Duct Cleaners = Occupant Health and Money Saved
Allow us, dear readers, to borrow a little from William Shakespeare. “To clean or not to clean, (your ducts) that is the question.” Okay, Bill didn’t include the “your ducts” thing, but otherwise, the conundrum is the same – is it really important to clean your air ducts? We here at Just Venting are very attached to duct cleaners so…
The answer is a resounding YES!
The reasons are many and diverse, but they ultimately fall into two general areas: health reasons and financial reasons.
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Our – and We Hope Your – 2011 Chiller Maintenance Resolutions
If you’ve deferred maintenance on your chiller or other HVAC equipment until next year, now is a good time to partake of two year-end activities that have become traditions over the centuries – the top 5 list and the New Year’s Resolution. If these activities are not part of your year-end rituals, then please, allow us to help you get started this year.
First – the resolutions, of which there are two:
Please repeat after us: “I hereby resolve to create a 2011 maintenance plan to cover my chillers, heat exchangers, coils, boilers and all my other HVAC equipment.” And then, say: “I resolve to actually follow the plan I just created.”
There…now that wasn’t so hard, was it?
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Coil Cleaning Equipment: Dirty Coils Cost Power and Efficiency
We’ve been telling you for years that dirty coils are detrimental to your HVAC system’s operational efficiency. Simply put, dirty coils practically reach into your pockets, take out your wallets and go on a spending spree using your money. Goodway offers top of the line CoilPro coil cleaning equipment because they know these statistics. But now another organization has systematically studied the effects and costs of dirty coils, and the results are pretty clear.
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Hard Water Deposits Impact Everyone – Some More Than Others
We’ve all heard the term “hard water”, but what does it actually mean? How is hard water described and categorized? What section of the country has the hardest water?
First, let’s describe “hard water” in more detail. Hard water is water that contains large amounts of dissolved minerals, especially calcium and magnesium. As our high-school chemistry teachers taught us, l0, those many years ago, water is an excellent solvent – some even call it the universal solvent. As water passes through rocks and the ground on its journey from rain to our sinks, it picks up small amounts of minerals and keeps them in solution.
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2010 Could Be The Year of Chiller Maintenance
What do the Boston MBTA, the State of New Jersey and the airline industry all have in common? They have all deferred some maintenance costs due to economic conditions. Chances are that more readers of this blog than not have either talked about or actually deferred some maintenance operations due to poor economic conditions. Around the country, deferred maintenance is epidemic. But there are signs that is likely to change in 2010.
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Deferred Chiller Maintenance Comes With Hidden Costs
Chiller maintenance deferred is chiller maintenance denied. We’ve all heard stories about delaying or rescheduling maintenance procedures that we once did without a second thought when the economy wasn’t…well, lousy. You probably dismiss as urban legend the horror stories about failed chillers and clogged coils leading to catastrophic incidents. Sadly, they are true.
There are lots of reasons why important tasks like chiller maintenance might be put off . They range from “We don’t have the manpower right now because we’re all busy with project X,” to “I really hate that job because I can’t stand wearing a respirator and rubber gloves,” to the ever popular “We just can’t afford it this quarter, we’re already over our budget.”
Our reply is “You can’t afford not to do it”.
A too-little-used term in this business is “first-level failure”. In general, this is when a mechanical system begins operating outside of normal parameters. A good example would be a chiller with just a little bit of fouling in its coils. First-level failure in this case, according to process-cooling.com, will be characterized by several subtle and unnoticed, conditions:
- elevated compressor head pressure
- poor airflow through the coils
- increased power consumption
- reduction in true cooling tonnage capacity
- Increased compressor cycling
None of these are good. They start out slow and their effect on your overall system may be negligible. But as time goes on, the effect becomes more and more pronounced. If you keep daily maintenance logs – and you should be – you’ll see the trends in your figures on power consumption and operating pressures.
Sooner or later, if you put off maintenance long enough, you will have a failure. If you are lucky only the chiller will fail, causing you to incur the costs of repairing it and whatever it costs you in lost production time. If you are unlucky, whatever your chiller was keeping cool will also fail. Deferring maintenance doesn’t make the need for it go away. All it means is that your chiller expenses will rise and the chiller will chill less as the likelihood of a failure increases.
For what it’s worth, the way to look at the question of chiller – or any building system – maintenance is not what it will cost to do it, but rather what it will cost if you don’t.
Rich Silverman
Goodway Blogging Team
Image by Dieder Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Under a Creative Commons Generic License
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