What are some of the basic electrical components of my chiller?

Hello, everyone. I’m John McCoy, Production Manager here at G&D Chillers. I’ve got some of the most basic electrical components in front of me here today. I want to run through these with you guys.

They’re just some of the thermostats we’ve used over the years, either as a freeze stat or a high temperature alarm, as well as the thermostat that controls your glycol temperature. We’ve got a Honeywell 4 Stage here with Dwyer thermostat, a Ranco thermostat. A Johnson A419 has been used as a freeze stat in a number of our chillers, as well as the auto reset analog controller here with the tab on top for a reset.

We’ve also got our breakers and contactors here. We’ve got a three-phase thermal overload breaker, single-phase flip up and down, just a standard breaker for our machines, as well as one of our contactors. We’ve got an alternating relay and the sequencer located here. What these do is they alternate between the stages. They give equal runtime across the board on all of our units.

We’ve got a time delay here. These are typically set to three minutes from the factory. This keeps the compressor off for a minimum of three minutes before it can fire again to prevent short cycling in the system.

Here we’ve got a phase and voltage monitor. This monitors the power incoming to the unit to ensure that you don’t have a brownout, a phase loss something along those lines that could cause damage to the motors inside the system. This will catch all that and display any faults that occur here in the display screen.

This is a fan cycling switch. You may notice at least one of these on a 208 to 240 volt system. You’ll see two of these in a 480 volt system. These control when the fans come on and shut off in the system to control pressure inside the refrigeration circuit.

This is a high-low switch. This is going to control when the unit comes on pressure-wise, and when it shuts off, as well as cut it out under high pressure situations. The reset for the high pressure cutout is located here.

Okay, so now we’ve ran through some of the basic electrical components that you’ll find inside the electrical panel of your unit or inside the machine itself. If you have any questions with this stuff when we’re going through it, just please give us a call.

Contact Us