A 100 ton air cooled portable chiller is the mid size machine on temporary cooling work: delivered on a trailer, hired by the week or the month rather than the day. Rates commonly land near $1,000 to $1,800 a week and $3,000 to $6,000 a month, with transport, hoses, cable and commissioning quoted on top of that.
What 100 tons of cooling means in practice
A ton of refrigeration is 12,000 BTU an hour, so a hundred ton machine removes a hundred times that. In rough planning terms that covers a large office floor plate, a mid size process load, or a data hall carrying on while its permanent plant is repaired. The size comes from the load calculation, never from floor area alone.
Power is the first thing to check
Most 100 ton portable chillers run on 480 volt three phase and pull a serious current under full load, so the electrical connection is the real constraint on many sites. If the building cannot spare a feed, the machine is hired with a generator sized for it and a distribution panel, and that changes the quote more than the chiller does.
Hoses, pumps and the water side
The chiller is one part of a package. You also need supply and return hoses in the right diameter, a pump where the building's own cannot serve a temporary loop, manifolds, and glycol if the weather can freeze. Yards quote these as a kit, and the length of the hose run is the number they will ask for first.
Emergency hire against planned hire
A planned summer hire is booked weeks out and priced by the month. An emergency swap after a plant failure is priced on availability, delivered the same day where possible, and set up by the branch technicians. Standing agreements exist for buildings that cannot go warm, and they are arranged before a failure rather than during one.
Questions people ask about 100 ton chiller rental
How much area will a 100 ton chiller cool?
As a first planning figure, comfort cooling runs somewhere near 400 square feet per ton in an ordinary building, so 100 tons covers a large floor plate. Process loads ignore floor area completely. Anything past a first estimate needs the real load in BTU an hour from whoever specified the system.
How is a rental chiller delivered and set up?
It arrives on a trailer or flat bed and is placed by crane or forklift where there is clear space for airflow around it. The branch technician normally makes the water and power terminations, fills and purges the loop and commissions the machine. That labour is a separate line from the weekly rate.
Air cooled or water cooled for a temporary hire?
Air cooled almost always, because it needs no cooling tower and no condenser water. Water cooled portables exist and suit a plant room with spare tower capacity. The trade off is space: an air cooled machine needs clear room around it or it recirculates its own hot air and loses capacity.