Water is required for energy efficient evaporative cooling commonly used in HVAC, refrigeration, and industrial process cooling systems. Water demand for these cooling systems can be significant. As the global water crisis grows, reducing water usage in these systems becomes more and more important. EVAPCO’s industry’s leading dry and adiabatic product lines offer significant water savings, but how can end users save water when evaporative cooling solutions are required or desired? 

Water usage in [evaporative cooled systems] comes from two main sources: evaporation and blowdown. Evaporation is dictated by heat load and ambient conditions, neither of which can be reasonably changed.

Total water use and efficiency in an evaporative unit can be controlled by increasing, or decreasing, the system’s “cycles of concentration” (COC). The figure below shows the relationship between blowdown and COC, the lower the COC, the higher the blowdown and greater the water consumption.

Cycles of concentration is the concentration ratio of dissolved ions in the recirculated water compared to the same dissolved ions in the makeup water. For example, if your recirculating water contains 250ppm of Chlorides and the makeup water contains 50 ppm of Chlorides, your system is operating at 5 COC. Every evaporative cooling system has a maximum safe operating cycles of concentration based on the materials of construction and makeup water quality. To increase water efficiency beyond this maximum level, thus saving water, pretreatment technology can be applied. The most common pre-treatment approaches in the industry are water softeners and reverse osmosis (RO), which can both come with application risks. EVAPCO® developed Water Saver ® as an eco-friendly, pretreatment system to improve water efficiency in evaporative cooling equipment. 

Water Saver® utilizes Capacitive Deionization (CDI) technology to remove charged ions from a water supply. This technology reduces the dissolved ion concentration from the makeup supply, thus lowering the makeup water conductivity allowing your recirculating water supply to operate at higher COC. In addition to reducing your overall water usage, this technology can significantly reduce treatment chemical use rates. 

To learn more about your local water quality, optimizing system efficiencies and if Water Saver ® may contribute to significant water saving at your project, please contact your local EVAPCO representative or [email protected].