Operating and maintaining a plant has great rewards – appreciation of your associates & peers for helping make their work possible, knowledge that important work is done well, satisfaction of solving challenging problems.

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It also has headaches, some of which are more frustrating than others.  Weekend and night calls, holiday shutdown work, very long days when a production-critical system is causing problems, too tight budgets, not enough maintenance tech man-hours – it’s enough to make you consider changing jobs.

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Among the worst are cooling water system problems which can be extremely difficult to solve – supposed fixes don’t last, or you fix one thing only for another to crap out, or the cost of keeping things repaired seems to never end.  And the constant awareness that you can get a phone call anytime that there’s another problem – that eats at you even when you’re supposed to be off the clock.

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Your chiller guy tells you one thing.  Your water treatment folks tell you another.  Your buddy has something he did that helped in his plant, but it doesn’t seem like it makes sense in yours.

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ISG can help you.  We have unique knowledge and experience with cooling systems, having worked with hundreds of different plants and systems, and we look at them from a complete system perspective, not just one or another piece of the equipment puzzle.  When you enlist our support you can identify the real issues in your system and solve them, not just squeeze the balloon here only for it to pop up there.

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Weak links, choke points, improper applications, incorrect control settings, unhelpful operating practices – all of these can contribute to your system’s problems.  And all of these have to be considered to completely solve your system’s issues.  The right answer rarely lies in a single piece of equipment because cooling water systems are just that – systems of components and interactions that combine to provide the heat rejection your plant and processes need to run.

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Cooling towers interact with chillers and machine cooling heat exchangers, pumps tie all the components together through a complex piping network, tanks and level controls keep the networks filled but can introduce other issues, controls may start & stop equipment but not help mitigate fault conditions or extend service intervals.  And every plant – every single plant – is different from every other plant, even if they were built from the same set of plans.

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Consider this: a system can be hydraulically balanced but not be thermally balanced.  Which is to say, it’s full of water and nothing runs empty, but still it doesn’t provide cooling evenly and appropriately to all the cooling loads and / or you can’t get all the chillers or towers to load fully and evenly.  This is so common with systems it’s almost the rule instead of the exception.

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Done right, cooling systems should be an asset that isn’t one breakdown away from dropping the plant.  They should support the plant smoothly with stable temperatures and pressures, have reasonable and orderly maintenance requirements, and help with the plant budget when times are tight.  They should be something you rely on confidently, not worry about constantly.

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When you’re ready to put an end to your cooling system struggles and get relief from the constant worry about what’s going to fail next, contact ISG.  Our mission in life is to make industrial process cooling systems stable, reliable, cost-effective to maintain, and energy efficient.  That’s it.  If you’d like to see how this could happen in your plant, we’re eager to be at your side.