1376: Pure Water Northwest: Why Every Homeowner Needs to Test Their Water Before It’s Too Late with Cydian Kauffman

Robert Plank 0:00 Steve from resolving business breakdowns to transforming water systems. Mr. Cydian and Kauffman doesn't just fix problems. He builds better futures. He's the driving force behind pure water Northwest, and he's bridging the gap between clean water and clear communication. This podcast is the marketer of the day with Robert Plank, brought to you by D FY podcast.com we remove the tech barriers so you can focus on real conversations and city and journey proves that clarity changes everything. So we're going to dive into that deeper story behind water problem solving the right words at the right time, how this water space has changed his thinking and how it'll change our thinking. It'll wake us up to be aware of all these things going on in the world, right? It's good to have an education so city and glad to be speaking with you. Yeah, thanks for having me out. Glad to have you. And so, what are you all about? I mean, water, it's, it's important, right? If we, if we don't have it, we die. The Earth dies. It's like, it's the most precious resource.

Cydian Kauffman 1:01 That is true, we are mostly water. The surface of the Earth where we are is mostly water. Almost every single thing that we do on the planet uses water. We need water for most electricity. We use need electricity in order to get water to our house. We absolutely all rely on water culture, culture structures build and grow and change around access to water. It is definitely important,

Robert Plank 1:36 yes, in so many different ways. And so what's the problem with it? Because I never know if we're killing the planet or if the future looks hopeful. So what's going on? What do we need to be aware of?

Cydian Kauffman 1:49 Well, yeah, so what I like to talk to people about around water is that depending on where you are in the world, depending on where you getting your water from, your water is either really good or it's secretly really bad, or it's obviously really bad, or it looks bad and it's good, and those are really the four categories. And a lot of people make assumptions about water rather than testing. And what I like to do is have people realize that their nose and their eyes and their taste buds. They're decent at being able to tell what, whether water is good or not, but they're not not great at it. Arsenic is basically was used as a way to murder people without them anyone being able to ever find out that that was happening because it is odorless, tasteless and hard to identify. It's a naturally occurring element, but in large doses, it'll kill you. Not that people have to be super concerned about arsenic, because it does take large amounts, but smaller amounts, over a long enough period of time, can have an effect, and there is arsenic in a ton of water. So it is really a good idea to test and not just rely on where, whatever your source of water is, that it is definitely giving you good water. We just like for people to know, have the data, you know,

Robert Plank 3:17 yeah, 100%and, and I think it was probably, after all the Flint, Michigan stuff happened, that there seemed to be more awareness, right? And, like, my limited understanding was, like, they had one water source. It was fine, and they switched water sources, and then didn't tell anyone. And then after that, it's, I was like, Okay, I'm not drinking, even if the tap water is good. I'm not drinking out of a tap. I'm using a filter. And then I became more aware of my water company had this little thing in the mail that was like, Hey, here's all the different chemicals, the additives in your water. And here's like, the here's like, the level where it's not safe, and here's the level all the different elements are. And they're like, Hey, your water has all these, you know, hundreds of little things added to it, but they're all super small amounts, so like, don't worry. Won't make you sick, you won't kill you. And that was a little bit of an education, but I still feel very ignorant about pretty much everything water and water health related. So what should we know? Well, yeah, I have had customers who have been on the city systems and the water comes out brown or discolored. And I go and do the test, and it's technically healthy. It's gross and should not be drunk, probably, but if you wanted to drink it, it's it's probably technically okay. And I did a pretty thorough testing on it. I've gone to other people's places where the water is really gross and disgusting, and it is really gross and disgusting, and it's it's should not be drunk.

Cydian Kauffman 4:46 And so when I was doing Property Management back in the day, we would sometimes have custom tenants come to us and say our water is brown or smells like rotten eggs. And we would do the 10. Test and go take it to the EPA, I mean, to a to a lab which did testing based on EPA standards, and the lab would say, this is within legal limits. And I'm like, How can this brown water that smells like rotten eggs be within legal limits? So that is what brought me to pure water Northwest. Pure water Northwest predates my involvement in the companies I'm now one of the owners. But prior to that, I came to Chris Pelton, who founded pure water Northwest, and he had to explain to me that the EPA has two standards for drinking water. One is a health standard, and one is a legal limit, and water that's beyond the health standard, meaning it's technically unhealthy, is still within the legal limit sometimes. So being able to identify that and and spot that is kind of an important aspect. It's what we do with a lot of our clients. People can do it by themselves. I'm not trying to trap anyone to working only with us. You can identify this stuff by yourself. The EPA has the list. You can do your own test, you can compare it to the list, and then you can reach out to us or find your own solution to solve that. Remediating, it's really, really easy, though. So I think people knowing that and knowing that that's possible is important.

Robert Plank 6:18 I think it is so. So just to give us an understanding of what pure water Northwest does. Like, you say that sometimes people give you a call, you come over, you take the water, you do a test, and so, like, what kinds of people are these? Like, who is calling you in for what?

Cydian Kauffman 6:35 Yeah, I've got a couple stories to explain that I had a customer who was on city water in Seattle, and they called us over, and their main concerns was whether or not there were any pharmaceuticals in the water. So we did a full spectrum of tests. A lot of times pharmaceuticals will go in and out of the water, right? So when we did the test, there was none. The water was super healthy. I did the same test four months later for a different client, there were pharmaceuticals, then there was a little bit of arsenic, then there were a bunch of chlorine byproducts. At that point, chlorine byproducts can't be escaped in a municipal system, and there's tons of them, and at high levels, they can cause cancer. But at the levels that are usually, they're not a big deal. But I had to go back to this clan and explain the change, and they were like, Okay, get me a under counter reverse osmosis ASAP. So the the funny thing about testing is knowing the actual municipality and what they do to the water is also pretty important. So find, finding someone local is a great idea separately. So that's a pretty common problem with municipal water. I had a guy on a well. He just bought his property, he moved onto a well that it was actually a natural spring well, and he moved 50 of his cattle onto this well, and they started drinking the groundwater, the bubbling up water from the well. And he went on vacation. When he came back, 50 of his cattle had died. And what what had actually occurred was there was a naturally occurring cyanide spring. The vegetation in the area were were dropping into the well, creating cyanide naturally, and it would definitely be enough to kill him. We had to do such a complicated treatment system. We took it to three engineers, and they all said it would be easier to get water from the moon than to treat this water. And we were like, no, no, we're going to figure it out. And so we did. We figured out a solution. Sent it back to the engineer they looked at and they were like, Okay, this, this will work. So we got him a treatment system. So basically, we deal with every spectrum of customer. We have a lot of customers who we go out and we test their water and your your water is fine. There's nothing we can do to help you keep drinking it. Be happy. But we're very testing oriented and very customization oriented. So our process is test, test, don't guess, and then identify the solution like a scientist would, and then deliver the solution. That's basically it. We do the installation for them by working with a plumbing company for that. So, yeah, that's how that's what we do.

Robert Plank 9:40 Well, nice. So you test first and then see what the situation is. And, man, it's just that little conversation we've had so far. It's, it's like, what will kill you first? Right? It's like, yeah, there's different dangers, right? If you're in the big city, the pharmaceuticals get in there. If you're out in the country, the arsenic gets in there. And so it's no matter what, there's something on this planet that's trying. To kill you. And so, as far, like, you say, like, everything's, uh, kind of custom, but like, what are the trends that you see? Like you see a lot of times, people just say, Hey, can you test the water? And it's okay. But like, like, what do you see, as far as, like, the the various like solutions that are done, or just what, what's, what are the general trends we should be aware of, as far as you know, water cleanliness and water safety,

Cydian Kauffman 10:20 yeah, sure. So right now, fluoride is a big topic. Like everyone's talking about fluoride right now because of, you know, the what's happening politically, and also because a recent test that was done from Harvard, I think there was a test on fluoride done 20 years ago, and the amount, and it showed a drop in IQ from fluoride. But that test was done with amounts that were so large that there was no way to actually compare it to the amount of fluoride that's put in our water. So a more recent test was done with the amounts that are closer to what's in our water, and it did also show a drop in IQ That being said, it hasn't been double blind. It hasn't it hasn't been fully tested and vetted by the scientific community. So we don't know for sure. A dose is everything. When it comes to a contaminant, you can have small amounts of something that is good for you, and in large quantities, it'll kill you. That's even true of water. If you drink seven liters of water in an hour, you die. So it is. It is very important to have a perspective about things that it's not the item that I'm hearing, like fluoride or arsenic or whatever, that is going to kill me, and I need to get it out. You can have that viewpoint, because it's totally doable, but I would never suggest anyone get scared like that about something instead find out what amount it is. If it's too high, then, yeah, you need to worry the for it is a funny thing, though, just to go off on a tangent, in a lot of Scandinavian countries, they don't do fluoride at all, and they have better teeth outcomes than we do so, but that could be also because of sugar. So they use less sugar than we do. So it becomes this, like again, what do we actually know? But yeah, solving fluoride is really easy, just doing under counter reverse osmosis, and it the most popular way to solve stuff in city water is carbon. But that's not going to do everything, so you really want to make sure that the treatment matches the problem.

Robert Plank 12:44 Okay, yeah, so it seems like a really nuanced situation, and so I'm curious about just the different kind of, like, filtration methods that there are. If someone says, Well, I'm concerned about my water. Should I, like, you know, use bottled water to brush my teeth? Well, if I use bottled water, world, there'll be plastic in the water. You mentioned the reverse osmosis under the counter. There's like the carbon filters built in the fridges some people have, like the Berkey water. So, like, what should we know about filters? Is it, is it all different? Is it all important? Is there's all a bunch of nonsense. Like, what's the deal with filters?

Cydian Kauffman 13:19 There's a lot of nonsense. Almost every single thing you said was carbon. Carbon is not nonsense. Carbon is amazing, but it's not a cure all. Carbon is really fun. If you take a single gram of carbon, like this big and you spread out the surface area, and when I say surface area. I mean all the tiny holes and pores inside of it create surface area, because those are, those are really nano sized, sub micron pore pores inside the carbon. If you spread out the surface area of the carbon, you cover three tennis courts. That is a lot of area to capture contaminants. So it's super, super good at treating water, but it doesn't treat everything. Plenty of stuff flows right by it way too small down to the water molecule gets into your body, escapes the water molecule gets into you the you almost all the stuff you mentioned a second ago had carbon there's a bunch of stuff that people are talking about, like structured water. Now, structured water has scientific backing, but you can't keep water structure. When you tip a glass towards your mouth and it goes down your throat, it doesn't stay structured. It's literally an alignment of electrons as it touches a surface. It's purely theoretical whether or not structured water if it entered your body in a structured form. Would actually help you. There's some evidence that it would. But keeping it structured? How? Unless you're eating, unless it's because it's bound to the the cell structure of a piece of fruit that you're biting into, maybe that would work. That's one of the more common trends right now. Hydrogenated water, another common trend, how does the hydrogen just not off gas from the water? It has to be bound molecularly, and that's incredibly hard to do. You can't do that with a bottle that you carry. There are some units that you can sit on your counter. They're incredibly expensive, that could get you water that, if you drunk it right away, would be impregnated with enough hydrogen that it would get into you, but it wouldn't last. So there's just, there's a lot of stuff that in a perfect setting is true, and then people try and sell it to you based on that perfect setting that technically checks a box of this did work, but when you actually get it, it's worthless. So it is really important to be cautious when deciding what you're using to treat your body, treat the water that's going into your body.

Robert Plank 16:12 And that seems to be just really difficult in general, just the scientific literacy with anything health related, and misinformation that there's like, they say something that's like, technically true, or partly true, or it's kind of like uses a term that, well, the term itself is true. And it just like, seems so exhausting to like, having to follow the thread and kind of, kind of follow the various claims. And then even, like you mentioned, like fluoride, well, they make claims, but as far as they do the double blind test, and so then you're they're left with a lot of people who, like, kind of pick and choose their release. And it just seems like really difficult to navigate all of that, but it's good to be informed in this way and to be like, Well, hey, it's just because they use that, that term, still look into it, and still look at all the nuances of the situation and especially what the latest cutting edge is, right? They say, well, hydrogenated water, well, they haven't cracked it, but then, if they do, then we'll have that new information. But as far as you've taken us on quite a journey, and you surprised us with all of these different kind of, like, unique issues with water treatment and all these kind of surprising you know, you know, stories and insights, but I want to make sure that we cover the missing pieces. So in this conversation we're having, is there a missing, invisible, hidden question about your business, or about water quality, or anything along those lines? Is there, like, a hidden question that I should be asking you, I just don't know to ask you?

Cydian Kauffman 17:40 Well, I guess, yeah, I'll just say that people don't how to get testing done is kind of cool. If you're on a municipal system, you can usually look in you can look in Google and say your the name of your city or your municipality, and then water test results, and it'll get you a pretty extensive result. You can go to a local lab. You can search Google for water lab near me, and you can call them, ask them for what it costs to do a full spectrum test. And you can take in water. You can go to a website, like our website, we have testing on there. There's also a website called Tap score.com you can go there. You can get full spectrum tests done for your either your well water or your city water. And you can go to the Environmental Working Group. Careful with the Environmental Working Group, because they put in these multipliers for the health guidelines that are so extreme that I would never say that they're that many times the health guidelines, but they do give real data on there, and they do do tests of various municipalities and well sources, and it can be a really good source, the Environmental Working Group, tap water database. So there's a lot of places to get testing done, some free, some you pay for, but they're not expensive, and by doing that, get me the results, and I'll help you with whatever you need to interpret it. Help you with whatever you need to know.

Robert Plank 19:08 Well, very cool. You make it sound so interesting and fun, you give me flashbacks to different like science projects and assignments that happen. My son's five years old, but when he's old enough, we're going to play around with the water testing and and for sure, take our water to a lab. And it's good that, even though that's a thing that can be done, right, you go in and as a process, you learn about math and learn about chemistry and learn about health. And I mean, it can be fun, as long as you're open to it and and, you know, let it be fun. And so as far as some next steps here, I know you said that you help in the testing, you help in figuring out the results. But what are the limitations here? Like, are you only limited to that Seattle area? Or, like, who's the kind of person that should be reaching out to you?

Cydian Kauffman 19:52 Um, absolutely, the all of Western Washington should reach out to us. For sure, we act we're really experts in. This area. We really understand the water needs of this area, we can definitely help and have help people worldwide. People who have well drilling companies have reached out to us for free advice on what they should do about their water. People who live in other states and just can't figure it out and their local people can't help them. Have reached out to us, because we have some really high quality experts on staff, and so they can definitely reach out to us. We sometimes, if it's a fast answer, I'll just do it for free. If it's a longer one, there would be a charge, obviously, and then we can deliver treatment systems anywhere. So yep, that's basically how we work.

Robert Plank 20:44 Very cool. So Western Washington, whether it's anything from, can you look at my levels to you need that detail advice on drilling the water well that's pure water northwest.com and the phone number is 360-505-7457, the there's a form right there on the website where you can contact them. They're professional water experts, and they can help you solve common water issues. We're talking about hard water buildup, iron and mineral stains, smelly water they serve that local Western Washington area. But even if you're outside the area and you want to have that chat, it's still good to give them a call. 360-505-7457, or if you go to that website, pure water northwest.com, there is a contact form right in there. They've been in business since 2015 they have a 10 year warranty on our tanks, five year warranty on their control valves, techs who truly care their top rated water treatment experts, and you can visit their water quality testing page, even to learn about water quality in your specific area, pure water northwest.com. But before I let you go, Mr. City, and it's time for the scary part of the podcast where I try to stump you. I try to put you on the spot by asking about a fun quote or lesson that has served you in life, in water treatment, in business and in any aspect, a fun quote or lesson. So what do you have for us?

Cydian Kauffman 22:18 I'm not stumped. My favorite quote from Richard Feynman, the first principle is that you must not fool yourself. You are the easiest person to fool.

Robert Plank 22:28 Ooh. Can you unpack that a little bit? How does that apply to you? Specifically?

Cydian Kauffman 22:32 It's just reaffirms my constant approach that you have to look at the data, you have to identify and not guess, not pretend that you know what's going on, not fool yourself. But instead, check the data and make sure it matches with the reality of the situation.

Robert Plank 22:51 I like it. Check the data, make sure it matches with the reality. And if you find yourself overwhelmed, stuck, especially when it comes to your own water situation, then reach out and get help that is pure water northwest.com. Go ahead, do it right now, and thanks, Mr. Cydian and Kauffman for taking what could be a dull, boring subject, which is water quality and water treatment, and making it fun and exciting and something that we all need to be paying attention to. So thanks for being here and helping us out

Cydian Kauffman 23:19 Absolutely. Thank you.