Every building needs an adequate cooling system. The instinct of most people is likely to be to turn to the most common and most conventional air conditioning systems. However, we believe that, depending on your needs and especially if you have large property, a chilled water system may suit you even better.
Air System International Ltd has helped many clients learn more about these cooling systems as well as the benefits and, indeed, the necessity of them. This has led several people to opt for this solution.
If you’re not savvy about chilled water cooling and how it works, the first thing to note is that it is not really a new concept at all – it has actually been providing efficient and effective cooling in major cities around the world since 1960.
A chilled water system uses water, rather than air, to keep entire the entire surface area of a building’s air and equipment cool. They require a source of water constantly chilled at around 7.2 °C (45 °F). Tenants can either make use of their own packaged chilled water to supply their system or they can purchase chilled water from a water-plant that lends such services.
The question of course is; do you need this kind of system? If your needs are purely domestic or small scale, we would recommend you opt for a different solution. Rather than residential areas, chilled water cooling systems lend themselves best to large-scale buildings in which individual rooms need to be controlled separately, such as office blocks, universities, hospitals, or hotels.
ASIL takes measures to ensure that our systems are as economical as can be. Although understanding the physics behind Chilled Water systems isn’t really necessary unless you’re really considering it for your needs (and we could go into in-depth explanations in a consultation session), it’s good to know some basic aspects of how it works:
- A mixture of water and glycol is held in a reservoir which is circulated via pipes and distributed in different rooms. Air handlers located in each room receive the air product of the chilled water, making the process very similar to conventional air conditioning.
- Depending on the size of the building, systems are usually made up of 2 or 4 pipes, and come complete with energy saving features. One such feature is that when outdoor air temperatures are below 12.8 °C (55 °F), air may be used with providing cooling instead of chilled water.
The next major question you should be asking is not the how but the why – why is chilled water cooling such a big deal? The main reasons are simply that it is efficient and cost-effective. Commercial customers have often been found to reduce their air cooling costs from 10-20% when making the shift from standard air conditioning systems.
Our chilled water cooling utility systems are also secure as they have back-up capacities in the rare cases of sudden outages.