Case Study: Large Commercial Center

Situation

A very large commercial center had been using liquid water treatment products for many years in its cooling system. The technical results had always been acceptable. In recent years, however, the management team of the commercial center had become more and more focused on environmental issues.

Solutionoffice

The management team worked with the water treatment partner to add sustainability areas of interest to the traditional water treatment and maintenance objectives to form a comprehensive, multi-directional series of goals for the new program.

To address these topics of interest, the facility management team worked with their water treater partner to install APTech Group blended solid concentrate water treatment products for their five cooling tower and chillers, each with 1,000 tons of refrigeration, with slightly soft municipal water for make-up.

Results

With the blended solid concentrate product implementation, cycles of concentration were increased from 5 to 10, which enabled significant water savings and reduced chemical usage. Additionally, PLC controllers were installed to allow for automatic, ongoing corrosion measurement without the need for corrosion coupons and automatic control of the number of operating chillers needed at any one time. The system uses “bleed and feed” method to deliver the blended solid concentrate water treatment products.

Over the following six months after installation, the blended solid concentrate product installation provided as good as or better system protection as the previous system for the following categories of measurement as tracked by the commercial center’s facility management team. Included among these are the more sustainability focused metrics as established by and of importance to the facility management team, based on the 5-star rating system the team developed.