Cooling Tower and Condenser Water Design Part 2: The Impact of Wet Bulb on Cooling Tower Performance

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How do you evaluate the performance of a cooling tower? What factors impact how effective a cooling tower will be in a given application? To get to the bottom of either of these questions – which are essential questions to ask when sizing a cooling tower – it’s important to understand the impact of the ambient wet bulb temperature on cooling tower performance.
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Cooling Tower and Condenser Water Design Part 1: The Refrigeration Cycle

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Cooling towers are simple mechanisms. Their operation is based on the natural occurrence of evaporative cooling – something most of us have experienced daily since the first time we got wet and felt a chill. But despite their simplicity, cooling towers play a crucial role in operational efficiency of the entire chilled water system. Not only are they the exit point for all those BTUs in a building that the chilled water system is working so hard to absorb and eliminate, their operation has the potential to significantly reduce the amount kWs going to the biggest energy hog in our system—the chiller.
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Understanding Primary Secondary Pumping Part 6: 5 Ways to Pump an HVAC System

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By Chris Edmondson

There’s more than one way to pump a chiller or boiler system.  In fact, there are five common approaches, and all but one includes some variation of our topic of late -- primary secondary pumping. 

Variable Primary Pumping

Contemporary systems that do not utilize primary secondary pumping are typically known as variable primary systems.  In this simple design, there is only one set of pumps (chiller or boiler pumps) creating flow for the entire system. 

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Understanding Primary Secondary Pumping Part 5: Best Practices for Piping

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By Chris Edmondson

Piping in a primary secondary pumping systems as a whole can be quite complex, but when it comes to the “primary” part of the system, there are really only two approaches:  Dedicated or Non-dedicated.

Figure 1 shows the chillers in a primary secondary system piped with one pump per chiller.  If the chillers

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Understanding Primary Secondary Pumping Part 4: “What happens when...?”

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By Chris Edmondson

Now that we know what happens when we vary flows and mix temperatures in a primary secondary pumping system, let’s explore these theories in some more realistic scenarios. 

As discussed in a previous blogs, when it comes to primary secondary systems, one of three flow patterns is always in occurrence: 

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