Chilled water is an efficient cooling mode for many processes for mission-critical applications. However, even the most sophisticated chillers are mechanical in nature, and even with stringent preventive maintenance plans in place, parts will fail over time.

Knowing what happens to the process when the chiller is down is an important design consideration. Ask these questions about your process:

• How critical is the chiller to the process?
• What other fail-safe mechanisms are built into the process?
• Is building chilled water or domestic water available at the site that can be used as a backup?
• Is the process so critical that chiller downtime will cost the site enough to justify a redundant chiller or special controls, features, analytics and alarms?

The answers to these questions will help you decide how to handle mission-critical chillers.