Healthcare facilities are places of healing. Governed by both ethics and regulations, these facilities have to maintain certain high standards for cleanliness and minimal germ spread. This includes their HVAC systems and the cooling towers that support them.
Cooling Tower Challenges for Healthcare
Most cooling-related challenges are universal to all applications: cost, safety, longevity. The importance and impact of these challenges is what varies by use case.
Some of the top challenges for healthcare are:
- Legionella control in compliance with regulations
- Mission-critical performance requirements
- Resource efficiency
- Maintenance accessibility and safety
- Space is at a premium
Legionella control in compliance with regulations
Cooling towers are one of the top culprits behind Legionnaire’s disease outbreaks. Conventional open-basin towers foster the growth of biofilm, the ideal conditions for bacterial growth, due to their combination of water and sunlight. Hospitals must have a water management plan that aligns with ASHRAE 188, which includes maintaining certain chemical disinfectant levels and regular cleaning/flushing of water systems. This will often require ample maintenance time and chemical expenses.
Mission-critical performance requirements
Hospitals are 24/7/365 facilities. They run all year long, serving not just the comfort of hospital rooms and gathering spaces but also cooling critical spaces like operating rooms, intensive care units, laboratories and morgues. These are spaces that cannot suffer downtime. Conventional cooling towers are designed with one to three very large fans, and when one goes down, the tower goes down. And because these fans are large, heavy and top-mounted, repairs can take a few days or more to complete. Most healthcare facilities increase the total number of towers to achieve redundancy.
Resource efficiency
Cooling towers require substantial power, water and chemicals to run. In an always-on facility with a number of redundant towers and significant disinfection regulations to meet, even a small amount of waste per minute can rack up significant costs in a single day.
Maintenance accessibility and safety
Based on their location and design, cooling tower maintenance can carry a high risk of injury. Tall towers must be scaled and heavy parts handled, often from a rooftop. Hospital maintenance staff also need the training and time to correctly care for the facility’s cooling towers in compliance with regulations.
Space is at a premium
Many conventional cooling towers are roof-mounted, and most designs need significant free-board clearance (12 to 18 feet) to maintain sufficient airflow. A single tower requires a large footprint in a space already in high demand from helipads or other essential rooftop infrastructure.
How Tower Tech Exceeds Expectations for Healthcare
- Mission-critical performance requirements
- Maintenance accessibility and safety
- Space is at a premium
Tower Tech modular cooling towers have an industry-best total cost of ownership and address the challenges that healthcare buildings face.
Tower Tech towers are made of inherently corrosion-resistant composite material, which is less hospitable to biofilm growth, and the lack of side louvers reduces or even eliminates the penetration of sunlight into the tower. The design also has better resource efficiency, all of which allows for excellent Legionella control in compliance with regulations. Tower Tech towers are even available in a closed loop design for even greater purity.
Tower Tech towers turned the cooling tower industry literally upside-down: its bottom-mounted fans and lack of louvers help Tower Tech maximize limited space and deliver maintenance accessibility and safety. The towers are designed with up to ten much smaller fans, which are significantly lighter than conventional fans. Mounted on the bottom, they’re also much more safely accessible. The additional fans place redundancy within a single tower, helping healthcare facilities meet mission-critical performance requirements.
In the healthcare industry, cooling tower mistakes can actually mean life or death. Tower Tech has the design needed to help these essential service buildings protect their mission of healing.
