Cooling towers, chillers, campus and people — a data centre is a water plant as much as a power plant. We bring our cooling tower, RO and STP engineering to the water side of data centres: make-up treatment, condenser water chemistry, blowdown recovery, STP-to-cooling reuse and WUE reporting — designed to the same N+1 philosophy as the cooling it protects.
Every megawatt of IT load becomes a megawatt of heat, and in India most of that heat leaves the building through evaporative cooling towers. A 10 MW facility at a Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) of 1.8 L/kWh evaporates and blows down about 430 m³ of water every day — in Navi Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai or Noida, where the same water is contested by townships and industry, that is a licence-to-operate issue, not a utility bill.
Water quality is the other half. Condenser water that scales, corrodes or grows biofilm raises chiller approach temperature, pushes PUE up and, in the worst case, takes a chiller out of service. Legionella in a cooling tower is a public-health event. So the water plant behind a data centre has to do three things at once: use as little fresh water as possible, keep the condenser loop clean 24×7, and never become the single point of failure. That is the brief we design to — the same equipment and chemistry we apply in pharma, chemical and power plants, engineered for a facility that cannot stop.
Nine elements, designed as one water balance. Most sites have three or four of them; the savings sit in the ones that are missing.
5–100 m³/h, duplex or N+1 trains, dual-source intake, automatic changeover.
Multi-pump skids with day tanks, flow-proportional and ORP/pH control, BMS interface.
Automatic backwash multimedia or screen filters, 10–500 m³/h.
60–80 % recovery of cooling tower blowdown; reject to ETP or ZLD.
50–500 KLD MBBR/MBR with tertiary polishing to cooling make-up quality.
Collection, first-flush, filtration, storage and blending into make-up.
Flow meters on every stream, monthly water balance, WUE and PUE-linked reporting.
Resident or visiting chemists, Legionella documentation, chemical supply with SLA.
| Item | Typical | With KEE water system |
|---|---|---|
| WUE (L/kWh IT) | 1.8–2.5 | 1.0–1.3 |
| Cycles of concentration | 3–4 (raw make-up) | 8–12 (RO/soft make-up) |
| Blowdown as % of make-up | 25–35 % | 8–12 %, of which 60–80 % recovered |
| Cooling make-up from STP reuse | 0 % | 20–40 % |
| Fresh-water demand, 10 MW site | ~430 m³/day | ~230–280 m³/day |
| Condenser approach temperature drift | +1 to +3 °C/yr (scaling) | held within design |
Indicative ranges for Indian evaporative-cooled sites, drawn from published operator data and standard cooling-tower water balances; actual values depend on climate, make-up quality and cooling design. Run your own numbers in our cooling tower water balance calculator.
New builds: we can work with the MEP consultant and contractor from basis-of-design — make-up quality, water balance, cycles target, reuse loop, redundancy philosophy — and deliver the water package as an integrated scope: design, skids, chemicals, commissioning, documentation for Uptime/LEED submissions.
Operating sites: we offer a two-week water audit (make-up analysis, system volumes, current cycles, chemical spend, blowdown route) followed by a costed plan — usually the fastest WUE improvement available to a facility team, with no change to the chiller plant.
O&M: monthly or resident service with online monitoring, Legionella documentation, chemical delivery on SLA and a WUE report the sustainability team can publish.
A data centre cooled with evaporative cooling towers typically uses 1.5–2.5 litres of water per kWh of IT load (WUE). A 10 MW facility at WUE 1.8 L/kWh consumes about 430 m³/day of make-up water — roughly the demand of a 3,000-person township. Air-cooled or closed-loop sites use far less but pay in electricity (PUE).
Water Usage Effectiveness = annual site water use (litres) ÷ annual IT energy (kWh). It is reduced by running cooling towers at higher cycles of concentration with softened or RO make-up, recovering blowdown through RO, reusing treated sewage from the campus STP as make-up, harvesting rainwater and condensate, and using adiabatic or free cooling when ambient conditions allow. A well-run Indian site can move from ~2.0 to ~1.2 L/kWh.
Yes — this is the most valuable reuse loop in a data centre. STP effluent after tertiary filtration, UF and RO meets cooling make-up quality (low hardness, silica, ammonia and phosphate) and typically covers 20–40 % of cooling make-up. We design the STP–UF–RO train, the storage and the quality interlocks so off-spec water can never reach the condenser loop.
Duplicated dosing pumps, filters and RO trains, dual make-up sources with automatic changeover, buffer storage sized for the longest credible supply interruption, online conductivity/ORP/pH with alarms to the BMS, and chemical stock held for 30–60 days on site. The treatment plant is designed to the same availability philosophy as the chillers it protects.
Both. We design the water systems for new builds with the MEP consultant or contractor, supply and commission the skids, and run them under an O&M contract with monthly water reports, Legionella documentation and WUE tracking for the sustainability team.
Direct-to-chip and immersion cooling move heat into a closed technology-cooling loop, but that heat still reaches the atmosphere through a cooling tower, dry cooler or hybrid unit. Closed loops need demineralised fill water, corrosion-inhibitor and glycol management and side-stream filtration; the heat-rejection side needs the same make-up, blowdown and biocide programme as any evaporative system.
Send the IT load, cooling type, make-up water source and analysis — we reply with a water balance, WUE estimate and treatment scheme within one working day.