At Chardon, nothing is more important to us than our service. In this article, we’ll give you an inside look at what our typical service call looks like for treatment on your boiler, cooling tower, and closed-loop!
8:00-8:15 – Our service team’s days start early. We arrive at our first clients location around 8:00 am. Consistency is important to us, for the next 15 minutes, we’ll look over the last month’s results, sign in at the front desk, and locate your water systems.
8:15-8:25 – For the next 10 minutes, we’ll spend our time locating a safe and efficient workstation and looking for sample valves for your makeup water so that we can safely and quickly run our tests on your systems.
8:25-8:35 – After finding a suitable workstation and sample valves, we will start our testing. With makeup water, our tests usually include conductivity, calcium hardness, alkalinity, and chlorides.
8:35-8:50 – After makeup water, we will move to your cooling tower water. Cooling tower water tests consist of a series of tests to make sure your cooling tower is running efficiently. Cycles of concentration and mass balance will be used in conjunction with our other tests to ensure you are getting the best results possible out of your cooling tower.
8:50-9:05 – After testing your tower water, it’s time to test your closed loop. Although a closed-loop system isn’t nearly as susceptible to scaling as a cooling tower or boiler, we want to make sure we are watching for corrosion and microbiological growth. Keeping your closed-loop system pH in a non-corrosive range is crucial to keeping it efficient.
9:05-9:20 – Next, it’s on to your boiler. We will test your boiler for a variety of compounds. We want to make sure your boiler remains scale-free by limiting the concentration of scale-forming minerals.
9:20-9:35 – Once the water in your boiler has been tested, we’ll move on to the boiler feedwater. Feedwater needs to be tested for many reasons. The optimized temperature of your feedwater tank is crucial to making sure oxygen pitting doesn’t occur in your boiler. The oxygen that enters the extreme temperature of a boiler quickly comes out of solution and attacks boiler tubes.
9:35-9:50 – Next, we’ll check out the return lines. Corrosion in the condensate return system causes elevated iron levels and indicates that the carbonic acid is not being neutralized and the pH level of the condensate isn’t buffering into a safe range. Since most steam and condensate return systems are long and complex, it is important to check the pH at several points throughout the system.
9:50-10:15 – Lastly, we’ll spend the remainder of our time working on what we think is suitable to your specific needs. Whether it be pumping chemical into your system, blowing down your boiler, or adjusting the settings on your conductivity controller, our service technicians will ensure your boiler, cooling tower, or closed-loop is orderly and efficient.
After our service technicians are finished with their process, they will report all test results and changes to the onsite person of contact. It is important to us to keep you informed of how your system is operating so that you are able to take the action necessary to running a clean, scale, and corrosion-free water treatment plan.
Matt Welsh
Matt Welsh is the Vice President and Water Consultant at Chardon Labs. He helps consult a wide range of customers utilizing various methods of water treatment, from chemical to chemical-free approaches, large and small applications, and across a wide range of geographical influences. With 20 years of water treatment experience, including a wide range of troubleshooting and service in potable water and non-potable HVAC and industrial applications, he is an expert in water treatment chemistry for cooling towers, boilers, and closed-loop systems.