A chiller is usually the single most expensive asset a contractor touches, and it degrades along axes that never show up on the control panel. Condenser tubes foul, approach temperatures widen, and efficiency falls by a few percent a year until the machine is consuming meaningfully more energy for the same tonnage. Tube wall thinning is worse: it is invisible until a tube leaks and floods the refrigerant circuit with water, which turns a maintenance item into a rebuild.
The steps ChatterFix schedules for this PM. Every step is a checkable item on the work order — a technician can speak their way through it without touching a keyboard.
A chiller is usually the single most expensive asset a contractor touches, and it degrades along axes that never show up on the control panel. Condenser tubes foul, approach temperatures widen, and efficiency falls by a few percent a year until the machine is consuming meaningfully more energy for the same tonnage. Tube wall thinning is worse: it is invisible until a tube leaks and floods the refrigerant circuit with water, which turns a maintenance item into a rebuild.
Nobody notices, because the chiller still makes cold water. It just makes it more expensively every year, and the approach temperature that would have shown the fouling was never trended. The failure that ends the conversation is a tube leak — water in the refrigerant, acid in the oil, and a motor burn that takes the machine out for weeks in the middle of a cooling season.
Annual is the industry default, and the run-hour leg matters more: a machine carrying base load through the year reaches the same wear in eight months that a swing machine takes three years to reach. Let the oil analysis and the approach trend pull the eddy-current test forward when they start moving.
This procedure — and every other PM for your industry — is already built into ChatterFix. Pick your industry and it lands on the right equipment, on the right interval, in about three minutes.