If you run a commercial business, you’ll understand the importance of having a cooling tower instead of an HVAC system. Cooling towers with interlock wiring offer significant cost savings because of their efficiency and large load capacity. We’ll examine what cooling towers are, how they can benefit your commercial business, how they compare to HVAC systems.
What Are Cooling Towers?
Cooling Towers are water cooling systems that work in conjunction with HVAC systems to cool large buildings and warehouses. Cooling towers utilize water to remove heat through evaporation, chilling the air to circulate through the building. You can often find cooling towers are the roofs of large high-rise buildings.
Cooling towers efficiently regulate temperature and flow rate, making them an ideal solution for large buildings. Modern cooling towers can be managed and customized through smart, automated controls, allowing for 99% uptime while reducing energy consumption.
Types of Cooling Towers
Cooling Towers come in a variety of designs:
- Natural Draft: These are your massive cylinder buildings that are commonly used for power plants.
- Mechanical Draft: This cooling tower utilizes a fan to circulate air through the tower.
- Crossflow: The crossflow design has airflow moving horizontally through the fill and tower.
- Counterflow: This cooling tower focuses air movement to travel upward, which is counter-current to the hot air as the tower allows the hot water to fall downward.
- Induced Draft: The induced draft cooling tower pulls air throughout the tower, reducing re-circulation, and is 30% more efficient than the forced draft.
- Forced Draft: Forced draft is similar to induced draft but has the fan at the tower base, blowing the air upward.
What Are Cooling Towers Used For?
Cooling towers are efficient systems for cooling, heating, and ventilating large buildings and industrial manufacturing and plants. More than 1,500 industrial facilities in the United States leverage cooling towers to regulate and cool their plants, such as:
- Power
- Natural Gas Processing
- Food Processing
- Petrochemical
- Petroleum
A cooling tower is essential to refrigeration systems and cooling large buildings like hospitals, schools, airports, and high-rise buildings. Depending on your business and facility size, you may want to consider installing a cooling tower to reduce energy costs and increase efficiency.
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How Cooling Towers Work
In a typical open-circuit cooling tower:
- A heat source warms the water.
- Gravity or a pressurized nozzle distributes the warm water over a heat transfer surfaced call the fill or wet deck.
- The tower pulls warm air from the atmosphere and forces the air through the warm water, causing some water to evaporate.
- The evaporation process cools the remaining water, and the tower blows the cool air out.
- The water is transferred to the cold-water basin.
- The water then recycles back to the heat source and starts the process again.
Cooling towers can scale with your facility to meet demand and be automated to deliver during peak seasons or business hours.
Do you want to increase the energy efficiency of your cooling system at your commercial facility? Learn more about Edison’s cooling tower, chiller, boiler, and interlocking wiring solutions.
Benefits of Cooling Towers With Interlock Wiring
A commercial or industrial business that installs a modern cooling tower will enjoy the following benefits:
Lower Energy Costs
By recycling 98% of the water during the cooling cycle, the cooling tower runs on minimal operating expenses. Cooling towers are more efficient, using 50% less energy than HVAC systems.
Low Maintenance
Legacy cooling towers have a bit more maintenance than HVAC systems because they require more cleaning and water treatment to prevent disease and bacteria. But new molded plastic models prevent contamination and can be customized to meet demand.
Equipment Longevity
The equipment needed to run a cooling tower lasts five to ten years longer than commercial HVAC systems. Most chillers for cooling towers are also stored inside the facility that extends the chiller’s life by not exposing it to the elements like an HVAC system.
Larger Capacity
Water cooling tower systems can scale to meet the demands of the commercial or industrial facility. By building larger towers, the business never needs to worry about not meeting demand or overloading the system.
How Do Cooling Tower Systems Save Money?
Cooling tower systems are the most efficient cooling system for larger facilities and industrial plants. By integrating a cooling tower with an automated management system, the cooling tower will:
- Reduce costly redundancies
- Provide 99% uptime for continuous service
- Recirculate water, which decreases utility costs
- Reduce energy consumption for lower energy bill
- Extend equipment life
- Reduce maintenance costs
If you have an industrial or commercial building that could benefit from a modern cooling system, contact Edison to learn how they can customize a cooling tower system for your business.
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Are Cooling Towers Eco-Friendly?
Legacy cooling towers are made of sheet metal, and while efficient, are not the most environmentally friendly. Although, there are newer cooling tower systems that are made from molded seamless plastic. These plastic systems are more eco-friendly and require less chemical treatment.
Cooling Towers Are Essential to Manufacturing and Large Enterprises
Because of their efficiency and large capacity, cooling towers are a no-brainer when it comes to heating and cooling your industrial or commercial facilities. Cooling towers offer better equipment longevity, sustainability, and lower maintenance.
If you are building a new facility or renovating an existing facility, you may want to consider upgrading your cooling tower system to a modern, automated management system.
Edison is a leading provider of automated cooling tower solutions for commercial and industrial properties. Edison’s experienced consultants can customize an energy solution to satisfy business requirements. Edison offers cost savings, efficiency, and insight into your building’s operations.
Do you need to optimize and automate your facility’s cooling system? Contact Edison for a free consultation to improve your HVAC services.
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