Background
After the site had installed Excool Adiabatic units to provide cooling to their data halls. The manufacturer claimed that there was very little in maintenance required on these units and scale would not be an issue due to the pre filtration. All of the units were supplied from Town mains via break tanks. When running above set ambient temperature the units run in adiabatic using water for heat rejection. We led discussions with the client on how this process would cause a concentration of minerals and salts to form on the heat exchangers, leading to a loss of efficiency resulting in £10,000’s worth of remedial action to remove scale deposits.
The Challenge
From our on site analysis we already knew that water hardness was high andfrom experience we highlighted this as a potential issue. During the summer vist, the site were running on approximately 52 Excool units and each one suffered with severe scale build up and loss of efficiency; costs were reported to be £ 10,000’s per month for remedial action.
Our Solutions
We installed a kinetico softener to one Excool unit in hall 14 as a trial. This demonstrated a huge improvement on scale reduction and was the catalyst
for site to consider a site wide solution. We proposed to supply and install a water softener system capable of delivering uninterrupted soft water to the Excool units. The system was specified to provide soft water to site at 72m3/h. Following various meetings with the client and their design consultant, we were invited to tender for these works. Following the tender process we were successful in securing this project based on our input and the consultant preferring to deal with us. This was also the first major project that was a collaboration between group entities within Marlowe Environmental Services.