CHICAGO - When thunderstorms and high winds toppled a 2,000-ton, field-erected cooling tower, a plant's main cooling water supply was destroyed and production ground to a halt.
Plant management was immediately on the phone, contacting vendors for a quick, inexpensive solution to their escalating problems associated with halted production.

A new tower was ordered and it was learned that lead-time to erect the new tower in the field would be three months. Faced with insurmountable production losses, plant management decided it was imperative that they rent a tower in the interim.

Competitive rental companies were trying to convince company officials to use four 500 ton towers. All would have been unloaded from the truck at the plant management's expense. The installation was very involved and entailed connecting all four towers together with hose. There were four separate power lines required for each tower's fan motor. Plant management felt that time was the enemy, and that such an involved installation would not only be more expensive, but would result in still further production losses.

So, company officials selected NuTemp, Inc. because NuTemp's 2,000 ton tower is the most portable available. The tower arrives in one piece on a 52-foot flatbed trailer, and it amazingly does not require any rigging or a crane to be installed. The trailer simply rolls out from under the tower, its legs are positioned, and it is raises up from the ground in an accordion-like fashion. The tower also features a single power point electrical connection.

The tower, capable of being installed by three NuTemp employees in about 48 hours, was shipped immediately upon order from the plant. Once on site, technicians and plant personnel worked around the clock to restore cooling and production.

While the plant had arranged to lease the unit for the three months construction would take on the new cooling tower, management opted to keep the rental tower on stand by until the permanent tower was up and running.

NuTemp is an emergency response company on call- 24 hours a day, 365 days a year because cooling equipment does not usually break down at 8 a.m. on Monday morning.

There are myriad reasons why corporations elect to rent temporary cooling equipment. Chicago-based NuTemp Inc. knows this first hand, and the company has made it its business to know why commercial and industrial customers alike spend money on equipment that is necessary only on a short-term basis.

More often than not, the applications center around production losses outweighing the costs of a temporary cooling system. However, there are many scenarios in which rental equipment is a value-added consideration.

For example, quite a number of companies utilize a rental chiller for standby systems when processes become too critical to rely on one source to ensure production with no or little redundancy. Another common application occurs when a company's growth mandates that production increase quickly enough to keep up with an increased demand. During times such as these, quite often the only obstacle to achieving increased production is the limited amount of existing cooling capacity. Management will not always allow the time to purchase and install capital equipment, making rental cooling a realistic and attractive option.

In many industries, as in many regions of the country, rental equipment is a fact of life. The petrochemical industry in Texas, for example, and the entire Gulf Coast region is the ideal example of one which relies heavily on rental cooling. Rental equipment supports entire plants and refineries during outages to perform maintenance in plants that normally operate 24 hours a day 365 days of the year.

Often NuTemp rents chillers to customers who simply do not have the capital budgeted for the purchase of a large-scale permanent cooling system. By renting temporarily from a company's operating budget, an investment of this kind can be postponed until the funding becomes available. NuTemp serves this need, not only by providing the temporary equipment, but through its unique lease/purchase plans. When customers rent to merely put off the long term fix, NuTemp assists by offering purchase options on installed operating rental equipment. In this case the temporary unit that is on site and operating becomes the permanent solution. This saves NuTemp customers from accruing further expenses with regard to demobilizing the rental unit and installing a new one.

NuTemp's sales managers often quote purchase options with the initial rental proposal. Customers are given further incentive to own the equipment at the end of the rental term by incorporating a percentage of the monthly fees as credit towards the buyout price.

Although the above examples are value-added rental scenarios, in the heat of the summer rental equipment quickly becomes the only expedient answer for equipment failure. When a company looses its cooling capacity in June, July or August, it doesn't matter if it's an industrial process or the air conditioning system in a high-rise office complex, the situation is critical, and very often lead times for overhauls or replacement equipment are too long to cope with.

Hot weather isn't the only way the forces of nature wreak havoc with a plant's refrigeration system. Storms and high winds can be just as destructive, as this NuTemp recent customer discovered.

NuTemp offers a comprehensive in range of equipment, such as: