Cooling Tower Setpoint For Chiller

Excellent explanation. You’re on top of your game. I live in the rust belt and this sounds like a good idea up this way since our temperatures usually cool off at night. I don’t do much chiller work anymore and when I did it was usually in large retail stores that mostly had water cooled screw chillers. The issue I mainly had was getting them started in the morning when the tower water had cooled off overnight when the chiller had shut down. They usually had tower bypass valves that would recirculate condenser water until it warmed up then would start pushing the water out to the tower as it warmed. However they rarely worked because the energy management company didn’t understand how these chillers operated. They usually only installed the condenser water temperature sensor on the outlet of the condenser to the tower and controlled the bypass valve and tower fan off this one sensor. I fought with them for a couple years trying to explain to them why I had to make rounds on an almost daily basis resetting the chiller at multiple locations due to this. They didn’t want to hear they were wrong. As you could probably guess they would see a high temperature on the condenser loop from their 1 sensor, turn on the tower fan and close off the bypass valve and dump a lot of cold water into the condenser which would cause it to fail on oil pressure. At 1 location I experimented and switched their strap on sensor to the water inlet which somewhat improved things by at least sensing the cold water from the tower sump would turn the fan off and begin to recirculate water again until the loop temperature stabilized. Couldn’t convince them to add a sensor to the tower sump to control the fan and relocate the sensor as I did to control the bypass from that. So I just continued to do my daily route to reset the chillers until we eventually lost the contract. It was easy money while it lasted. I pass by one of the stores I used to take care of often and rarely see the cooling tower fans running on a 90 degree day. I guess they showed me👍

I want to say, thanks for your input and may God bless you and your families.

The tower sp at 80-85° is a decent rule of thumb. The true answer is the manufacturer spec. The carrier 19xrv, under low load situations in mild weather, are looking for 60-65° condenser water. Also the york mc2 likes low condenser water temps. Know your equipment before making changes.

Great explanation & visual animations!💯👏 For lift control, you should control both condenser water temperature & water flow. All chillers have min & max flow and you can adjust those parameters for peak performance.

great information

Great info! Thanks.

Excellent 👍

You’re the man!

Thank you…great info

Great video.

Thank you!

Great video brother 💯💯

very good info

The York ymc2 chillers can run inverted. Had our 800ton ymc2 running with a 45 degree leaving chilled water temp and a 42 degree entering condensing water temp.

20years ago received a new building and i tried to explain to engineer this issue he would admit, especially in GTA in April

Great video! Can those rule of thumbs set points be used on other air cooled chillers? Please keep videos coming as I am just getting into centripetal chillers.

I have experienced many centrifugal chiller plant with fouled up condenser tube. I always advice my customers engineering and chiller plant operator to monitor condenser leaving temperature versus condenser saturation temperature. if the difference is greater than 10 fahrenheit, its time to punch the condenser tubes. and I also detest recycled water for cooling tower use.

What is the best or ideal energy efficient running 700tons York chiller. We have 3 700 tons chillers and 3 cooling towers but cold weather we only run one each, but hot weather two each. Thank you

lift determines the actual work the chiller compressor is doing. the closer the approach the less energy consumption, and vice versa, remember that chiller efficiency is to produce a large amount of TR tons with the least amount of energy consumption

I'm curious as to what you would do if you had a York yk, and those OWT's are so high that you can't possibly have condenser water below 85 degrees. During the summer here in m.d., we commonly experience that with our yk's.. I'm not sure I've ever observed surging. (our cw setpoint is 44 degrees). I do however constantly see what appears to be surging in low load conditions this time of year in the morning. The chiller will be running around 24% and sound like a dying whale. I never see that hot gas bypass operate either. Very confused about this.