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Reducing cooling system costs

05 April 2024

Refrigeration accounts for a high proportion of overall site energy costs, most notably cooling for food and beverage processes. ICS Cool offers some tips to reduce costs in process cooling systems.

Keep your chilled system well maintained: Equipment that is improperly maintained can fail to provide the required level of efficiency, shortening its lifespan and increasing operating costs. Planned preventative maintenance, carried out effectively by qualified engineers, will help ensure that the equipment is in optimal shape, minimising energy consumption and limiting downtime.

The frequency of maintenance should align with how often the equipment is used and how critical it is to operations. The expense of replacing parts that could have delivered a higher lifetime value, the time it takes to wait for the part and the subsequent multiple engineer call-outs, plus the cost to your business from downtime will far outweigh the cost of a preventative maintenance plan.

Carry out water quality checks and treatment: Efficiency, longevity, and safe operation of closed-circuit process chillers is critical and should be top of mind for those who are responsible for them.

Water treatment is a fundamental part of a chiller’s operation and maintenance ensuring efficient and reliable operation. A chilled system water needs to be treated with the correct dose of inhibited glycol to protect from freezing,
bacteria build-up and corrosion.

Taking samples of the system water as part of a planned preventative maintenance program and carrying out pH tests will help determine the quality. If the water samples fall outside of the recommended pH level, a water treatment program should be followed to correct the problem.

Should the system show signs of increased suspended solids, corrosion, or other debris, several devices can be used to remove such contamination. These include strainers, filters, magnetic filters, dirt separators, combined air and dirt separators as well as commonly found side stream filtration.

Upgrade the chiller to a high-efficiency and high-performance unit: The average lifespan of a chiller is dependent on how heavily it is used and how well it is maintained.

Manufacturing process chillers, for example, tend to be used much more heavily than chillers for comfort purposes.


As a guiding principle, if your chiller for process cooling is 8-10 years+, it is worth considering upgrading to the latest high-performance technologies 

Relocate your chiller plant externally and use a free cooling coil: As autumn and winter approach and the ambient temperature drops, preparing to capitalise on free cooling could save up to 70% on energy costs.

As soon as the ambient temperature drops 1°C below the desired operating temperature, partial free cooling can be used to cool the process. Free cooling is a solution that will reduce mechanical energy consumption, lower the carbon footprint, reduce load on mechanical parts and therefore reduce maintenance cost and extend life of your cooling equipment.

Replace cooling towers: Cooling towers are expensive to run, maintain and waste a lot of water. Put into monetary terms, for every £39k spent running a cooling tower, you would expect to spend £10k running an adiabatic cooler – providing a saving of around 75%. Providing savings on water usage, they require significantly less maintenance and operational costs and no ongoing chemical treatment or registration with local authorities, while operating at optimal efficiency in high ambient temperatures. For every 70 buckets of water used by a cooling tower, you would expect to use just one with an adiabatic cooler – saving 93% on water costs.


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