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How to Pay for Your Cooling Water Treatment Program

With the high cost to operate a comfort or process cooling system, everyone is looking for ways to save money. One obvious way is to solicit quotations from several water treatment companies and employ the cheapest. In most cases, however, this practice results in higher overall operating and maintenance costs due to poor program performance. The water treatment supplier must cut corners in order to realize any profit in these situations. This is done by not maintaining inhibitor levels in the proper ranges, not dosing biocides strong enough or often enough, or utilizing cheap, unreliable feed equipment.

How do you avoid this pitfall and insure you receive maximum treatment program performance for you expenditure? Simple. Save money in an area that does not affect operating or maintenance costs.

Water companies calculate sewer charges based on incoming quantities. By their way of thinking, what goes in must come out. However, this does not hold true for facilities with recirculating cooling water systems.

In recirculating systems, most of the cooling effect is achieved by the evaporation of tiny water droplets. In fact, for every 10^oF drop between inlet and outlet temperatures across a cooling tower, approximately one percent of the recirculating water will be evaporated, not sent down the drain. For a 100-Ton system operating 24 hours per day, the evaporation rate will be 4,320 gallons or 129,600 gallons in a month. For a typical rate of $1.44 per 100 cubic feet of sewerage, this amounts to $248.83 of excess charges each month. To qualify for a sewer credit, the water company may require the installation of a totalizing water meter on the cooling tower bleed line so that they can read the actual gallons to the drain. Contact your water company for assistance.

By using the money you would have paid the water company in excess charges, you can afford to employ a water treatment program that offers maximum results. In other words, you will be upgrading your treatment program for free.

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