Building owners are exploring all their options as they work to decarbonize their buildings, especially as governments begin to crack down on carbon emissions. However, there is a simple but often neglected solution to kickstart your building's decarbonization goal: clean water.
With proper HVAC water treatment, you can maximize the efficiency of your equipment, save energy, and, in turn, reduce the building's carbon emissions.
Maximizing Cycles of Concentration Saves Water and Reduces Water and Sewer Costs
Water has a high heat capacity and is an excellent primary heat transfer fluid in HVAC systems. Cooling towers operate by evaporating a small portion of water, leaving behind minerals such as calcium, phosphate, iron, and other metal compounds. The more impurities you have in your system, the greater the risk of equipment scaling or fouling water due to over-concentration. By maintaining proper HVAC water treatment chemistry and employing the right analytical tools, you can safely maximize the cycles of concentration in your cooling tower system, which will result in sewer and make-up water savings. Over a year, these savings can be significant, as illustrated in the figure below.
Recently, a commercial building in Fairfax, VA, installed a water softener on their cooling tower system to help increase their cooling tower cycles of concentration. They were using over 3.2 million gallons of city water and 973,000 gallons of bleed to the sewer. Removing the calcium increased their cycles of concentration from three to eight, saving a combined 1.3 million gallons of sewer and makeup water per year.
Contact our Water Treatment and Technologies experts today to request a complimentary consultation.