Spot the difference

Actually, its the same thing..

GEA was invited by a client to advise on a 2 year old refrigeration system which was not performing or reliable, after losing faith with their supplier.

Once offering some advice to help with the reliability issues, we were asked to provide a cost for extension to facilitate an increase in capacity. This is where the real issues became apparent...

As well as being poorly designed and installed, it had no CE certification, not complying to DSEAR, EN378, SMARS either. On investigation of welds, over 90% failed NDT so combined with the above information, an urgent decision had to be taken to make the system safe and stop the factories production until the system could be replaced. A depressing moment for everyone involved, as this could close the factory.

After a few quick calculations, we concluded that temporary chillers on glycol through the ammonia evaporators could keep the factory production running (which was no mean feat as they were mostly spiral freezers) so within 10 days the entire factory was up and running again.

Interestingly, the client has demonstrated record production through the freezers, which goes to show just how poorly the "new" refrigeration plant was performing.

We are now well on with replacing and extending the system.

So it goes to show, you can actually polish a "t**d", as although the system seemed nice, shiny and new, it was inefficient and in fact dangerous and should never have been charged with refrigerant.

This is a hugely expensive and stressful journey for us all, and I would like to ask all those who have Refrigeration systems to ensure you have as a minimum a CE certificate for each and every system. 99% of them require it, irrespective of refrigerant. It has been a legal requirement for over 20 years, and it is the operators responsibility to ensure this documentation is in place, as it ensures a certain minimum standard has been achieved. (its not an option)