Written by Kent Penning

When working at a building in Sunnyvale, CA we were planning to place a new chiller and chilled water loop in operation for a customer, while there we ran across the equipment pad and saw the equipment in the photo below.

We weren’t sure whether to be in awe of the cleverness of the designer for this equipment configuration or wonder why something like this was created.

What you see in this picture is a car radiator married to a swamp cooler and the swamp cooler  blows cooled air through it.  In the San Francisco bay area of California the swamp cooler will cool the ambient air 15 degrees. This means that if it is 90 degrees outside – the air out of the swamp cooler will be 75 degrees.

This configuration is using the auto radiator as a cooling loop in the system.  The cooler air from the swamp cooler will then pick up heat from the hotter radiator cooling loop (by blowing the cooler air through the radiator).

On that 90 degree day, the radiator cooling loop will never be cooled to the 75 degrees of the swamp cooler air. Perhaps the best it would do is 80 to 85 degrees.

Luckily, after asking some questions, we found out that this firm really didn’t have much of a heat load. This radiator loop was hooked up to several water cooled vacuum pumps.

If those vacuum pumps required cooler water – this arrangement would not have worked. This firm has sputtering equipment which coats parts with a thin film of the desired material.

I just proves that no matter how many years experience you have (and Kent has 30 years experience) – you can never say you have seen it all.

 

If you need help with temperature, contact Cold Craft, Inc.

408.374.7292 or [email protected]