Watch the fan exhaust. A healthy winter plume is wispy and dissipates quickly. A dangerous plume is thick, heavy, and drifts horizontally without rising. This indicates the water is entering the cold air basin at a temperature too low to melt the ice forming upstream.
Most operators assume that cold weather is a blessing for cooling. After all, if it’s freezing outside, the tower doesn’t have to work as hard to shed heat, right? This is the single most dangerous misconception in wet cooling tower management. cooling tower handbook
When ice forms, panic leads to silence. Silence leads to stagnation. Stagnation leads to a tower that looks less like a heat exchanger and more like a frozen waterfall. A frozen cooling tower cannot be thawed with steam hoses; it must be rebuilt in April. Watch the fan exhaust
Here it is, the line you should memorize and stencil onto the tower control panel: This indicates the water is entering the cold