How Can Hot Weather Affect My Chiller?

Hey everyone, this is John McCoy Production Manager at G&D Chillers. I’m going to get into some of the areas in which hot weather can affect your chiller. When you get into the high ambient conditions, there’s a number of things that come into play. You need to check the clearances on the condenser, airflow through the machine. All those can affect it in a negative way.

One of the areas that can come into play is this high-low switch. If the pressures get too high due to lack of airflow or too hot of weather, air being pulled in through the condenser, the pressures are going to rise in the machine. And this switch is going to trip. It’s a safety to protect that. There is a reset right on top of this thing. It’s spring loaded. If you slide that over and let it go, that will reset that high pressure switch in the event that it trips.

Also, what can happen is say it’s midnight, there’s nobody around. It’s a Saturday, everyone’s gone. For some reason this thing trips due to a bad fan motor or not getting enough airflow, hot weather coming in, a blocked condenser, or hitting it with an extremely high load will cause the glycol temperature to increase dramatically, which can increase the pressures on the system when the refrigerant passes through. What happens then is you still got a process pump that’s running. You’re still sending glycol out, but the compressors can’t run because this is tripped.

That’s when our high and low temp comes into play. It’s a safety we install. S1 on this is a two stage Ranco located inside your electrical panel. That’s the low temp setting. That’s going to prevent freezing and any low temperature conditions that may occur inside the heat exchanger. Also this is going to protect against high temp situations, if the glycol ever gets too hot because a compressor is not running. Once it reaches the set point, it’s going to shut your pump down to prevent any heat being introduced into the system.

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