Good Glycol Advice

Here is som great feedback I received from yesterday’s article. I agree with all of these and wanted to share them with you. Cheers, Tom

Hi, Tom

I think this is certainly helpful for a lot of people and, as before, I congratulate you on the free content you are offering to others.

Having set up a few glycol setups myself - and certainly learning from my mistakes along the way - I would offer a couple of points that may also be helpful for those out there setting up their first one:

Agreeing that is super important to monitor pressure to not burst a weld on a jacket, I think the easiest way to avoid this is to follow industry standard practice and move the solenoid to the inlet rather than the tank's outlet: you burst the weld because you are letting each single tank take the full brunt (if you wouldn't install a pressure regulator) of the chiller's pump when they are not in use.

By moving it to the tank inlet, the tank jacket is much less exposed to higher pressures, because glycol is then allowed to go through the jacket and returning to the chiller. Or see no pressure at all if the tank isn't cooling.

And then you move your already very aptly suggested pressure regulator to the end of the inlet line, creating the separation between inlet branch at 15psi from an unpressurized, free flow return branch.

This allows you also to have a much more reliable guarantee that the whole inlet branch is at 15 psi, even if you have more than one tank cooling, which helps with the tank farthest from the chiller not having less efficient cooling as the first (granted, this is seldom an issue with only 2 or 3 tanks).

This would be the same exact cost and labour as your suggestion with (at least in my perspective) a better outcome.

Cheers,

Paulo