As summer arrives in full – and cooling system usage increases – we’re highlighting the importance of proactively maintaining your cooling media. Although many maintenance teams and facility managers schedule media inspections at this time of the year, looking for wear and scaling is just the beginning.
Media assessments, as well as replacement planning, are critical when it comes to preserving peak performance. Pre-season system cleaning (before the peak demand arrives) helps maintain efficiency, saves costs, and keeps water sustainability goals in focus.
In this article, our product team shines a light on the benefits of early summer maintenance, as well as on the many ways in which Condair’s engineering support and service teams can work with you to catch issues before they negatively impact performance and drive up unnecessary cost.
As temperatures rise, evaporative cooling systems must handle greater thermal loads, which leads to increased runtime and additional demand on the media. By performing beginning-of-summer inspections, facility teams can catch issues before those peak loads arrive. Inspections like these, as well as cleanings, have a direct impact on both cooling performance and operational costs.
Not sure if the media in your system is ready for replacement? Get a free Media Replacement ROI Analysis from Condair.
Evaporative cooling media that has become partially clogged, damaged, or degraded can limit system performance and drive up overall energy use. Ensuring that your media is in optimal condition helps to prepare the cooling system to operate efficiently when it’s needed most.
Clean and intact media ensure proper airflow and consistent saturation, which leads to more effective cooling. At the same time, regular inspections help to:
It all adds up to optimal performance and tangible operational savings.
Maintenance teams and facility managers should look the following signs of wear when inspecting their systems’ media.
Indicators like those listed above typically suggest that the media is no longer performing optimally and should be repaired, cleaned, or replaced.
Condair’s engineering and service teams offer an even more advanced evaluation that goes beyond what a visual check can reveal. Assessing factors like pressure drop, airflow resistance, system performance metrics, and water quality, our team brings deep knowledge of evaporative system design and understands how media degradation affects overall system efficiency.
Our approach is always based on system performance and lifecycle value, and not just media’s visual appearance and/or its number of years in service. Evaporative media ages differently under different circumstances and operational loads. So, all media must be evaluated and its viability assessed independently.
Get a free Media Replacement ROI Analysis from Condair
At Condair, we recommend full media replacement when it shows signs of:
But we’ll also advise customers about when not to replace their media; for example:
Condair supports proactive media replacement planning through our Engineering Services team and our End-of-Life (EOL) tool. The EOL tool considers critical variables including local water quality, system run-time, and environmental conditions to estimate the expected lifespan of cooling media at any specific site.
By modeling media performance over time, we can help customers understand when to plan for replacement—avoiding unexpected failures and maintaining optimal cooling efficiency.
Our proactive approach minimizes downtime, ensures budget predictability, and reduces operational risk—especially in mission critical places like data centers, where downtime is unacceptable, and performance and uptime are everything.
Because we understand the exact chemical makeup, structural design, and performance characteristics of our own media, Condair can confidently assess its condition and predict its remaining lifespan. Our evaluations of third-party media wouldn’t allow for the same level of accuracy or insight—and we want to ensure our recommendations are always based on data, and data we trust.
Condair offers a wide range of evaporative media products featuring superior performance for direct cooling, indirect cooling, humidification, and pre-cooling applications.
Condair’s KEEP (Keep an Efficient Evaporative Program) is a pilot program designed to help our customers make data-informed decisions about when to replace their evaporative media. As part of the program, customers send us samples of their media—quantity being determined by system size—which are then evaluated in our lab.
There we can analyze the media’s:
KEEP offers significant value by helping facilities avoid unnecessary replacements, maximizing media lifespan, and ensuring reliable system performance. This lab-level evaluation of media is performed by the same experts who engineer and manufacture the media, which means they can offer insights that field inspections can’t match.
Assessing the condition of your media, especially as consistently warmer temperatures arrive, ensures that your cooling system is always operating at peak performance, both in terms of efficiency and cost.
Doing so proactively, before evaporative cooling systems are required to handle greater thermal loads, enables service teams and facility managers to address any issues before increased runtimes and additional demand on the media.
Condair’s team is ready to help you get out in front of potentially costly repairs and downtime that nobody wants. So, get in touch with us today.
Contact the Condair team to determine the ideal humidification solution for your needs. Our experts will help you assess your needs and recommend the best system for optimal performance.
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