Water Savings

Water conservation is a high priority in designing and operating water-cooled equipment and plays an important role in USGBC’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification and other sustainability programs. LEED assigns credit points to reduce water usage. 

Data centers are a lynchpin of our modern economy. Server rooms power small- to medium-sized businesses, enterprise data centers support major corporations and server farms host cloud computing services. Keeping up with the explosive growth of digital content, big data, e-commerce and Internet traffic is making data centers one of the fastest growing consumers of electricity in developed countries.
As the population continues to grow in the United States, industrial water use will need to continue to fall to help offset the increases in public-supply water use.  Water-cooled compressed air systems provide an opportunity for sustainability managers to reduce associated cooling water consumption and costs. If switching to air-cooled air compressors is not possible, understanding the costs and the alternative types of liquid cooling systems is important.
The demand for advanced computing power rises year after year, but the more powerful the system, the more heat it generates. As data centers grow, they place higher demands on cooling equipment. Packing as much kilowatt and computer usage into as small a space as possible is key to reducing the cost and size of the facility. In doing this, data centers increase the power density of their systems, drawing more power, and generating more heat per unit area.
ElectroCell Systems, Inc., manufactures a system for commercial, industrial and institutional facilities that is applied to conventional water-cooled chilled water plants. The system significantly improves efficiency in water and energy use with paybacks in the 2.0 to 3.5 year range. The system is not a substitute for chemical treatment; rather it is a Condenser Water Efficiency system, engineered specifically and solely to increase water and energy efficiency by addressing the uniquely challenging demands that exist only in the condenser water loop.
The number of data centers in the United States continues to grow in response to the enormous amount of digital information stored and streamed. The massive computer power within these data centers generates heat, making efficient cooling a key building system requirement. Evaporative cooling towers are an integral part of many data center cooling systems.
Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson (NYSE: EMR) and the world’s leading provider of critical infrastructure for information and communications technology systems, today announced that the deployment of the Liebert® DSE pumped refrigerant economization system in North America has saved over 1.4 billion gallons of water in the last 36 months, compared to using data center chilled water cooling systems, and is expected to save an additional 1 billion gallons of water in 2016.
Long known as water hogs, resistance welders are widely used in factories that manufacture products made from sheet metal and wire. Sub-categories of the resistance welding process include spot welding, projection welding, seam welding, butt welding and flash welding. An adequate flow of cooling water is one of the most important variables of the resistance welding process, and the typical machine requires 2 to 3 GPM of water per cooling circuit.  
This major mill complex upgraded their compressed air system and thereby eliminated $500,000 in annual rental compressor costs, reduced annual cooling-water costs by $500,000, and reduced electrical energy costs by $135,000 per year.
There are six basic types of cooling systems that you can choose from to meet the cooling needs of your load. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses. This article was written to identify the different types of cooling systems and identify their strengths and weaknesses so that you can make an informed choice based on your needs.