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  1. #1
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    Replacement Chiller Barrel Selection



    So, it's air conditioning season again. Greetings from non-heatpump central where I beat on boilers all winter. And thanks to global warming we have had no AC demand here in the Northeast US yet, even though it is almost mid-June. So, I'm drawing a breath and trying to bring back the Trane 15 ton dual circuit chiller that i limped through last season with your help.

    Got the TXVs fixed last year (haven't put silicon on top of the new one as someone recommend to prevent corrosion damage but that is high on my list at the moment).

    But after various chemical flushes and attempting to use the 2" npt tappings as access to physically spray off the coil, I despair of getting the heat, i.e. cold, transfer back where it belongs. My water deltas are in the neighborhood of 5 deg. and if I look back at the threads from last year when I was diagnosing, two to three times that would be the target.

    I had presumed that the refrigeration tubes return upon themselves in to the end of the barrel with tube exits and that I could pull off the blank end of the barrel for better access to use a pressure washer and or physical sludge removal. However, I find that this barrel, as is apparently common according to design engineer at Standard Refrigeration, has refrigeration terminations even in the blank end. So when I had started to crack the bolts before I knew this, I heard that characteristic hiss and tightened 'em right back up, didn't loose the frigerant and went for plan B, i.e.,
    find a replacement chiller barrel and treat it more kindly, i.e. condition the water and flush clean it annually.

    So this is a Trane CGACC157HBN 2222K
    with two 7.5 ton circuits. I guessed and was correct that the theoretical Standard Refrig replacement is a TX15-2. It is about 6" in diameter and 36" long.

    But the OEM chiller barrel is about 10" in diameter and 60" long.

    So I'm guessing that the OEM barrel is just mega-oversized and the TXV takes care of the superheat along with dropping out fans based on ambient temperature so as not to have excessive subcooling.

    Other observations on this pretty significant difference? Should I overkill in capacity? Could the much larger barrel have less tubing in it and be equivalent capacity?

    Are there other materials or designs than the standard barrel that I could consider? It just seems like a really bad idea to me to have a big iron cylinder filled with water and the refrigeration circuit is not a closed loop of copper but opens off the end. A design in which you could open the barrel, pull out the refrig coil and clean it and clean the barrel, and/or replace the coil if needed seems like a better approach. Instead the barrel has to be built like a brick s%*thouse when the water it's holding is only going to be at maybe 30 to 40 psi.

    Are there alternative heatexchangers I could consider that are either 'throw away' but cheaper, i.e. soldered/welded units that can't be disassembled, or are there other designs that offer more discrete maintenance of the water and refrigeration circuits? Are there ones of alternative materials that could be less prone to corrosion?

    Thanks, and hope you won't think the less of me for my annual winter hiatus, or my longwinded questions.

    Brian
    Last edited by archibaldtuttle; 09-06-2009 at 08:12 PM. Reason: emphasis



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