General Interest

Barpro has come across several incidents of frost heave recently in South African freezer stores. So what is frost heave?  It happens when water freezes under a cold store and pushes up the floor. There doesn’t have to be a lot of water and the temperature only needs to drop slightly below freezing point. When water or moisture freezes it expands and the expansion has to go somewhere, which is up.  As mobile racking requires a level floor any frost heave is a major problem. I have seen freezer floors come up by almost 1 metre due to frost heave, and, the longer the problem is left, the worse it tends to get. How do you prevent frost heave from happening? Be aware of frost heave and what it can do. Understand how your freezer store is designed to prevent frost heave and then make sure that these defences are working. Most freezer stores have heater mats. Know where the control panel is, make sure it is working, and check the temp under the heater mat on a regular basis. If you use other methods like pumping warm glycol under the freezer floor, make sure that the glycol is flowing. UK freezer stores have flow indicators on each loop for this purpose. If your store has air vents under the freezer floor, make sure these vents are not blocked. The 1 metre frost heave in the freezer store referred to earlier was caused when a new manager noticed that rats liked to use the under floor vent pipes, so, unaware of the dangers, he blocked the vents. Remember, frost heave is very difficult to cure once the process has begun. And it doesn’t only happen in freezer stores. I have also witnessed an incident in a chill store……   Other things you can do to guard against frost heave. Get the electric heater mat supplier to check the mat’s performance on an annual basis. Get a Barpro technician to take floor levels at the same time as he is doing the annual maintenance inspection on the Storax bases. If this is done every year, you can quickly  see any changes in floor level. If you do, don’t leave it but take action  immediately.

It is now three years after the Barpro monthly newsletter  started, and we have been kicking around the idea  in house that we need to find  ways to interact more with our customers. Obviously we want to know when someone is unhappy with our performance  as well as when we do something right. This gives us a chance to rectify a mistake or bad service and to congratulate employees who perform well. But generally, there has been an immense amount of change in the warehousing industry and cold storage in particular. Warehouse and cold store managers can feel isolated and don’t know where to go for advice. For this reason the Barpro newsletters have  not concentrated purely on mobiles, but looked at other  developments and ideas as they come along.  One example of this was Ice Melt, which I originally saw in a Melbourne cold store. After featuring it in a newsletter, we suddenly had inquiries from Malaysia. The article had been picked up by the IARW (International Association of Refrigerated Warehouses) newsletter and broadcast to its members as well. So the cold storage world has become a small place and problems shared can be problems solved. The result of all this thinking was the decision to start a blog in addition to the monthly newsletter.  It is there for you to use. By all means use it to criticise any bad service you might be unlucky enough to get from us at Barpro. We can use criticism to improve.  But also use it to share a problem. You may find that you are not the only one sitting in the same boat and maybe someone out there will have a solution. I haven’t put any restrictions on input but would prefer that it deals with warehousing or cold storage problems and ideas. Energy management, forklift driving, rack safety, health and safety generally, even cold store clothing and situations vacant. Let see what happens. All the best. James Cunningham.