How to Maintain a Cooling Tower System
Energy Plus has trained our site engineers with the operation of cooling tower systems and to improve their understanding of the water/energy nexus with the goal of reducing energy, water and chemical consumption of the cooling systems through improved operations. By reinforcing strong operational practices, introducing new concepts and raising overall awareness of cooling tower operations, it is expected that a system will more likely be operated at or near peak efficiency.
- Our goals with respect to cooling tower operations is to:
- Protect the health and safety of building occupants and technical personnel as related to the treatment of water and the handling of associated chemicals.
- Maximize the efficiency of HVAC equipment.
- Protect equipment from scale, corrosion, and deleterious micro-bio activity such that cleaning and repairs of equipment due to water problems are not required.
- Achieving these goals will save energy, water, chemicals and costs while improving sustainability by reducing consumption of scarce resources.
Cooling Tower Operations Checklist
- Determine makeup water quality – Make up water quality is most critical factor for cooling tower system. This will enable the establishment of target Cycles of Concentration (COC).
- We Energy Plus team test the makeup water quality at site to ensure TDS, PH, Hardness of the system.
- Establish target Cycles of Concentration (COC) – Based on makeup water quality, set a practical COC goal using the Target Cycles of Concentration.
- Monitor COC and water performance frequently – Keeping the system running at peak COCs while staying within water performance levels will maximize efficiency and protect equipment.
- Automate where possible – Utilize automated monitoring and alarms when available and cost effective. Implement direct chemical feeds at the makeup distribution. Implementation of temperature controller is cost effective.
- Protect the equipment –We Energy Plus team maintain the regular chemical dosing as per requirement to ensure no corrosion, scale buildup or bio-fouling is occurring, which is important to protect the system and equipment’s.
- Water Flow rate- Water flow rate is a vital factor for heat transfer of a cooling tower system, as well as efficiency of cooling tower. We Energy Plus team carefully maintain pump flow rate and clean the strainers of system.
