How long should it take to cool 5000-10000 litres?

I heard a story earlier this year about a chiller salesman connecting his chiller to a 20 litre bucket to show a client how quickly it cooled the water.

I had a good laugh, but it does raise the question - how quickly should a chiller be able to cool a body of water?

The thing with commercial chillers - look at them like a truck and trailer as opposed to a race car.

A truck is designed to pull a whole lot of weight up to speed, but then be able to keep it there for long periods of time.

Commercial chillers are the same.

The way they make the pool cold is by removing all of the heat from the water.

And to cool the water down from ambient temp to below ten degrees, there is a whole lot of heat that needs to be removed.

This takes time.

Sticking with the truck analogy, imagine a truck trying to pull a trailer with nothing on it.

It'll get going pretty quickly.

This is the equivalent of 500-1000 litre pools.

Smaller body of water, less heat, can do it faster.

But then imagine the truck trying to get up to speed towing 60 tonnes, it's going to work pretty hard.

You need something with a lot of horsepower.

If you had a truck with not quite enough power, it might not be able to get it to 100km/h, maybe 80 and then struggle to keep it there.

Again, chillers are the same.

Bigger load (heat load in this case) means it takes longer to get down to temp.

Have a look at these two examples.

Both at the same venue, same chiller, just different bodies of water.

The first is 2000 litres, they hadn't connected three of the other ice baths to the system yet.

You can see it pulls to 3 degrees in about 8 hours and cycles on and off.

This next one is 5000-6000 litres.

The whole system was turned off, new tubs connected, everything checked and then turned back on again.

It took roughly 20 hours to bring the temp down to three degrees.

Then it cycled on and off for efficiency as it's designed to do.

So when assessing a commercial chiller, it's less about how fast it brings the pool down to temp, it's more about IF it can bring it down to temp.

And more importantly, if it can keep it there when swimmers are hopping in and out.