Cooling tower is a type of heat exchanger used to dissipate the unwanted heat from a medium into the atmosphere. A well-designed cooling tower provides prolong contact time for water with air and breaks down the water to have large surface area to promote the heat transfer rate. In the present work, an induced draft cooling tower is fabricated and used with a stationary IC Engine to minimize the overall usage of water. The performance of the tower with two different bed materials (Jute carpet & Polystyrene balls) with and without wire mesh at three different water flow rates viz., 12, 18 and 30 lpm are studied. The cooling tower parameters such as range, approach, efficiency, effectiveness, heat loss, windage losses, and evaporative losses are calculated from the experimental data. At higher flow rates, jute carpets with wire mesh provided optimal results for the parameters while at low flow rates polystyrene balls are found to provide better results. The experimental results showed that the efficiency of the cooling tower increased by 67% as the flow rate increased from 12 lpm to 30 lpm with jute carpet and wire mesh, whereas the efficiency decreases as the flow rate increases with polystyrene as the bed material. Also, the similar trend is observed for the effectiveness of cooling tower. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.