Ports, logistics and a lot of cold storage
South Essex along the Thames is one of the busiest logistics areas in the south-east, with the ports at Tilbury and London Gateway and the warehouses that gather around them in Thurrock. A good share of that space is chilled or frozen, and the refrigeration plant behind it often uses evaporative condensers. Further in, there are industrial estates around Basildon, Harlow and Chelmsford, logistics near Stansted Airport, and hospitals, universities and office buildings in Chelmsford, Southend, Colchester and Brentwood.
A dry county with hard water
Essex is one of the driest parts of the UK, so the water a cooling tower uses gets more attention here than in most places. Towers lose water three ways: evaporation, drift and bleed. Evaporation is the job the tower is there to do, and drift should be tiny if the eliminators are in good order. Bleed is the one you can adjust, and it's tempting to cut it right back.
The catch is that Essex water is generally hard, and squeezing too many cycles out of hard water is a quick route to scale. The sensible approach is to find the highest cycles of concentration your water and inhibitor can safely support, keep the conductivity probe clean and calibrated, and fix leaks and overflows that waste water without doing anything useful. If water use matters for your sustainability reporting, we can record make-up and bleed meter readings on every visit so you have real figures. Our article on cycles of concentration explains the trade-off.
Who supplies your water
Essex & Suffolk Water serves much of south and central Essex. Anglian Water supplies much of the north, including Colchester. Affinity Water covers parts of the west around Harlow, Epping and Saffron Walden, and an area in the north-east around Manningtree. Hardness and chemistry vary between them, so check your supplier's postcode checker and expect us to test the make-up water on site before setting a programme.
Getting to Essex sites
We reach Essex from Chiswick on the M25, then the A13 for Thurrock and Southend, the A12 for Chelmsford and Colchester, or the M11 for Harlow and Stansted. Port and terminal sites run their own security, pass and induction systems, so we book these early and send RAMS and COSHH information ahead. Cold stores bring their own hazards for an engineer: refrigeration plant rooms, forklift traffic and ladders up to condensers on a roof or gantry. We follow the site's rules on all of it.
Notification in Essex
Essex has a county council, twelve district, borough and city councils, and two unitary councils, Southend-on-Sea and Thurrock. Environmental health sits with the district, borough, city or unitary council, so that's who gets your written notification under the Notification of Cooling Towers and Evaporative Condensers Regulations 1992. Contact your local council's environmental health team for the form, and keep a copy in your log book.