Make improvements now to be ready for summer

2nd January 2019

Rittal

Alex Lynn

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The temperatures may be feeling quite mild, but even if the thermometer hasn’t yet regularly dropped below zero, you’re probably no longer hearing the alarms on your cooling units. While this is likely to mean you’re spending less time maintaining overheating panels, it would be a mistake to forget about climate control.

By Karl Lycett, Rittal UK’s Product Manager for Climate Control

In fact, the opposite is true; this is actually the best time of year to turn your mind to your enclosures, carry out a climate review, and start to understand what changes or improvements need to be made.

Last summer, of course, things were very different. Fans and filters weren’t cutting it as the ambient temperature in the workplace was higher than you wanted inside your enclosures! Now that everything has settled down, it’s worth assessing any problem enclosures and making the necessary changes to ensure that this summer you are free to spend your time on tasks other than firefighting.

It’s important to remember that every degree above your set-point will be time removed from the life of your expensive equipment, including PLCs, variable speed drives and transformers. Collectively, this can easily have a replacement value that tops £100k, even in a relatively small setup. If you replace only two percent of that equipment each year because of burnt-out componentry, then the costs can quickly mount up and it’s an entirely unnecessary spend.

But it’s not just the cost of repair and replacement of the actual componentry. There are also the add-on operations costs caused by componentry breaking down and stopping the processes it controls. This lost output will continue for as long as it takes to repair the fault, and is bound to have consequences for your wider business, impacting productivity and efficiency, and thereby reducing profits.

Correct climate control is often overlooked during the installation of electronic equipment because the focus is all on the equipment, not on regulating the environment that it operates within.

This is where Rittal aims to help. With its RiAssure service, trained staff can visit and provide a free Cooling Review. This review is a short visual inspection of existing enclosures and cooling equipment; from this they can ascertain the next best step for your equipment and also provide ongoing, best practice, suggestions so that operations benefit from increased longevity, life and profit.