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DOTmed Industry Sector Report: Medical Chiller Sales & Service

by Jean B. Grillo, Reporter | March 26, 2008
Special low temp
process chiller used
for bio diesel production.
This article is from in the February 2008 issue of DOTmed Business News. A list of registered users that provide sales & service can be found at the end.

The bottom line about medical chillers is succinct: they are indispensable equipment that if not in good working order can grind any hospital's operations to an abrupt stop.

Should one of these sometimes hefty (as much as 90 tons) cooling systems go awry, multimillion dollar hospital equipment--- MRIs, CT Scans, X-rays, Operating Room Air Conditioners----stops dead in its tracks.

And the dominoes would continue to fall: diagnostic and therapeutic operations stop, patients' health is perhaps imperiled and a hospital, clinic or center sees multiple revenue streams shut down until repairs are completed.
or new or refurbished equipment installed.

So when problems unexpectedly beset chillers, most often as a result of poor maintenance, the medical institution can go into what Martin King, president of Legacy Chiller Systems, Placerville, CA, describes as "mission critical" mode.

And the folly of allowing such a situation to occur, say chiller manufacturers and specialists, is that 95 percent of all problems could be avoided, provided facilities adhere to a regularly scheduled preventive maintenance program.

"It's so easy to catch the problems before they occur," says Jerry Hoover, HVAC Service Solutions, Inc., Dallas, PA, a chiller specialist serving a wide variety of institutions in the Northeast. Hoover, who strongly advocates quarterly service calls, also says that whatever service and maintenance company hired,
"make sure they are familiar with the equipment."

Chillers are indispensable
to any hospital's operations



Even with the best maintenance, however, chillers sometimes fail, though usually it's not mechanical failure. More often than not, refrigerants run low, filters get clogged, dust and dirt builds up. But such small factors are not always obvious to the medical equipment engineer at a facility, so it becomes just another important reason to call in a professional chiller service company.

OEMs tend to favor authorized service operations as well. Most back the practice of having factory trained mechanics and technicians primarily service one brand and its considerable range of products