Factory Refrigeration & Ventilation Upgrade

This project was particularly challenging, a substantial refrigeration and ventilation upgrade to an existing working factory, where factory down time was to be kept to absolute minimum and spare space was at premium. We worked with our customer to come up with a truly ‘out of the box’ solution. Our customers factory was bursting at the seams and had no space for the new refrigeration equipment without extensive remodelling, with the resulting disruption to production and refurbishment costs this would have cost their business, but they had a warehouse across the road, which due to ‘just in time’ procurement systems had some space. Our solution involved designing and constructing a bespoke multi-level steel gantry within the warehouse for the refrigeration equipment and connected the new refrigeration equipment to the existing factory via a new underground concrete culvert, running under the estate road, saving our customer time and money.

The refrigeration equipment included a 140Kw Profroid packaged condensing unit sited on the top level of the gantry, evaporating at +2c serving various production area cooling systems within the factory, maintaining room temperatures of +10c while product is portioned and packaged. The middle level of the gantry contains a Coolers and Condensers 145Kw centrifugal condenser, mounted internally with ducted discharge to outside. This serves a blast chiller pack system that ultimately rapidly refrigerates ready meals.

Vertical discharge cowls were fitted on the internally mounted condenser, this new plant area has low level fresh air intake and high level thermostatically controlled mechanical plant area extract. All the new refrigeration equipment is controlled by a series of control panels with common run and fault indication for each compressor and a series of fault lamps above related to the condenser fans.

The ventilation element of the project involved removing the old tired ventilation system and installing uninsulated extract ductwork which removes cooking smell and steam from a food cooking/production kitchen, this air is drawn through a bank of carbon filters to remove cooking odour before being discharged to atmosphere, The new extract system was balanced with a new supply air system including insulated ductwork and thermostatically controlled fresh air tempering heater batteries to prevent condensation.