Water Cooled Condensing Units for Market Case Refrigeration

[ME27272727]

Anyone have anything to say about water cooled vs air cooled condensing units for market refrigeration cases? Small existing market, has all condensing units located in basement with insufficient ventilation, and no easy way to get air in there and space overheats. Investigating whether or not its worth retrofitting existing compressors with water cooled condensers, or perhaps replacing all of them with water cooled condensing units. I see evaporative cooling used a lot for these types of water cooled units, but any reason a dry cooler wouldn't work up in the north east? I know the approach between condenser, glycol, and dry cooler may start to get squeezed without evaporative cooling. Curious to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks.

 

[LittleInch]

But how do you intend to cool the water?

Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.

 

[ME27272727]

The dry cooler. Maybe the terminology is throwing you off. Dry cooler just being an air to water heat exchanger with fan on roof (basically a big car radiator), no evaporative cooling. So we are limited to ambient dry bulb temp rather than the wet bulb temp we can get with evaporative cooling. Condensing temps are typically 110-115 degF, design dry bulb 95 degF. Would probably need a big heat exchanger to get that approach temp down to make this work. Wondering if anyone has experience with a setup like this. Not sure if the economics are there for this solution.

 

[dbill74]

LI's point is that it won't matter if you use water cooled refrigeration cases if the heat is still being dumped into the basement. And he's right, if you can't get air circulating through the basement it doesn't matter what type of system you use, you will have problems.

If there is no way to get more air through the basement, then you need to move equipment out of the basement.

 

[LittleInch]

If you can get a dry cooler on the roof why not just shift the condensors up there?? A water chilled system is just adding another pumped system with a different additional set of heat exchangers.

Or are you just trying to cool the basement with a water cooled system?

I would just look closely as to whether you can just relocate the existing fluid to air heat exchangers.

Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.