Chiller Selection

Overview

Picking a chiller by tonnage alone is the most common sizing mistake we see. Buyers frequently size off the horsepower of the machine being cooled, the clamp tonnage of a press, or whatever nameplate was on the last unit that failed - none of which is the actual heat load the new chiller has to remove. The right unit comes from a small set of process numbers, gathered once and applied consistently, not from matching the size of nearby equipment.

Those numbers are the heat load in tons or BTU/hr, the required leaving fluid temperature, the ambient design condition for air-cooled units, the flow rate and available pump head, and whether the loop needs glycol. Get those five right and a standard Advantage portable, central or glycol chiller drops out of the selection almost automatically - there's rarely a need to go custom. Get any one of them wrong, particularly the leaving fluid temperature, and a chiller that looks correctly sized on paper falls short on the plant floor, because a chiller's nameplate tonnage is typically rated at a moderate temperature and delivers meaningfully less capacity at a colder setpoint.

The three guides below cover the decisions that follow from those numbers: the step-by-step selection process if this is your first time sizing a chiller, whether a portable or central configuration fits your plant better, and whether air-cooled or water-cooled condensing makes more sense for the mechanical space you have. Between them, they cover the configuration questions that come up on nearly every quote request we field.