Cooling towers must use water because evaporation is how they reject heat. A sudden increase in makeup water, however, should not be accepted as normal without investigation. The added consumption may come from a leaking float valve, excessive blowdown, drift, overflow, a hidden system leak, changing load, or inaccurate measurement. The quickest way to…
Signs Cooling Tower Fan Shaft Bearings Need Replacement Fan shaft bearings support a rotating shaft in one of the wettest and most demanding areas of a cooling tower. A bearing can begin deteriorating long before the fan stops. Noise, heat, vibration, grease leakage, shaft movement, and repeated belt trouble may all provide warning. The…
Why Is A Cooling Tower Access Door Leaking? A cooling tower access door should allow maintenance crews into the unit without becoming a path for water, air, and debris. When moisture appears around the opening, the first reaction is often to tighten the knobs as hard as possible. That can hide the real problem…
How To Identify The Right Cooling Tower Spray Nozzle Before Ordering A spray nozzle may be small, but ordering the wrong one can leave part of a cooling tower fill dry, create excessive overlap, or change the water pressure across the distribution system. A replacement that fits the pipe is not necessarily the correct…
Dirty cooling tower fill is not one single condition. A deposit may be hard mineral scale, loose airborne material, corrosion products, biological matter or a mixture of contaminants. The difference matters because cleaning methods, water treatment decisions and replacement timing depend on what is actually present. A quick look through an access opening can reveal…
A cooling tower can have a working fan, an operating pump and apparently clean water while still falling short of its expected performance. One possible reason is uneven water distribution. When some sections of fill receive plenty of water and others remain partly dry, the tower cannot use its full heat transfer area. This problem…
Rust in a cooling tower basin often begins quietly. A brown stain appears near a seam, around a fastener, or beneath an area where an older coating has lifted. Months later, the affected patch may be larger and the basin may begin losing treated water. Recoating can protect a suitable basin and extend its useful…
A mechanical contractor gets asked to “just replace the fill” on a cooling tower, but the old media is broken, scaled, half missing, and nobody has the original paperwork close by. That is where a simple parts order can turn into a slow, expensive guessing game. Cooling tower fill media is not a generic insert.…
A facilities manager in Phoenix can have a cooling tower that looks fine from the ground, then a dust storm rolls through, temperatures stay ugly, and suddenly the tower is not pulling heat the way it should. One common culprit is not dramatic at all. It can be the spray nozzles. Nozzles do the quiet…
A solenoid valve is easy to overlook until it starts causing trouble. It is not the biggest or most expensive part of a cooling tower, but when it sticks, leaks, or stops responding, operators usually notice pretty quickly. In a cooling tower, solenoid valves often help control makeup water, basin levels, bleed functions, or other…