Carrot Farm
Starting small
This was a very interesting and again unusual project for Advanced Building Controls, engaged at the time to investigate some control problems to some chillers on a carrot farm, we were asked to investigate four low temperature air cooled chillers that broke down on a regular basis and halted production of the farm, handling at the time some 80 tons of fresh carrots every day.
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Upon arrival we were face with some bespoke manufactured chillers that had been in operation for some 15 years, with no information, instructions and schematics, these four chillers where used to cool a water glycol mixture down to around -15℃ used for cooling the carrots during there processing and packaging.
Chiller units
Config Page
Chiller units
All four chillers basically ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week to keep water temperatures at there critical temperature, the loss of one unit caused major problems for the farm, and in many cases complete shutdown.
The controls within these units was basic and unreliable, with no real staging or efficient control. Advanced Building Controls provided the farm with a new integrated solution, to upgrade and retro fit onsite the internal control system of each chiller.
We provided our client with an internal web based controller and control panel touch screen, writing a complete new chiller operation strategy to take control of the chiller internal operation.
All four chillers are connected to there onsite internal LAN, enabling the user to access graphic pages of each unit, adjust parameters and monitor chiller operation.
A 7" LCD touch screen fitted to each unit, displayed operation status, alarms and allowed the used to enable and disable the chiller, as down time was a critical factor, the chillers software was engineered of site, and new control panel back plates complete and wired were also pre manufactured, this allowed us to attend site, and carry out a change over, in one day.