Are you planning to install a cooling tower for air-conditioning purposes in your commercial building? Well, it is imperative for you to learn about blowdown. Blowdown refers to the intentional removal of water from the cooling tower to mitigate the overconcentration of insoluble debris and salt. With too much debris and salt in the water, your cooling-tower use will inevitably lead to environmental problems, excessive water use and disposal costs. Here are some of the important things you need to know about blowdown.

How Do You Control Blowdown?

The best way to control the blowdown on your cooling tower is by keeping an eye on conductivity. Conductivity is an easy parameter to measure, and it is proportional to the total dissolved solids in the water. You should make sure that your cooling tower has conductivity controllers to monitor and regulate levels of conductivity in the cooling tower. The conductivity controller has set points that activate a blowdown valve to control the amount of blowdown. If you employ conductivity control properly in your system, then the water temperature and chemistry will reduce the amount of water consumed and maximise corrosion and scale control.

What Is Underuse of Blowdown?

Underuse of blowdown is a case where you try too hard to conserve the water circulating in your cooling tower. While this may save you some money in the short run, conserving water to extremes will present a set of problems in the long run. First, you will exceed the boundaries of your chemical treatment such that there is a high risk of deposition and scaling. All the chemical treatments used in the cooling tower aimed at preventing deposition become overwhelmed because they cannot maintain the limits of solubility, and the water becomes saturated. Secondly, there are chances of increased microbial growth and activity in the cooling tower. This adversely affects the insulation.

What Is Overuse of Blowdown?

Essentially, blowdown comes in handy to prevent overcycling of dissolved solids, as this would lead to deposition in the cooling tower. If you overuse blowdown, in any case, the conductivity of your makeup water will be close to the water in your cooling tower because you dump lots of water into the drain. In short, overusing blowdown makes you waste a lot of water. Secondly, you will also be shouldering high sewage costs because of the high volumes of water going down the drain.

Blowdown is the secret to running your cooling tower efficiently or incurring high operational costs. You should keep an eye on the conductivity controller for optimal management of blowdown.