@mjmixoncoolairhouston-com

No dumb questions, that’s what this group is all about.

It’s pretty typical in process that a chiller trips out, and the crew panics and pushes buttons until it works, then never tell anyone (including their own management).

No one can remember everything. Moving forward it is important to document everything in a way that you could retrace your steps years back if you needed to. This would eliminate any back and forth, and get the customer on your side. Most OEM’s and serious companies expect this.

So step 1 is document everything, photos are usually the fastest, then save them all so you can retrace your steps when your not on site.

We can work through it with you, and get to the bottom of it, but we need some more information.

Can you Let us know when you have done the following:

1. Get photos of Everything:

all of the settings menus from the chiller, system photos, so we can ask questions, and you have the information we ask for.

2. verify all of the pressure transducers and temp sensors are reading correctly on the chiller, and the system if using another reference?

3. Verify the flow switch is calibrated.

4. where your located, is there any time throughout the year where the outdoor temp is dropping below 40 degrees?

Gather all this info, and reply below, and we will help get you squared away.

There is a lot going on here.

What temperatures are you Chilling to ?

If the strainers are blocking up, and causing you to loose flow, why isn’t the flow switch taking out the Chiller? Has it been tested?

I have used PD switches across stainers so that in the event that the strainers start to block up, the PD switch takes out the Chiller before the flow switch will.

This is a food factory so why can they not use Propylene Glycol (food grade) in the chilled water?

Have you confirmed actual flow rates?

Without a tank, is the volume enough in the system?

The only way you will dry out the system is purge with nitro and puling the vacuum. But if it is bad, be prepared to loose a vacuum pump or two.

You need to keep any eye on the Vac pump oil and as soon as it goes milky colour, change it out.

I am going to get the info from all the settings tomorrow morning and recheck the settings and make sure they are at factory settings. To the best of my knowledge at this time all the transducers are reading correctly. It is not using a separate reference. We are in Houston, so yes sometimes it does get below 40.
That is part of the problem, there are times we have found the temp turned down to 40 and below and the settings changed to Celsius, not to be an an ass, we are dumb white guys, we don’t know how to read Celsius, lol. They can use glycol, they have it in another chiller, but they never have in this chiller loop and again have not listened to my advice about treating the water. I have not confirmed flow rates other than the pressure gauges on the piping.
I will say we have never really focused on the chiller loop itself because its separate from the chiller and they always took care of it on their own, they never asked us to mess with it. Which is a mistake on my part.
As far the loop volume, this is something I think I have overlooked. The original loop had 2-60ton chillers and I was always told this was only for the mixer jackets. They only wanted to replace 1 of them, I never thought anything of it. Recently they finally told me that this chiller loop used to cool the mixers AND the cooling rooms that the product went through when it came out of the oven before it was packaged. Which means they were running it at pretty low temp and it had to have glycol in it at one point!!! They now use a large DX system to cool those rooms. The loop volume may very well be part of the problem. He recently mentioned that it had a tank at one point, I assumed he meant the expansion tank, I think I assumed wrong…
We have gone through gallons of vac oil, I lost track and I think we burned up a pump last time. Just was not sure if there was some magic machine that we didn’t know about.