In our previous articles in our ongoing blog series on cooling towers, we’ve discussed just about everything—from cooling tower installation and cooling tower repair to maintaining your cooling tower to upgrading and replacing your cooling tower.
There’s one more area for us to tackle, and that is a more in-depth look at retrofitting your cooling tower—why you might need a cooling tower retrofit, what distinguishes a cooling system retrofit from an upgrade, and how your cooling system retrofit can benefit your property.
What’s the difference between a cooling tower retrofit and an upgrade?
At face value, a cooling tower upgrade and a cooling tower retrofit sound like the same operation—replacing older, less efficient, or more functional parts with newer, more efficient, or more functional parts to prolong your cooling tower’s lifespan and improve its performance. However, while there is generally a lot of overlap between the two, there is a crucial distinction between retrofitting and upgrading.
To upgrade your cooling tower is to raise it to a higher grade or standard by replacing its parts with enhanced, optimized parts that do a better job. For example, replacing the fans in your cooling tower with newer fans or trading in one type of filter for another is an upgrade. Replacing a galvanized steel structure with stainless steel is an upgrade.
A cooling tower retrofit, on the other hand, is about adding a component or accessory to your cooling system that it did not have when it was manufactured. The goal of a retrofit is to add and replace components of your cooling tower to provide it with functionality beyond what the original model was capable of to improve its efficiency.
Upgrades and retrofits often go hand in hand. Both are ways you can prolong the life of your cooling tower and bring it up to modern standards of performance, energy efficiency, and water use efficiency.
Why do you need a cooling system retrofit?
You’ve had your cooling tower for a long time—maybe 20 or 25 years or more—and it’s starting to show signs of its age. It doesn’t keep your building as cool as it once did, and even though its performance has worsened, it’s using more energy than ever and driving up your electricity bill and water bill. No matter how dedicated you are to preventative maintenance, eventually, your cooling tower’s systems decay into obsolescence. Replacing obsolete components for newer, more efficient components has helped, but sometimes that can only go so far as to bring your old cooling tower up to modern standards, and if you’re in need of a retrofit, upgrades might not have gone far enough for you.
A cooling system retrofit adds new components to your cooling tower, making use of modern advances in climate control technology to restore the efficiency of your cooling system and bring it up to par with the modern, energy- and water-efficient standards your property needs to meet.
Cost Savings With a Cooling Tower Retrofit
Replacing your cooling tower when it comes near its end-of-life is expensive, with an average cost of around $125,000 (depending on the size of your building). The procedure and necessary materials for a cooling tower retrofit are generally far less costly compared to the time, labor, and materials cost of tearing down your existing cooling tower, purchasing a new cooling tower, and installing the new cooling tower.
Retrofitting is cheaper than replacement because, unlike replacement, you don’t have to get rid of everything—just the parts that no longer work. Because you’re keeping what works and throwing out what doesn’t, rather than replacing the whole thing, both the cost of materials and the cost of labor to install them are lower.
While retrofitting is often more extensive and expensive than upgrades, compared to replacement, cooling tower retrofits can often be a more financially sound decision.
Increasing Water Efficiency and Energy Efficiency With a Cooling Tower Retrofit
A cooling tower retrofit, much like a cooling tower upgrade, can be especially useful for bringing your cooling tower up to modern standards of energy efficiency and water efficiency—two subjects that have rapidly risen in importance.
Older models of cooling towers tend to use far too much water and electricity to cool your building, while modern cooling towers with far more advanced heat transfer systems have found ways to do more with less. With many parts of the world grappling with how to maintain necessary climate control with seasonal water shortages and reduced electricity usage, new innovations in water and energy efficiency are driving innovation in cooling systems.
Retrofitting your cooling tower can involve making changes and adding new components such as newer, more environmentally conscious water treatment systems, new cooling systems, and new monitoring systems to reduce the amount of water needed to cool your building.
New motor, fan, and cooling systems can have a massive positive impact on the amount of energy use your cooling tower requires, saving on your property’s electricity bill while improving the efficiency of your cooling system.
An extensive enough retrofit can even involve transforming your old cooling tower from one type of cooling tower to another in order to make use of more energy-efficient, water-efficient, and cost-efficient cooling practices.
What are the three types of cooling towers? Wet Cooling Towers vs. Dry and Hybrid Cooling Towers
There are three types of cooling towers: wet cooling towers, dry cooling towers, and hybrid wet-dry cooling towers.
Wet cooling towers, also known as open-circuit cooling towers, use water to absorb excess heat from your building, then place that water into direct contact with the cool air that passes through the cooling tower through its ventilation systems. The warm water evaporates into the air and expels the excess heat, cooling the water and sending it back into circulation.
Dry cooling towers, or closed-circuit coolers, utilize the same principle of removing the heat from the water and placing it into the air to cool it, but unlike wet cooling towers, the water that moves through your tower does not come into direct contact with the ambient air, and the system does not remove heat through evaporation. Instead, dry cooling towers operate by heat transfer.
Wet cooling towers waste their process water through evaporation, while dry coolers conserve water, with the trade-off that dry cooling towers tend to have lower heat exchange capacity.
A third option for cooling towers is a wet/dry hybrid cooling tower. First developed in the 1970s, a wet/dry hybrid cooling tower uses both wet cooling and dry cooling principles to efficiently control your building’s climate while using—and wasting—less water.
A cooling tower retrofit can involve taking an old, out-of-date wet cooling tower and reworking it to contain a parallel path wet/dry configuration, transforming it into a hybrid cooling tower that consumes less power and less water while still efficiently cooling your building, especially for commercial and industrial properties.
How to Know When It’s Time for a Cooling System Retrofit
Like upgrading or replacing your cooling tower, a cooling tower retrofit is a big commitment in terms of budget, time, and logistics. Retrofitting your cooling tower is an alternative to replacement when upgrades alone won’t do enough to bring your old cooling tower back up to par or enable it to meet modern standards, but doing a retrofit requires careful strategy and expertise to get the most out of it.
At Chiller Systems Service, we’re here to help. Our technicians are experts in every aspect of cooling tower installation, repair, maintenance, upgrades, replacements, and retrofitting and are dedicated to providing you with all the advice you need to determine whether or not a cooling tower retrofit is right for you.
If you think you might need to retrofit your cooling systems, contact us. We’ll give you honest, straight answers and expert advice, connecting you to the right cooling tower services for your building’s climate control requirements, your business needs, and your budget considerations.
Reach out to us and find out what makes Chiller Systems Service the best option for cooling tower services.
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FAQs
What is the difference between a cooling tower retrofit and an upgrade?
Upgrading your cooling tower is to raise it to a higher grade or standard by replacing its parts with enhanced, optimized parts that do a better job. A cooling tower retrofit adds a component or accessory to your cooling system that it did not have when it was manufactured, such as making use of modern advances in climate control technology to restore the efficiency of your cooling system.
What are the three types of cooling towers?
The three types of cooling towers are wet cooling towers, dry cooling towers, and hybrid wet-dry cooling towers. Wet cooling towers use water to absorb excess heat from your building and place that water into direct contact with the cool air that passes through the cooling tower through its ventilation systems. Dry cooling towers utilize heat transfer and do not come into direct contact with the ambient air. Hybrid wet-dry cooling towers use both wet cooling and dry cooling principles to efficiently control your building’s climate while using less water.
What are the benefits of a cooling tower retrofit?
A cooling tower retrofit can save on the cost of materials and labor to install them compared to the time, labor, and materials cost of tearing down your existing cooling tower, purchasing a new cooling tower, and installing the new cooling tower. Retrofitting can also involve making changes and adding new components such as newer, more environmentally conscious water treatment systems, new cooling systems, and new monitoring systems to reduce the amount of water needed to cool your building, as well as new motor, fan, and cooling systems, to improve the efficiency of your cooling system.
How do you know when it's time for a cooling system retrofit?
How do you know when it’s time for a cooling system retrofit? A4. Replacing obsolete components for newer, more efficient components has helped, but sometimes that can only go so far as to bring your old cooling tower up to modern standards, and a cooling system retrofit may be necessary. At Chiller Systems Service, our technicians are experts in every aspect of cooling tower installation, repair, maintenance, upgrades, replacements, and retrofitting and are dedicated to providing you with all the advice you need to determine whether or not a cooling tower retrofit is right for you.