fazrul03 (and binbin93)
To start off you both need to look at your coolers and the type of environment they are in. My experience, because of my line of work, generally involves room coolers that range from about a minimum of 27 cubic feet (i.e, about 3 feet in each direction) to about 125 cubic feet. They are indoors in a generally clean environment with a plant cooling water running through the tubes. The plant cooling water, depending on the plant location, can be clean soft water, heavily sedimented (silt, sand, clams, mussels, and -- one very smelly time -- ground up fish)water, or hard water with a lot of minerals that can precipitate out over time.
You may have a cooler that has a lot of particles or sediment in the air -- if the cooler is outdoors, or if the particular area has a lot of dust or other particles in it. The water that is in your cooler could be soft, silty or hard. The method to clean the cooler has to depend on what the problem is.
If you have an air cooler that is susceptible to air side fouling then you can clean the air side by providing a flow of clean air in the opposite direction from normal. This will remove particles that have settled on the cooler. As I stated, this is really only needed if the cooler is in an area where there are a lot of particulates in the normal air (such as this one person who posted several years ago that had an outdoor air cooler that was picking up sand.) If your cooler is inside, you can do it, but it will probably not result in much better performance.
If your cooler is dirty on the water side, then you need to decide why it is dirty (which usually requires opening up the water box so you can look in the tubes.) If it's silt or sand -- or even fish -- you can probably remove the blockage by flushing with a high pressure hose. If it's clams or mussels, you'll probably need to kill them off with a biocide and then flush. If it's mineral deposits (I believe fazrul03 mentioned calcium carbonate), you'll need to use a chemical to get the deposits back into solution and then flushed out of the system. I have seen places where the "chemical" was nothing more than several gallons of off-the-shelf vinegar flushed through the cooler a couple times followed by a clean water flush.
The important thing is to figure out as much as possible what's causing the fouling in your cooler before you take it out of service. Take care of your biggest problem areas -- coolers with calcium carbonate deposits are definitely going to be underperforming. Getting those deposits removed will do you far more good than cleaning the air side.
My two cents ...
Patricia Lougheed
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