Cooling tower manufacturers are increasingly turning out modular designs and many businesses have adopted modular cooling towers to meet their cooling needs. But what is a modular tower, and why might they be the right option for you?
What Is a Modular Cooling Tower?
Ordinary, non-modular cooling towers are assembled at the factory and then shipped and installed in a single piece. This is a convenient system for many businesses, particularly smaller ones, but it has a few downsides that modular designs get around.
The alternative to a factory-assembled cooling tower is a field-erected cooling tower.
These cooling towers are shipped in several pieces and then set up once those pieces reach where they need to go. This has obvious advantages for shipping in particular. For bigger cooling towers, shipping the tower all in one piece can be very difficult. On the other hand, it makes the tower more of an effort to set up.
Modular cooling towers go a step further. In many modular designs, each separate piece can function independently as a complete cooling tower. These pieces can be used in groups to provide extra cooling capacity. This makes it quite easy to scale the complete cooling tower to your business. If you have relatively low cooling needs, you can just use a single module, but you can also use a large number of them together if you need greater cooling capacity.
What Are The Advantages Of Modular Cooling Towers?
Shipping a few smaller components is often easier than shipping one large one, especially if the large tower won’t fit on a truck. If you require a large cooling tower, it may need special equipment to ship and may not be transportable on regular roads. This is why preassembled cooling towers tend not to come with capacities greater than about 1400 tons. Larger towers are just too impractical to transport in one piece. Modular towers may even be completely assembled at the factory, minimizing the amount of work to do on-site.
Scalability is a huge advantage for modular cooling towers. If each cell is a complete cooling tower by itself, it becomes very easy to choose the right capacity for your business. If you expand your business and need greater cooling capacity, you can just add extra cells.
Some businesses need more cooling capacity than they can realistically get from a single preassembled cooling tower. Power plants and large factories will almost certainly need more capacity than 1400 tons. If you will be choosing multiple cooling towers either way, it often makes sense to go modular.
Cleaning Modular Cooling Towers
Cooling tower cleaning and maintenance can take a bit longer for many smaller cooling towers than it can for one larger one if each module has to be accessed separately.
Many manufacturers design modular cooling towers specifically for ease of maintenance, so the extra time investment doesn’t have to be large.
The same cooling tower cleaning equipment and cooling tower cleaning methods that you would use for a non-modular tower can still be used. Cooling tower cleaning products are also the same for modular and non-modular towers.
The frequency of cleaning also doesn’t need to change. Like factory assembled cooling towers, modular towers should be cleaned at least twice a year.
Contact Pinnacle Cooling Tower Service for a free inspection and estimate.
Contact us
To learn more about cooling tower maintenance or to find out how we can help when it comes to routine cooling tower service and maintenance, contact Pinnacle Cooling Tower Service today at 732-570-9392. Our primary goals are safety, service, and customer satisfaction.
