your demonstrations and intuitive explanation Grady. Civil engineering usually got a lot of flaks for being the "easiest", but I argue we're probably the most essential to modern day prosperity. Physicists and mathematicians can't work on their fancy proofs without electricity or drinking water! Water and sewage systems are also most effective with density and agglomeration, in that dense urban forms reduce the probabilities for leaks and nonrevenue losses. I do hope that the new urbanism wave will take hold and cities across North American can return to their social and human-scale roots.
Just finished my water plant operations course last year, your videos are fantastic and spot on. Really helped me in my studying to better understand the process. Thank you!
As a UT in the Navy, I worked with wastewater, sludge cake, effluent, and every other aspect of sewage treatment. This demonstration was way easier to follow and learn than going to school in the Navy.
I went searching for information on sewage cleaning after your sewage pumping video and was sad to see a lack of information on it. I hope this series really takes a deep dive, it's fascinating. Thanks Grady.
This is fantastic! I work for a company that provides those settling chemistries and helps run these process with the municipality- it's called Nalco! I've loved your channel for years, so seeing something that I do is really awesome.
Upvoted for being literally the only presentation I've ever heard that explains how particles that are more dense than water can stay suspended in water.
I don't know if you have had planned this video a long time ago , but I surely requested this video several times, thank you. Another suggestion: (1)Explain the Coagulation Aided Sedimentation and why it's not performed in your country whilst we perform it quite frequently in WTP. (2) Explain sludge thickening and clean energy produced through sludge digestor , explaining self sustainability of STP.
I was literally thinking about this 2 weeks ago... playing cities skylines like wtf are these circular tanks in sewage processing and why do they all have them? TH-cam only had whole process videos that I had to sift through for the small info on clarifiers... that is.. until now. Thank you for all that you do!! This video release was perfectly timed for me!
These videos are amazing to me, several topics I sort of had an idea from school grazing over the subject but the videos really help quickly clarify how things truly work. Thank you,
One of the best channels on TH-cam. Hey Grady, perhaps do a series on industrial processes, like kraft paper process, power production in closed cycle gas turbines for example.
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Having worked in the water and waste water industry for the last 22 years here in the UK, i can say your video is 100% correct, apart from the flocculants we use are polymer not pool cleaner :)
What happened to everybody's favorite segment of getting to watch you try to cook a meal‽
only for US residents. "we currently require all Wealthfront clients to have a U.S. social security number, a permanent U.S. residential address, and currently reside in the U.S due to financial regulations. "
Can you please explain "peak days" in the context of sewage? Are there days where we all just shit more?
So is (W) the 3D part of the equation? 6:05
The small scale demonstrations are what set this channel apart from the rest in the beginning. I hope they never go away. I really appreciate the work.
I completely agree. Bet his wife wishes she could park in the garage though lol.
1000% agree
I loved the coloured sand one
Totally agree
hello are you Minecraft Steve or Crablante from One Punch Man
As an Environmental Engineer, it's amazing that wastewater treatment is getting the exposure that it deserves. This can go a long way into shaping people's opinion in processes that are crucial in our lives but are oblivious to.
Couldn't agree more, im a maintenance tech for a water company and people seem to think that Sewage just, kinda goes down the drain and disappears to some magic location?!
how is the sediment accumulated at the bottom taken care of? I mean I assume that it eventually piles up
@@BringDHouseDown 9:00
@@BringDHouseDown Grit, as it is commonly called can be removed manually in small-scale plants. Large scale plants employ bucket s calpers, pumps, or screw conveyors. Sludge ( biodegraded material) is removed every 3-4 years ( depending on system design), dried and sold as fertilizer.
Hey i've got a question: These circular clarifiers are called Dorr-type clarifiers right? Dorr clasifiers are often used in mining so there is where my question stems from.
When I was a teenager I seriously considered going into wastewater management. I visited to treatment plants and I found the process pretty darn interesting. In the end I picked a job that would pay better, but I sure love clean water
I knew some people who had great careers doing so. The stink keeps people away
@@ChevTecGroup - You don't even notice the stink after a while. I worked on the headworks upgrade for the Boston Harbor cleanup project about 30 years ago on the equipment that moved the grit and screenings material up to trucks six stories above at ground level.
@@chickenwing111 I've heard the same. But people can't get over the initial stink to even imagine applying there.
Same here i loved that quest on fa4 and felt like I was a pro but later on on the game I just wanted to be a bit raider lol
Mostly the smell isn't too bad. Mostly.
My three little boys ( ages 7, 4, and 1) always come running for these waste water videos :) They are fascinated by our small town's sewage treatment plant and are so very disappointed that they don't give tours. These videos have been the next best thing. Thank you for another excellent video.
You should really write to the local sewage treatment plant about giving a special tour for your boys! I hope they'll do it :D
But its stinky 😅
@@Xv1p3rCr0 It doesnt smell that much.
If you say so. 🙃
@@Xv1p3rCr0 For boys that age something being stinky probably adds to the charm...
Keep these public works videos coming! I manage a small municipal electric, water, and sewer utility and these videos help me better understand some of the fundamentals that our crews work with on a daily basis.
I managed medium municipal eclectic, water severe waste utility and clean plant for 5 year
It's always great to see the head guys learning their crew's jobs better. That usually means less unreasonable expectations and a better working relationship.
@AGNÉZ Buny Girls This isnt what we want to learn
Interesting confirmation that managers are nearly clueless what the people they're managing do.
@@AboveEmAllProductionI managed large municipal eclectic, water severe waste utility and clean plant for 10 year
I'm a California Grade IV wastewater treatment plant operator and I take pride in what I do. Job security for sure. Excellent presentation you gave. Thank you
As a grade 1 operator I have to admit I didn't think the job would be as fulfilling as it actually is, but I take pride in knowing I'm helping to keep my community's water clean and safe.
@@Thoughtmage100 I actually went all the way on go my grade V, in June. That's how committed I am.
@TheWicho46 Congratulations! I'm hoping to shoot for my grade II soon, but our facility has been a bit understaffed lately. Fortunately the city I work with paid for the classes and exams to train me in both drinking water and wastewater.
You all are unsung heroes of everyday life. Thank y'all for your hard work!
Thank both of you for being the 15% or so of the population who are the absolute backbone of this country.... Hard working people like you... Along with all the great tradesman out there are the unsung heroes that allow us to live our lives in such convenience every day...
"A moment of tranquility" Being used to describe sewage settling to the bottom is just not the words I would have used.
To be one with the universe.. FLUSH.
I'm enjoying a moment of tranquility as I watch this in the bathroom while adding to that very waste stream. Ah, the circle of life...
@@RealJohnnyDingo 😂
My father in law was a pipefitter in Chicago so we got to go to the grand opening of Stickney Treatment plant. They showed and explained the different steps and processes used to separate things then put us on a sludge train. At the end of the line they has a HUGE field/ train yard that the sludge was dump into, then turned several times like compose. They would sell this as fertilizer.
Woah! Cool!
Cool! And also, Ew!
@@jasonmyneni8605 that will be used to grow corn for the beef/pig to eat that you'll eat in tomorrows breakfast
Selling composted sludge as fertilizer is all well and good until you think about the industrial waste included in the treatment plant's feed stream, some of which gets into the sludge. The composting process (theoretically) kills harmful bacteria but mostly doesn't affect heavy metals (lead and mercury, for example) and other industrial contaminants that you definitely don't want in your food. Personally, I wouldn't want to eat food derived from this fertilizer. The fertilizer may be ok for non-food crops (flowers, trees for wood, biofuel) but not food.
I wonder if the stink blows to the neighborhood to the north.
In my specific field we have a wastewater pretreatment process called "metals precipitation" which uses hydrated lime and flocculant to "settle" and separate the metal contamination out so we can release clean water. It also uses a clarifier and at least one "polishing tank" to allow the sludge to descend, and a clear water layer to form and flow out of the plant into the sewer system.
In my previous field we did second hand waste management survival, called fill metal perception, which uses hydraphobic particle acceleration through flocculant construction of contaminated sludge.
in my future field we drink lots of water so our urine is clear. then we pass it onto the next person. no wastewater treatment needed
@@Blox117 lol
@@Blox117 so efficient
@@Blox117 in my cosmic field we drink psychotropic water so our urine contains psychedelics to pass on to our children. Mushrooms are our wastewater treatment.
As a non engineer working in the civil engineering world, these videos have been incredibly helpful in understanding not just the process flow but the math behind the processes I see in my day to day.
As a student engineer in Toronto, I did a work term co-op at the Queen Street sewage treatment plant. 32 years later I can still smell it when I think about those days. It was a huge factor in choosing to focus on Structural Engineering.
I grew up in farm country so i already knew that i could never handle sewage treatment, definitely glad I chose Electrical Engineering.
PS: "liquid manure" is so awful that my neighbor could smell the "honey wagon" of it drive by while he was milking his own cows. (Liquid manure has extra nitrogen added which results in more bacterial growth and makes it a better fertilizer, this also makes it one of the worst smells on earth)
@@jasonreed7522 Electrical engineers will visit sewage treatment plants too.... The pumps often are driven by variable speed drives, and there are many control systems. Fortunately I can say that my entire time spent at a treatment plant was measured in hours. My employer's equipment was having repeated warranty failures so I got sent to investigate.
@@jasonreed7522 nothin wrong with a lil squirt squirt
@@jasonreed7522 i live on a chicken farm that keeps liquid manure, I just don't smell much anymore
@@matthewbeasley7765 fortunately my company mainly focused on "clean industry" and universities so its mostly clean rooms and lab buildings for our work.
But we do/did have a single project for installing an anaerobic digester for a farm to make biogas power. Fortunately that was being done by another office and so I wasn't on that project, but i did see pictures. (I'm wasn't bothered, once i walked through my neighbors barn in rubber flipflops and i don't know why my dad let me do that looking back)
Also mechanical field work for such places is much more involved than electrical field work since we just need panel and machine label information. To an EE everything is just a black box with power requirements and a transfer function. Sure an electron microscope may have facinating physics going on but at the end of the day it comes with a spec sheet that has a list of its power needs (ups, low noise, nema plug number, voltage class, power draw, ect).
Feel bad for the commissioning department who has to make sure it works after its been installed.
minor correction, at 6:16 , it should be "all particles settle when t_d < t_l " because, as you mentioned, you want the time it takes for particles to settle to be LESS than it takes to travel the basin's length. You then performed a multiplicative inverse which changes the direction of your inequality symbol to get your overflow rate. Great video nonetheless, very informative.
Seeing the water treatment plant in my city, I use to wonder, what those circular pools are
Thanks to Practical Engineering for ending my doubt.
Poo pools
Swimming
I work for a municipality in the US and it is amazing how fast water treatment plants can clean water. One of the plants we have can take sewage and turn it into water clean enough to discharge in only about 24 hours; it really surprised me when I was discussing it with our Public Works department. An treatment operator is a good job, I consistently see openings for these positions. Urban areas and water treatment needs are only going to grow.
Thats where they got purified labeling from.. Makes sense now 🙃😁
To my knowledge, wasted water goes in a water treatment system will remain in the system 5-7 days (to be treated by said system). The treated water that goes out is the wasted water of 5-7 days prior, 24 hour mark is flush gate opening cycles. Or maybe the plants you're talking about running different system. Cheers.
I love your channel. I have been a wastewater treatment plant operator and am currently a potable water treatment plant operator. It is gratifying to see the processes that underlie the functioning of modern society explained in laymen's terms.
I learned engines by working with my dad at a waste water treatment plant. They had 4 big natural gas Cat engines (that we maintained) that turned the blowers to aerated the sewage as it entered the plant. I learned a lot, not only from dad, but from the engineers, operators and chemists at the plant. Really, really cool!
Dear Grady, great to hear such a complicated topic presented so easily.
I am working in the wwtp field with newest technologies such as electro dialysis, ultrafiltration or reverse osmosis.
In case you need contacts to a full scale plant almost everywhere in the world, to shoot videos or do interviews, don't hesitate to drop a comment and I can forward you to some colleagues.
Cheers
Grady
@@adobedoug2564 fixed :) thx
Awesome job! This episode hit home. I was born and raised in Chicago and now live near the Northside water reclamation plant in Skokie IL.
The plant is connected to Stikney by 16 miles of pipe. The Skokie plant sends the primary and secondary settling tank sludge to Stikney to be digested and dewatered. The sludge is composted and used as fertilizer.
My wife has covered our front yard with the fertilized and is planting native plants in place of our lawn.
I guess you could say that my yard is the final step in the settling tank process. :)
Taking extremely complex systems and simplifying them is something that you do best with these videos. You did a dang good job explaining the basics of WWT in a 11 minute video. This video could be 30 hours long with how complicated and elaborate water treatment can be.
I work for the SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) department at a municipal water and wastewater management company. These videos explaining how our wastewater systems work is phenomenal. Thank you for your hard work and the informational videos!
When you find someone with the same occupation as you do in the TH-cam comments section ❤️
Do you generally use citect, geo/clear, Honeywell for your SCADA?
@@ScottyTee06 siemens is usually the best
I'm a process engineer who specialises in coagulation and brine treatment, and I really think you did a great job of explaining the sedimentation. Also your coagulation demo was very neat, quick and informative. I will definetely use that one for future presentations. I hope you'll do more water treatment videos in the future, even though it is not entirely in the field of civil engineering
I worked at a wastewater treatment plant for 13 years before becoming a teacher. This was a pretty good explanation of clarifiers, but you skimmed what is done to the particles that settle out to the bottom of the clarifier. At my plant, we pumped them back to the head of the aerators for further treatment as the mostly cleared water goes over the weirs.
I worked for the Clayton County Water Authority in Georgia. We won all kinds of awards. People from all over the world toured our water and wastewater plants to learn how to improve their own systems back home.
Don't forget belt presses Grady! Thanks for doing this series! My dad was a wastewater plant operator when I was growing up, it was a lot more interesting than people would think, especially when the state would audit them because their lab results showed the effluent exceeded state drinking water standards. . . And then the audit would reveal they WEREN'T falsifying their results! 🤣
The fish absolutely love the output of our waste treatment plant, the water is so clean and well oxygenated. Thanks, ever increasing EPA standards, and thanks, increasingly expensive water bill.
I'm a biological wastewater treatment plant operator. This video did such a fantastic job explaining some of the principles used in treatment and how the plant works. Thanks for putting out such informative videos.
The precasting company I work for has made a few parts for these facilities. I've definitely drawn up walls for clarifiers and digesters, along with pumping stations. They may not smell great, but these places are absolutely critical for civilization.
Great starting video. I was a construction/distribution manager for a water treatment plant and would really like you to do more in depth videos on these subjects. Many thanks.
GF works at one of the Seattle area sewage plants, on the solids side of things. "Polymer" is a big part of getting the solids to separate from the liquids. Once settled out, the solids go to enclosed digesters where the "material" is more or less composted in an anaerobic process. The resulting methane is used to help provide process heat for elsewhere in the plant. Once sufficiently digested, the solids are dewatered (the watery "mud" first goes on a separating belt to let liquid drip out, then into centrifuges to spin out more water) to the consistency of wet soil and shipped to eastern Washington for disposal, er, I mean application as fertilizer on agricultural land. Seattle area folks - if you've ever seen double dump trucks on I-90 with "Loop - turn your dirt around" you now know that is what's left of Seattle's poo.
Poo in a truck beats San Francisco style! I really appreciate water and sewage workers, just think about what kind of a community you'd have without their efforts.
I love the concept when someone presents a lesson where they explain to have gravity work in your favor.
An example of having gravity working in your favor is with removing a heavy object from a box. Instead of straining to lift the item out of the box, a person should tip the box on its end so that the lightweight box is lifted-up while the heavy object remains on the floor. That way you are having gravity working in your favor to remove the box from the heavy object.
I always prefer to work smarter instead of harder!
@@CGT80 I agree! There's been times in life when working smarter didn't bode well with my bosses; as I came up with the idea and they didn't. Bosses like that may indicate their insecurities.
I have been over-joyed by this series, I work for a DWR and visit our plants on a regular basis. Seeing it taught in a fun and interesting way is just awesome! not to mention seeing the ways our process is the same or different from other municipalities. You're awesome Grady, keep it up!
Wastewater Treatment Operator here, I love this industry. Seems like its complicated but you learn your plant quickly and your city inflow characteristics as well. I like to describe it as a cruise ship, nice and slow with slight changes. Thank you for these videos, hopefully we can inspire the next generation of Wastewater Operators!
So excited for this! Great video; I am a PE who focuses in wastewater treatment in Michigan. Glad to see this information getting out there in an entertaining way.
I'm thinking of entering into the industry! I'm an environmental science student. Any tips on what I should do to secure a good placement year within the industry!
Where at and/or with whom? I'm the Utilities Electrical Foreman for Flint and we're having fun here in Flint spending lots of SRF money.
@@timothydonlan9112 I work for Williams & Works in Grand Rapids.
It warms my heart seeing the very thing I work with being brought up on your channel.
Now my specific area is industrial wastewater from a pulp processing plant so there are some adjustments to the biological portion of the process to deal with but the core principle is still intact as you describe it. Since I was a little boy I have been fond of water as I grew up close to a small picturesque freshwater lake and just beyond that the Baltic ocean. It pollution and waste in the water compelled me to study biology and the ecology of watersystems on a molecular scale at University. So to now work with it after all these years and have it brought to attention by you is truly wonderful!
Thanks for the great video, as always!
Dear Grady, I have an interest in engineering and technology topics and I absolutely love your videos. I think they make said topics much more friendly and accessible to everyone, and are truly inspiring. Sure, there's so much more about engineering than what you show - so much more math, for example 😅😱 but I'm sure in my heart of hearts that it is possible to make videos like these even for the most complex mathematical aspects of the things you show here, to make them just as accessible. Keep it up!!👏
@@aduantas Corrected, thanks 🙏
As a flood defense engineer in the uk I find it really interesting to watch these videos with the demos. Great videos keep them coming.
This is my only subscription on TH-cam! I check for new content all the time!
Hopefully you do a video on aerobic and anaerobic digestion. Sludge is such a critical part of WWT, and I feel like it is often overlooked. Great video!
Me and my former process and maintenance tech colleagues at a waste water treatment plant used to refer to ourselves as animal caretakers in that same line of thought ;)
I do video from aerobic and anaesthetic digest from anorexic parts of both wwt and wwt3, but only fine columns of sludge can be transferred at a time. I love physics!
@@SonsOfLorgar 😅😂 You will be running the place someday! (If you want to, that is!) 🤣
Yes please! 🙏
@@SonsOfLorgar the "bugs" can be quiet temperamental. A plant that I worked at had too little water entering the plant so were heavily impacted by summer heat. We had to occasionally get a transplant of sludge from a nearby municipal plant to restore the biodiversity.
I love how you focus on the general principles, such as flow rates and sedimentation physics, and only use the modern facilities as examples, instead of focusing on the facilities with the general understanding used only as extra examples. If I wanted to build my own small scale sewage plant, whether in urban, rural or even wooded environments, I'd still know what was needed to be done (not everything, such as contamination mitigation, but you get it). Your content really makes the world a better place. Thank you!
Collecting the sludge is also important for just making the whole process work economically - because by readding some of the sludge collected in the clarifiers at the beginning of the secondary stage, it is possible to have the solids retention time be many times higher than the hydraulic retention time, which is set by the volume of the secondary stage and the flow rate through it. A quite high solids retention time is necessary to give the bacteria enough time to sufficiently degrade dissolved organic contaminants.
Kinda like biomedia in an aquarium filter, but on a much larger scale? Neat! :D
@@Dth091 That's the other method that is used in some wastewater treatment plants too, growing the bacteria as a biofilm using something like a trickling filter or a fluidised bed bioreactor. Those can be more space-efficient than the normal activated sludge process, but also more complex and expensive than just a few big concrete basins.
As a guy who builds waste water plants this is great. Please make more of these they are very well done. I can’t wait to show my crews these videos.
Hey Grady, water/wastewater process engineer here- Great video! Have you considered making Continuing Education versions of these? Might be another way to get some revenue for the effort. I'd rather watch your vids than any other CE providers.
Only @Practical Engineering could make a video about sewage fascinating! Love the infrastructure videos.
This was an awesome video! I work in wastewater, typically the screens that take out branches and trash, but I also work in sludge thickening, which is like your pool cleaner demo. For sludge thickening machines, the inlet sludge is typically 0.5 to 1.5% solids, and after being treated with chemicals (polymer) and sent through a process machine, it can come out anywhere from 5-10% solids, which is an 80+% reduction in volume.
I've slung a lot of concrete building these they weren't that big but it brought back memories from 25 or more years ago. Thanks for the refresher course. From the first hole to the reestablishment of plant growth I did it all being .young was fun
Settlement is often the last step in a legal process too. 😝
Thanks for clarifying about clarifiers.
Lol, now I am thinking of gangsters who take their "legal disputes" to a waste water treatment plant for "settlement".
And if the lawyers handle it poorly the gangsters push them into the river where all the treated pollutants go.
I worked at a brewery with a waste water treatment plant for brewery runoff. I never worked in the plant, just the brew side, but I learned a lot about waste treatment. This video was so informative and I found my self thinking about ways my previous employer could improve their system.
Grady, you're awesome, and you're content is quality 👌 Thank you for doing what you do.
Having had the opportunity to visit both waste water and drinking water plant here in the Netherlands, It is interesting to see the similarities and differences across the pond. While the wastewater treatment is largely similar, for drinking water the sediment separation is not done with chemicals but electrostatically. Furthermore, we use ozone and UV sterilisation so the water does not contain much if any chlorine. Tap water here is the same quality as bottled drinking water. To keep the water supply safe, waste water treatment is very important!
The sediment of waste water gets pumped to a fermenting plant where they evaporate the water and then let the residue ferment. The resulting gas is used to generate electric power, and the remaining residue is burnt and its residual heat used in the same electrical power generator.
I work in water and wastewater engineering in the US. Ozone and UV disinfection are both known technologies over here, although I’ve only seen one ozone plant in my, admittedly still early, career. UV is much more common, and is arguably displacing chlorine in wastewater applications. It is less popular with potable water because unlike chlorine, UV disinfection provides no ongoing disinfecting effect after the water leaves the plant. Residual chlorine in the distribution system helps to prevent microbes from developing in the pipe network. The downside is that, if any of your pipes are metal, corrosion becomes a concern over time.
Tap water is generally at a rather higher quality than bottled.
After a 40+ year career in water, wastewater, power, petroleum and mining industries I am always impressed by your content. Keep educating the public!
I wake up to this video as I'm heading to My Water Treatment Class, talk about perfect timing, Always Love your Videos Grady 👍
Excellent explanatory video Grady! I’m an Operations Manager at Beckton Treatment Works, which is the largest in Europe and treats the waste of nearly 4 million Londoners from Bazalgette’s original 1860s Sewers. We have 16 enormous Primary Settlement Tanks (PSTs), and 88 Final Settlement Tanks (FSTs). You’ve nailed the sheer effective simplicity of the settlement process - visitors to site are often astounded that, bar dewatering/sludge thickening, the treatment process is exclusively gravitational and biological.
Keep the fab videos coming :)
Sometimes I imagine your wife making commentary while you're shooting the video:
"Oh yeah shake that bottle"
"Ooo fancy, he's got flocculants"
That demonstration with the white and black sands is an awesome explanation of why centrifuges work
I've been trying to reverse an old, over sedimented pond and this was interesting for that purpose. One idea for a video would be how lakes/ponds silt over time with dead leaves, sticks, etc resulting in stagnation and methane production. (And how one could go about fixing one in their backyard without a backhoe 😅)
@GOLD, BULLETS & BEANS Yeah I know it.. it's a 2.5 acre pond so it'd be an expensive endeavor getting it dredged properly
Easy. Explosives. Or hire Elon Musk to have one of his rockets grab you a microasteroid and drop it to impact at the center of your pond surface. Seriously a dozer can also do it. How was it dug in the first place or was it natural?
A friend who is a civil engineer says he watches your channel to learn about othet things he's less familiar on / how to better synthesize complicated issues. Both professionals and everyday people learn alot from you. Thanks!
(also, appreciate links to other videos.)
I kinda love how we really just use a ton of pretty simplistic processes in series to create the miracle of clean water, when you break it down each step is fairly simple but we just do it on a huge scale and in clever combinations and get clean water. It's almost as much a triumph of construction as it is engineering.
and we better be grateful for it xD
Thanks!
Thanks for this video I am actually working on a big clarifying station projet. Thanks for the effort thank you very much 💝
Hands down the most useful channel on youtube!!!
There might be several reasons I don't want to take a swim in one of those pools, but I only need one.
It sounds like exercise and I'm not about that.
I love water treatment plants!! I did my thesis on one of those stations with an emphasis on biomethanisation which can save tremendous amounts of energy for the plant. Such an important and unknown part of our society, glad you shed some lights on them, Grady! 🥰
They are also quite sensitive, as the workers there! Dont throw just about everything in sewage water, people, it can cost a lot to your whole community 😙
Just a little note, sedimentation bassins are *not really* the very first part of the journey, there is a whole system of grids and filters that comes first, or all the subsequent infrastructure would get clogged with, and potentially damaged by, macroscopic objects, plastics, wood, and so much more! And floculation and flotation also serve to get rid of fats, which remain on the surface when the rest sediments :)
I always love these in depth looks you do on science/engineering projects. It would be cool if you did a collaboration with Destin from Smarter Every Day.
Great video. As a wastewater treatment operator, I'd say you took all the complicated stuff and made it easily digestible for the average person.
What you failed to mention, however, is that the engineering firm that won the bid to design and build the facility was the lowest bidder, they did the absolute minimum to get paid, and were long gone by the time operations started running the facility; left to "make it work" because all the genius engineers couldn't have been bothered to listen to us lowly, unclean operators, and consider what we said we needed vs what they decided we needed
Most engineering contracts for public infrastructure in the US are awarded based on qualifications, not price. In addition, most firms awarded large contracts like this have long-term relationships with the clients and definitely maintain a presence and relationship after a project is complete (with the hopes of winning the next one).
I work as a plumber, and when it comes to sewage disposal on a mass scale, your video was very informative.
When it comes to settling particles with an electric charge, Mark Rober made a video awhile back about how I believe P&G made a packet compound that does exactly what your experiment showed, to purify water in Africa and more poverty-riddled countries.
I recommend everyone to check that video out as well.
Very interesting and very informative. The narrator is also very clear in telling the story. English is my second language (I'm a Filipino) and I sometimes find myself relying on subtitles to fully understand the video I am watching. Not so with this channel. His voice is crystal clear and soothing to my ears. Thank you!
I'd love to hear and see more about how they collect and remove the sediment/sludge after it's out of the water. How often do they have to do that? Is it as gross as it sounds like it would be?
There is a pipe at the bottom of the clarifier that takes the sludge to a sludge basin. Then the sludge from the sludge basin is pumped to a belt press, which presses the water out of the sludge. The water then goes back through the process without the sludge, and the sludge is put in a dump truck and hauled to the landfill. Hopefully that answers your question.
In Seattle they turn the biosolids into fertilizer!
I am currently working on an expansion of Hawaii's second largest wastewater treatment plant to full secondary treatment. This video is awesome! I love taking your plain language explanations and use it to communicate with the different stakeholders on the project.
Recently started a position as a lab analyst at a treatment plant. I run tests for alkalinity, sludges, and total suspended solids. I work with these samples every day but don't really have a clue about the steps they go through, so this is a much appreciated series.
Hi Grady, I enjoy watching your video's and demonstrations supporting the subject being discussed. A point that could be mentioned here is the city of Chicago only has a single sewer system that collect's house hold waste, business waste, and storm water waste. Over many years, decades, the city drilled a tunnel system to collect this combined waste water during heavy rains to prevent flooding and sewer backup's into house's. The waste water is then pumped out of the tunnel system to and ran through, at a later time, this treatment plant. This tunnel system is also connected to a old open air stone quarry located on the south side of the city.
6:16 small correction
All particles settle when tD < tL
As a wastewater operator I’ve been asked “how does it work?” more times then I can count and just like you said I simply put it as “separation of the dangerous materials from the water either by physical, chemical, or biological means is the easiest way I can put it”
Being an Environmental Engineer and a professor teaching these subjects (Wastewater Treatment Engineering, Water Supply and Treatment), the positivity and enthusiasm regarding this topic in the comment section does put a smile on my face.
As somebody currently designing a wastewater treatment plant for my senior capstone course in college, seeing Grady post these videos now makes me happier than I could ever have imagined
Great video! As an Environmental Health Inspector, Waste treatment and water treatment are things that people need to know more about.
You're just the best. Masterful balance of technical details and layperson explanations. You were destined for this.
We used clarifies in the gold mines I worked at in Nevada. We used them to recover the slimes, and dispose of the overflow. The “slimes”as we called them were the concentrated gold ore. We were trying for 50% density by time the recovered ore began its refinement. Good video as always!
One of the really interesting things I wished you had covered here is tube and plate settlers in this stage. When I was researching this topic it was really interesting to see how the surface area introduced at different angles decreased the clarification time needed. This whole series is great for people to start understanding!
yep. Many older plants have had plates installed to increase their capacity without having to build new sedimentation tanks.
A video about what happens with the sediment would be interesting too.
I worked in a water treatment plant in Nigeria 🇳🇬 construction work by Salini Nigeria Ltd. Your explanation helps more and it is valid. We constructed Lamellar Settlers to assist the clarifiers.
I work as a process engineer for a company in the UK that supplies modular treatment systems to the municipal, industrial, and construction sectors - and I have to say this is the best layman's explanation I've ever seen for how clarifiers work! Since most of our clarifier/settlement units at work are modular (i.e. small, mobile units that can be prefabricated and transported to site on a flat-bed) we use lamellas, it would have been cool to see you expand on the overflow rate (or upflow rate as we call it) to explain how a lamella takes advantage of this principle to reduce the required footprint (maybe a little companion piece for a future video!). We also make chemical dosing units, MBBRs for secondary/tertiary treatment and DAFs (mostly for HST applications) so hope you cover some of these technologies eventually.
Thanks for the video, it’s really nice to see. I have a question, why you can states that “All particles settle when tD > tL”, should it be tD < tL? please explains thank you
I work at an automotive paint facility and handle their process wastewater using various chemicals to eliminate paint waste (sludge). I manage 750,000 gallons so i’m a small fry compared to the mammoth showed here.. Absolutely loved this video!
I just wanted to let you know that I use your videos as part of our homeschool program. You’re an excellent teacher. Thanks.
This guy is answering all my questions around how society works. This is incredible engineering that goes unnoticed. Thank you sir !
Grady, how did you resist not using any jokes regarding a certain organic solid in wastewater? Your maturity and focus is stunning.
Your videos should be required curriculum for elected officials that often randomly modify budgets without understanding what havoc they cause. I am the Utilities Electrical Foreman for a city and we're currently working through multiple wastewater process improvement projects including replacing the entire aeration system and adding UV disinfection. Currently using biogas to offset electrical usage and we'll be adding adding a methane-powered blower for aeration. Keep the videos coming!
When I was a kid I had the opportunity of touring one of these facilities. It totally changed the way I think about water treatment!
Every kid in school should tour water treatment plants, waste water, power plants, and some agriculture too... too many people take for granted the armies of people working behind the scenes to make their lives comfortable and modern.
I was so excited when I saw that you had made a video on this topic because I have been wondering about what those facilities are and how they work. I was not disappointed. Once again you deliver quality info -well done.
I love your demonstrations and intuitive explanation Grady. Civil engineering usually got a lot of flaks for being the "easiest", but I argue we're probably the most essential to modern day prosperity. Physicists and mathematicians can't work on their fancy proofs without electricity or drinking water!
Water and sewage systems are also most effective with density and agglomeration, in that dense urban forms reduce the probabilities for leaks and nonrevenue losses. I do hope that the new urbanism wave will take hold and cities across North American can return to their social and human-scale roots.
Just finished my water plant operations course last year, your videos are fantastic and spot on. Really helped me in my studying to better understand the process. Thank you!
As a UT in the Navy, I worked with wastewater, sludge cake, effluent, and every other aspect of sewage treatment. This demonstration was way easier to follow and learn than going to school in the Navy.
I went searching for information on sewage cleaning after your sewage pumping video and was sad to see a lack of information on it. I hope this series really takes a deep dive, it's fascinating. Thanks Grady.
This is fantastic! I work for a company that provides those settling chemistries and helps run these process with the municipality- it's called Nalco! I've loved your channel for years, so seeing something that I do is really awesome.
Upvoted for being literally the only presentation I've ever heard that explains how particles that are more dense than water can stay suspended in water.
I love all your videos but the water ones the most. Your voice is so comforting!
I don't know if you have had planned this video a long time ago , but I surely requested this video several times, thank you.
Another suggestion: (1)Explain the Coagulation Aided Sedimentation and why it's not performed in your country whilst we perform it quite frequently in WTP.
(2) Explain sludge thickening and clean energy produced through sludge digestor , explaining self sustainability of STP.
I was literally thinking about this 2 weeks ago... playing cities skylines like wtf are these circular tanks in sewage processing and why do they all have them? TH-cam only had whole process videos that I had to sift through for the small info on clarifiers... that is.. until now. Thank you for all that you do!! This video release was perfectly timed for me!
These videos are amazing to me, several topics I sort of had an idea from school grazing over the subject but the videos really help quickly clarify how things truly work. Thank you,
One of the best channels on TH-cam. Hey Grady, perhaps do a series on industrial processes, like kraft paper process, power production in closed cycle gas turbines for example.
I’ve taken multiple classes on water treatment and i still love these videos.
Your channel evokes strong Löwenzahn and Sendung mit der Maus Sachgeschichten vibes in every German watching. Keep it up!
My grandparents lived about 5 blocks south of the exact plant on the thumbnail. I was always so fascinated by the magnitude of this plant!
As a product engineer in wastewater treatment, I appreciate your coverage on this topic. Super important and most people breeze over it. 👍🏼👍🏼