9 August 2016
 Categories: , Blog

A cooling tower is an open-topped, cylindrical tower used to condense steam for air conditioning. A cooling tower works by rejecting waste heat from a building into the atmosphere, enabling you to maintain a certain desired temperature in the building. It has fans, water basins and piping to facilitate the circulation of the water throughout the system. Some of these components rely on electricity to perform their functions. For you to cut on your energy costs, you must ensure that the cooling tower always operates at its optimal best. If you just had a cooling tower installed for air conditioning in your commercial building, here is a checklist of what you can do to ensure energy efficiency:

Set Up a Sun Shade

Shielding your cooling tower from prolonged exposure to sunlight will go a long way in making it energy efficient. The moist conditions on the top side of the cooling tower and availability of sunlight encourage the growth of algae. This inhibits the proper flow of water within the tower and the water cooling media. In the end, the algae lower the efficiency of the cooling tower by forcing some of the components like the fans to use more energy than they would. Thankfully, you can alleviate this problem by putting a sun shade over the tower. It will stop the sunlight from reaching the top decks of the cooling tower hence no growth of algae.

Locate the Blowdown on the Hot Water Side

When the water leaves the building, it is warmer than the water supplied to the building by the cooling tower. As water evaporates into the atmosphere, it leaves behind salts and impurities. Therefore, you must run blowdown water through the system to get rid of the solid wastes that remain after evaporation. If your cooling tower supplies blowdown through the cold water side, then you should change the piping and have it let in through the hot water side. In this way, the blowdown will not interfere with the temperature of the cold water, keeping cooling energy levels at an optimum low.

Treat Your Water

It is important to keep the treat the water circulating in the system and keep it clean. Considering that this water is recycled, impurities force you to use far much energy (fans have to work harder) to get it to the right temperature before circulating it through the building again. This can be alleviated by using treated, clean water.

Contact a company like Cooling Tower Sales & Service Pty Ltd if you have further questions about maintaining a cooling tower.