Tips Archives - Page 5 of 16 - Barpro Storage SA (Pty) Ltd

Common Practice vs Logic

When taking stock in a freezer store it is common practice to turn off the evaporator fans and leave the door(s) open. This provides more comfort for the stock takers but causes another problem in mobile racked stores. When air humidity is high, the warm moist air enters the cold room door as the dry but relatively heavy cold air flows out at the bottom. With the fans off the moisture in the air tends to move to the coldest place it can find which is the racking and the floor. Steel mobile racking wheels have a sufficient co-efficient of friction with the steel rails in the floor to move even when heavily loaded. However add just a few microns of ice and the situation changes resulting in the wheels turning but mobile base not moving. In serious cases the solution is to scrape the rails with wire brushes, especially those which support driven wheels so as to provide the necessary traction. This is a frustrating exercise but if one closes the door, turns on the fans and runs the refrigeration system with a low suction pressure the mobiles will probably move more easily the next day. This happens because the thin ice sheet on the floor sublimates to the evaporators via the moving air as they will now be colder than the floor. But it’s better to keep the door closed even while stock takers are inside. Do you have an ice build up in your cold store? Try i-Smelt [gravityform id=”12″ title=”true” description=”true”] Read more: Do you have an ice build up? Read more: Vector Peninsula uses i-Smelt Read more: Fight the return of the ice age… in your cold store

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How much water does your cold store need?

Tips, Uncategorized, Water / admin

Levels at Theewaterskloof Dam (Picture Source) Gabor Hilton, Engineering Manager at AB Oxford cold store in Melbourne, recently sent through his water consumption figures for 2016. With a total refrigerated space of 1,071,154 m3 Oxford used 72,643KLitres of water of which 31,957Klitres where harvested from the cold store buildings and stored in tanks. This translates to 68 litres of water per m3 for the year of which 44% was harvested on site. If we assume that freezer stores in the Western Cape also use 67 litres per m3 per year, then a 10,000 pallet facility will use in the region of 250,000 litres of water per month. Since Oxford Cold Store enjoys economies of scale, it is the GCCA’s 19th largest freezer store globally, our consumption per m3 is likely to be higher. So where will freezer stores get this quantity of potable water from if day zero arrives, currently said to fall in early May 2018? That’s what makes Christo van der Merwe’s article attached on water saving so important – Download here If the taps do run dry and a freezer store doesn’t have access to borehole water an option could be to use salt water. Any mention of salt water prompts the response of corrosion. But if it’s a case of using salt water or turning off the refrigeration system, the corrosion cost might not look too bad, especially if the condensers and pumps had been given extra protection before time. We would be interested to hear if anyone knows of cost effective methods to reduce sea water corrosion. If it could be managed, then there would still be the sourcing and transport to consider. Read more: New Pongola Cold Storage Facility Read more: Drought: How a large international cold store survived Read more: Can mobile racking work in FMCG stores?

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A readers’ perspective

Complimentary Products, General Interest, Letters to the editor, Maintenance, Pallet Racking, Pallets, Safety, Tips, Uncategorized / admin

Last month we received a response to our article, “What to do with sub-standard wooden pallets”, from a retired Managing Director of one of the UK’s biggest cold storage facilities, “Good article on pallet quality problems. My company used pallet support beams on every installation after there was an instance of the tack welded load beams twisting with a subsequent opening up of the interweaved box section. There were also similar problems with disposable or what we called “one way trip” pallets. These were flimsy and totally unsafe for reach truck drivers to retrieve and put away. Our cabbed reach trucks were equipped with a special strength Perspex overhead window. On one occasion a “one way trip” pallet collapsed while being moved on the fourth level at about 9 meters up. The boxes were small at 12.5 kgs and one smashed its way through the Perspex window, landing behind the driver’s seat. You can imagine what he felt like. After this we fitted an additional heavy mesh grid above the Perspex with an inbuilt safety hatch. For additional protection, my company also switched to solid pallet supports on the bottom cantilever level made from thin steel sheeting rather than mesh. This solid plate arrangement was also used on the bottom pallet level to prevent detritus from falling into the bases and causing damage to the drive train. Irrespective of Health and Safety considerations, caring employers shouldn’t allow product to be stored at high levels on unsafe pallets. It’s actually quite unfair to ask drivers to lift such death traps into and out of racking. If a freezer is in the third party business, accepting broken pallets will become your responsibility not to mention any damage that may be done to the product stored on them. So it makes sense to have a simple system in place to identify, replace and charge for broken pallets when they arrive on site.” For more information on pallet support beams and support grids contact us today! [gravityform id=”12″ title=”false” description=”true”]

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