One of my majors in school was speech communication. Obviously, I ended up preparing and giving a lot of speeches. One of the things that was pounded into my brain was to never rely on Powerpoint presentations, because a) it's boring b) they're rarely used effectively and c) you can never be sure you'll have access to one. 

So here I am, four years later, and I sat down to prepare a presentation for the North Central Region meeting in Mauston. What do I do? I create an awesome Powerpoint presentation, that includes videos, pertinent graphics, diagrams, engaging questions, the whole works. My written outline is so-so, but I feel good about it. What happens when I get to the meeting? A big, beautiful room... with no projector. Luckily I think I adapted fairly well; at least the guys in the room were nice enough to lie and tell me so. The biggest save was that Bill was there with me, and was able to add a lot of expertise and credibility to the presentation. But to my communication professors - you were right, I promise never to rely on Powerpoint again.

Because it would be such a shame for these slides to never see the light of day, I thought I would share some highlights. Of course, you don't have my witty banter leading you through the presentation, so it's seriously lacking (sarcasm font, where are you?). I was actually speaking on a topic that I posted here about almost a year ago - combating "flushable wipes" and other pump clogging obstacles. I find this issue of flushable wipes fascinating. It's such a commonsense thing to flush down the toilet, and it is causing such big problems for operators all over the state. Luckily, we have some great solutions ready to meet this obstacle. Check out the slides below.

Fair warning: I gave this presentation on Wednesday. The very next day one of my customers who was at the meeting call - one of his main pumps are down. Josh gets out there right away, pulls the pump, and sure enough - it's fully clogged with flushable wipes. So be warned; this presentation may or may not cause flushable wipes to clog your pumps. Maybe that Secret thing really does work?

This last Wednesday was pretty cool, because the engineers at ShinMaywa came to our shop to go over the training required for us to become an authorized ShinMawya Service Center. While we have been impressed by the performance of the ShinMaywa pumps, and have seen the beefy construction of the pump in the cutaway, it was very interesting to see the pump broken down. The design of the pump is very impressive, and to hear the design decisions from the engineers themselves was enlightening.  The designers of this pump take the quality of the pump very seriously.  

For example, of all the installations in America, there has only been one seal fail.  Based on the number of pumps of other manufactures that we rebuild because of seal fails around here, I would say this is a pretty common lift station pump problem. When that seal failed, instead of just replacing the seal, ShinMaywa pulled the pump, put in a brand new pump, and sent the pump with the failed seal back to the factory so it could be evaluated as to what exactly went wrong to further prev 

As the company who is out there recommending and installing these pumps, it certainly provides us a lot of peace of mind to know that the manufacturer is standing behind their equipment so thoroughly.  We're now even more excited about the opportunities that the high quality of these pump allow us to offer our customers. If you're looking for a high quality submersible pump, just let me know.