All roof mounted and ground mounted machinery and equipment is subject to hail damage. You should evaluate the critical nature of the equipment to your operations and the effects of damage to the equipment for your business. You should consider providing hail protection for this equipment based on the priority of importance to your operations. Equipment such as condenser coils, cooling towers, refrigeration units should be protected. The condenser coil is the heat rejection component of a chiller, rooftop unit and refrigeration unit – it is used to dissipate heat from a production process or from the inside of a building. Refrigerant gas is pumped from a compressor to a heat exchanger unit inside of the process equipment, or air movement system inside a building where it is then sent to the condenser unit located on the outside of the building where the fan pulls air through the coil / fins – as the air passes over the surface of the fins heat is rejected away from the coil and thus removes the heat from the process equipment or inside of the building – after the heat has been rejected, the refrigerant recycles through the compressor and the cycle repeats until the set temperature point is reached. To remove that heat with optimal efficiency, the condensing units typically feature a coil made of copper (which has high thermal conductivity) that is covered with many thin aluminum fins (to provide high surface area). In high efficiency equipment – the coils are commonly referred to as “Micro-channel coils” – where the number of fins on the coil could be double that of a standard efficiency coil in the same footprint. If you think about a coil as a filter, the high efficiency coil is like a high efficiency filter compared to a standard efficiency coil – that means high efficiency coils will have a tendency to foul out sooner between maintenance cycles vs. the standard efficiency equipment – furthermore, it micro-channel coils are impacted by hail, more damage will be done – The irony is that the very unit customers typically pay money for to achieve an energy savings, rarely actually capture the energy savings because the coil fouls out sooner between maintenance cycles which means it runs longer in a fouled condition between maintenance cycles and when they run in a moderately fouled to fouled condition, the very unit which has the capacity of delivering an energy savings actually becomes an “Energy Hog”.

The Key to actually capturing the energy savings one pays for in a high efficiency unit is to protect it in the first place – Protect it from airborne debris (cottonwood seed, pollen, bugs, leaves, etc.) and from hail. Keeping condenser coils clean and protected from hail damage is the single most important thing in proper care and preventative maintenance you can do to ensure you get the most out of your equipment.