Good day everyone! Zak here from a very hot and sunny Cape Town! I was sent recently to do a survey on a mall's AC... all of it. Over 50 stores, both a long line of shops with split units as well as a Chilled Water system.
It was a lot of work and there are a lot of equipment installed in this mall.
It was a bit funny when I found the sign above: DO NOT SWITCH ON, YOU WILL DYE.
What they fail to mention is which Colour! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
This is down in the Chiller plant. Both Condenser Pumps and Chilled Water pumps are in view here. Quite a bit of work needs to get done here...
All of the water cooled units look like this. Drainpans rusted and a lot of them not flowing well. You can bet that the coils in here have quite a lot of corrosion on them as well!
The view is nice though! On the roof you look directly into Table Mountain. On the left the Cooling Towers still look good. We installed them not too long ago and their condition is still great.
Again, inside a unit. Rusted pulleys and dirty coils.
Some of the DX units are also starting to look worse for wear. Not all of them, but I can bet you that the above unit does not work well!
As much as possible, you want your Chilled Water piping insulated and vapour sealed. Leaving this open like this exposes hundred of meters of piping to vapour sweat and ultimately, corrosion!
Opening up the insulation around the mall revealed a lot of the above. Rusted piping.
It seems that there had been a leaking pipe at some stage and that it had filled up the insulation all over the place, causing corrosion.
I took over 500 photos of this survey and then everything needed to be captured into data. Over 70 tabs on a spreadsheet with engineering calculations.
The suggestion is going to be to replace the old Chilled Water units and all the Split refrigerant units with water cooled Hydronic Cassettes.
We shall see if we get the job! Here's hoping!
Thank you for reading!
Cheers!
@zakludick
