The first thing we had selected when we were prompted was “1 Chiller at ARI” and in order to get to that, we just go to “create plants.” Here we have our water-cooled chiller. That’s the name of it. It’s our one chiller at ARI. By default, we’ve got one boiler as well. If we want to refine this equipment, which we do in this case, we go to our cooling equipment tab.

I said that we have 1,000 ton peak, and right here the cooling capacity is blank. We know, in fact, that we’re comparing a 1,200-ton chiller to two 600-ton chillers. We don’t want this to be blank, because if this is blank, it will fill in with the peak design cooling capacity that we saw on the Excel chart, which is 1,000 tons. We want this to be 1,200 tons. That may not sound that important, but for you chiller gurus, you know that it’s very important because the way that your chiller unloads will impact its efficiency number. It defaulted to a three-stage centrifugal chiller. Again, that might not mean a lot right now, but that’s very important as well.
There’s also the cooling tower, which has its own set of specific details. We’re going to keep things simple. We have our pumps to be concerned about; we have our primary pump and our condenser pump. If we had more than one chiller, we could also go to plant control and we could have a secondary distribution pump as well.