Eric discloses some changes coming to the Orenda App and educational materials.
00:00 - Introduction
02:20 - Updating bicarbonate's pKa from 6.14 to 6.27
08:24 - Orenda app integration with a test kit
08:51 - The new calculator
15:02 - Account login
16:37 - Closing
[00:00:00] Eric Knight: This is the Rule Your Pool podcast, episode 144. This is more of a housekeeping episode. I want to get out ahead of a few things. There are some changes coming and I don't like being surprised, personally. And as a manufacturer, I feel it's my duty to tell you ahead of time. Because if you're used to the way things are, and then something changes without warning, that's not always fun.
[00:00:24] But they are changes for the good we are doing them for you. Make no mistake. Just like we do this podcast. We do this podcast for you. And we hope you find it valuable. I know a lot of you call us and email us, and we're so grateful for that.
[00:00:36] I believe the changes that are coming. If my gut is correct, they are going to be very well received. We're not just doing this and spending massive amounts of development dollars and time and effort because it's cool. No.
[00:00:54] I listen to you. I read your emails. I read your Facebook comments, especially if someone tags me. Not that I like Facebook, but that's besides the point. I hear you. I'm in a lot of backyards. I've been in a lot of backyards with a lot of you listeners. I go out and I see pool pros. And I see them struggling with the same things all over the country.
[00:01:17] Oftentimes, when people call us, they're stressed out about something. They don't realize you're not alone. Most people struggle with these same issues. And as I say, in my classes, there's only two types of pool pros out there. Those that have some problem pools and those that refuse to admit they have some problem pools. Everybody has them. And that's okay.
[00:01:38] Homeowners, if you're calling with a problem. You're not alone. We recognize for homeowners, that body of water in your backyard is a massive investment. And for the pool pros, this is your livelihood.
[00:01:53] We hear you. I hear you. And I've listened for many years to some of the requests that you've had. Well I've listened to all the requests, but we had technical limitations. And as we've grown and as technology has improved, we've gained the ability to do some really cool things.
[00:02:13] So let's get into this. I'm going to explain three things that are coming, and, um, Yeah, let's do it. Episode 144. Let's go.
[00:02:20] Eric Knight: There are three things that are changing. The first one, which I would say it's a mistake, it's not a mistake. It's a correction, it's an update. It was not a mistake when we wrote it, but we have more information now and in the interest of precision we're going to be updating some things.
[00:03:01] In the last few episodes we talked about pKa values, meaning the negative logarithm of the acid dissociation constant. Yeah, that thing. Where it tells you how strong or weak and acid and conjugate base pair is.
[00:03:15] And that pKa is represented on our graphs with a vertical dashed line. And essentially that pKa value tells you where a certain pH buffering system has its optimal buffering capacity. And in that carbonate alkalinity chart that we've had published for, gosh, I don't know, five or six years? Something like that. That pKa value has been listed as 6.14.
[00:03:41] Here's the problem. I got that source from a medical journal. The issue with that is not that it's not true. It is true. That is the pKa value between carbonic acid and bicarbonate alkalinity. But that's not exactly where it is in a swimming pool, apparently, and I didn't know this.
[00:03:59] That's the case in blood. Uh, the reason you breathe out CO2, why carbonic acid, you should Google it, it's fascinating. But it regulates the pH of your blood. Just like CO2 regulates the pH of our water because of the carbonate alkalinity buffering system. We talk about this in several pH containment episodes, Henry's Law, all that stuff. And so I'm getting excited about it. I look up what is the pKa of carbonic acid and bicarbonate, boom, 6.14 in a medical journal. I'm like, hell yeah. It's legit.
[00:04:32] Well, here's the problem. It doesn't account for something called ionic strength. Didn't even know that was a thing. Great, okay, so what is ionic strength? And I realized in the past, like four or five episodes, I've been getting too technical, other than the cicadas thing, I've been getting so deep in the weeds, I realize just how little we actually know in this industry.
[00:04:54] I know almost nothing because the more you read, the more you realize, whoa, there's a lot more here than I thought. And I don't have a chemistry degree. So for me to read high-end chemistry journals and stuff, it's slow and I have to read it multiple times. I then have to do some research to figure out what these symbols mean.
[00:05:14] And I have help. I talk to chemists, I talk to physicists and they're gracious with their time. Several of them listen to this podcast. Several of them are retired chemists who are customers of ours. You know who you are. Thank you. Thank you for your help. I didn't know what ionic strength was, but it matters to swimming pools.
[00:05:31] It doesn't matter in your blood, but it matters in swimming pools. So that's why I'm going to make a change to 6.27. Because 6.27 is based on 300 parts per million calcium hardness, and 1000 PPM TDS, which apparently has an ionic strength of 0.019 whatever that means.
[00:05:52] So yeah, we're going to be changing it. So you might see some sources that say 6.3. And I'm going to tell you right now, this is not going to change your life in any way. Because it's not going to change the calculator. Our calculator has been factoring this in the whole time due to ionic pairs, we talked about that in a previous episode.
[00:06:10] That math with the TDS and the salinity? That's already done. So as you adjust your TDS, that correction to the pKa is already automatically happening for you. But on the chart that we have, if you tap carbonate alkalinity, you'll see this chart. That's what I'm changing. I'm just changing the graphic to be more precise.
[00:06:31] You know, you're never going to attain perfection, but you should never stop pursuing it. We want to be as precise as possible. I would apologize for it if there was ever any misdirection, there certainly wasn't. I didn't know, so here we go. We're going to improve it.
[00:06:45] Another one, by the way, I've mentioned it in the last episode was HOCl to OCl-, which is the active form of chlorine to the weaker form of chlorine. Everyone says, you know, 50-50 at 7.5 pH. What they're saying is that's the pKa value because that's where they intersect at 50-50. But years ago, I found the figure 7.48. As the pKa value for that. Apparently that's not true either. It's actually 7.54.
[00:07:16] Is the difference of 0.06, going to change your day? No. But we want to be precise. So that's why I'm telling you this. When we move things on these graphs, they're going to be updated. This is why. It shouldn't change your day, but I don't want people going back and say, Hey, what the hell! You moved the dash line slightly.
[00:07:36] Well, yeah, we did. And it's to account for ionic strengths. And one final note on that. If I haven't already put you to sleep. I am making the decision myself to base it on 1000 PPM of TDS on the chart, not whatever your salt pool is if you have a salt pool. And the main reason for that is the research is almost all based on a thousand PPM TDS. Primarily from John Wojtowicz and a couple others.
[00:08:03] In swimming pools, that's what the math is. I'm not qualified to modify the math. So we're going to stick with 1000, but again, the calculator, when you change the TDS in the Orenda calculator, it will make that correction for you automatically. So rest assured you are getting precise numbers. So that's the first thing I'm changing. The pKa values to be more precise.
[00:08:24] Eric Knight: The second thing is we are about to integrate with a test kit that many of you have. I'm not going to say the name until it's done. But this has been a long time coming. We have been asked about it for a very long time. And to give you an idea of the scope of this, we are flying our developer in from overseas to come here and work with me for a week to get it done because it involves Bluetooth, and you can not do that remotely. You have to be next to the device. We're excited about this.
[00:08:51] Eric Knight: yeah. Anyway, the third thing that I want to put ahead of you is the big one. We have app users and we're grateful for every single one of you. We do get questions and feedback, and we love that. I read it. I hear it. It matters to me. And we've had technical limitations. Part of the reason that we have partnered with all the routing softwares is because they can do things better than we can.
[00:09:15] They're software companies. We are not. We happen to have a calculator that was early, and advanced, but we are not a software company. We can't do a fraction of what these companies can do.
[00:09:26] I'll start with how I view technology personally. Technology can either be a force multiplier for good, or it can be a drain on us, and it can be a problem. It could be a weakness. Everything that we've done in the Orenda app has been aimed to be a force multiplier. To help you do calculations in the backyard. Or if you're a commercial pool operator in the pump room. To allow you to be more precise.
[00:09:52] It allows you to predict where your alkalinity is going to be. That future alkalinity when you reduce your pH. It forecasts your burn rate. It tells you the pH ceiling. It does all this really high level math in the background for you.
[00:10:07] So in that sense, technology is an amazing thing. But technology advances very quickly too. And I don't want to get lost and think, oh, we have to go full tech stack. Uh, we're going to do all this stuff. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's back up. What are we trying to accomplish with this app? And it leads me to sort of the fundamental question of what do we want this app to be?
[00:10:28] What, why did we make it? Not what is it? Why did we do it? We did it because we chronically see people damaging pools, thinking they're doing the right thing.
[00:10:41] I don't see people intentionally damaging pools. I see people doing what they were trained to do. Thinking it's the right thing and destroying pools as a consequence. And they don't know it. They don't realize it's their practices that are doing it. They don't realize that it's their overdosing of acid. Or under dosing of calcium chloride. Or way over chlorinating a pool. These problems are alleviated by the calculator if you just use it. That's why.
[00:11:09] Along that vein of why we created it, we're building a new calculator that I've been working on it for over a year. And this new calculator is a direct result of listening to our customers. I get your feedback. I get your emails. I hear you. I see you. When you have a problem, you have a question or you have something that you come to us for help with, we want to help you.
[00:11:35] And this calculator we've been building that we hope to release this summer is phase one of three. And it's one of the biggest projects I've ever taken on. Now, when it comes out, you might think, well, is this, it's pretty simple, what do you mean biggest project?
[00:11:51] In technology, any app developer or software people listening to this can understand. You don't always just prioritize the features that you want. You have to think ahead of what's going to be necessary to create that feature that you want. And sometimes you have to do things as a foundational piece before you can get to where you're trying to go. I may not want this foundational piece, but I can't build what I want without it.
[00:12:15] I'll give you an example in the articles. You think I wanted to talk about pKa values? Do you think I wanted to talk about molar weights and spend weeks of my life researching that so that I could teach that? No. Do you need to know molar weights and pKa values to rule your pool? No, you don't. But it was necessary to teach what I'm trying to get to.
[00:12:39] And we're not there yet. But without that as a foundation we don't have the context for what we're trying to create. Now let's take that back to the app.
[00:12:49] We're building a calculator. And the calculator that you have today, the LSI calculator, that's going to stay. You'll still have it, always going to be free. Everything in our app is still always going to be free. The new calculator, however, is going to do different things than what you can get on the current dosing calculator. Right now the current dosing calculator will tell you how much of a given chemical it will take to get you from the left side to the right side.
[00:13:15] Well, what if we flip that math around? What is this 50 pound bag of calcium chloride going to do on my startup? Or what is this one pound bag of shock going to do to my pool? Or what is this gallon of chlorine going to do in my pool? So I'm not going to tell you exactly what's coming, but I think with those context clues, you have a pretty good idea.
[00:13:38] And it's phase one of three. Phase two, I don't have a timeline on this, in fairness. We want to cater to our homeowner audience. With the pool pros, we have partnered with the routing softwares because they can take our calculator and they can allow you to save your results. You can have a history and they can help you grow your business in so many more ways than we can ever imagine. That's why we partnered with them.
[00:14:00] But that software is not available or practical for homeowners. Those homeowners are using our app. So what we want to do, now that we have the capability to, is build in the ability for a user to save the history of one body of water. Sorry, pool pros. It doesn't apply to you because you have way more than one body of water. This is for homeowners.
[00:14:25] You can still use the calculator of course, but we encourage you to be using that calculator in a partner software. Let them help you grow your business. We are all about using software. Like I said, it's a force multiplier. It can be very good for you. And fortunately, most of them, at least the ones I'm aware of, they're working on integrations with us too. Okay. So you're going to have plenty of options there.
[00:14:48] But for the homeowners, we want to be able to allow you to save history so you can go back and look at the track record of your pool. We're not there yet. But I can't get there without building this first calculator. And that's what's taken so long.
[00:15:02] Eric Knight: Here's the point that I'm bringing all this up. This is not just a tease you so that you're like, oh, I can't wait to have it. No, no, no. Don't get too excited. The reason I'm telling you this, in full transparency, is because there's going to be a login for the first time in our app. Never had that before. We've had an anonymous survey, which is kind of annoying and it's the best we knew how to do at the time. But it's unavoidable. The login unlocks things that we're unable to do without it. We cannot store any chemical history without it, if you've taken things like Orenda Academy, you would have your scores in there. You would have your history in there. We're trying to build a loyalty program.
[00:15:40] We're trying to get closer to our customers. And we're not there yet, like I said, but the log-in is one of the first steps there. And I just want to make it completely transparent of what our intentions are.
[00:15:51] It's so that we can unlock cool features coming forward that I think are going to help you. You do not have to have a log in to use the Orenda app. You will for the new calculator, but not the existing calculator. So do not feel obligated to do it. It's still no cost to you. But that's why that's there.
[00:16:08] I just don't want people being shocked that Orenda has a login for the first time. I mean, it only took us eight years of having a free app to get here. So I kinda guess we did pretty good. But this is the age we live in. We didn't write the rules, but we got to play in the game if we want to build these features for you. And I think we're in the unique position that we're able to do that, given the user base and the customer feedback that we have. And for that, I am very grateful and I mean that sincerely.
[00:16:37] Eric Knight: If you have any questions, podcast@orendatech.com. I'm totally fine if you want to criticize our decisions to do this, these are mostly my decisions and I own them. And I have thought through them thoroughly.
[00:16:51] I've tried to think through every possible alternative to having a login and it just keeps coming up with the same answer that we're going to need it. We don't really have a choice, unfortunately. But again, you do have a choice. You don't have to use the new features that we're coming out with. Don't feel obligated to do that.
[00:17:09] But yeah, I can take negative feedback if you want to criticize me. But, uh, if you've been listening to this podcast, just know, I'll leave your name out of it, but I will read your email on here if it's funny enough. So at least have some humor when you're trying to destroy my own personal character. Anyway, I'm glad that we're getting this off our chest.
[00:17:27] I just want to give you fair warning. I think that's the right thing to do so that we don't blindside anybody. I'm your host Eric Knight with Orenda. This is episode 144. Thanks everybody. Take care.