Equipment Isolation

What is equipment isolation and how does it affect you? Equipment Isolation is the ability to valve off, or otherwise, isolate a single component from your building’s condenser water, chilled water, glycol or other building wide loop. 

 

Proper equipment isolation affects you by allowing for the disassembly, repair or removal of Boilers, Chillers, Heat Pumps, Fan Coil units, CRAC units and other water source equipment without draining the entire system loop. Draining an entire system is expensive, by virtue of it being time consuming and can have adverse affects on the operation of equipment that is operating properly and is in no need of maintenance or repairs. An example of this is when multiple pieces of equipment on the same water loop have to be shutdown due to repairs needed on one piece of equipment. Although there is nothing wrong with the other equipment, because they share the loop with equipment that can’t be isolated, they too must be shut down.

 

Draining and then re-filling building systems also sets up a unique set of problems that can be difficult to overcome. The introduction of air into any loop may cause you to have to vent the system multiple times to ensure that components are not air bound. Draining, refilling and venting glycol systems can also be an expensive proposition due to the high cost of the medium and the losses inherent in the transfer process.

 

In a perfect world, every piece of critical equipment would be installed with proper isolation. However, today’s value conscious design techniques often do not call for the up front installation of isolation valves. When to do it then? While we would never recommend shutting down a building loop solely to install isolation valves, retrofitting these valves during component repair/replacement or at other times when the system is down makes perfect sense.

 

Judicious installation of system isolation valves, while a marginal add to already costly repairs, may effectively reduce costly system wide repairs in the future by isolating those repairs to a single component in the future. This will often lead to reduced or even eliminated downtime for multiple pieces of your HVAC equipment.