Ammonia & Glycol Secondary Refrigeration
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Berry Gardens,
The customer
Civils Contracting Limited, is a highly successful and accomplished British construction company providing construction services across a wide variety of sectors. As the main contractor on site, they were tasked with to design and build the building shell for the landlord and the fit out for the tenant. The tenant, Berry Gardens Limited is the UK’s leading berry and stone fruit production and marketing group, suppling all of Britain’s leading retailers with a market share of more than 30%.
“A road map for how buildings of this type could be done in terms of energy efficiency, control systems and design.”
PAGE SURVEYORS
The brief
JD Cooling Group’s brief was to design, supply and install a future proof cooling system, which would be expandable and flexible for long-term growth while delivering operational and optimal efficiency.
The solution
The installation, designed to be both expandable and flexible saw JD Cooling supply two ammonia/glycol chillers delivering 1.6 Megawatt of cooling via a secondary, food-safe glycol system. This serves a series of ceiling mounted coolers and roof void air handling units to supply conditioned, filtered air to the automated packhouse via insulated ductwork and fabric air socks.
The primary refrigerant, ammonia, delivers around 20% greater efficiency than man-made refrigerant alternatives and has zero GWP (Global Warming Potential), which makes it future proof in environmental terms.
Further environmental benefits come from the low-energy, highly efficient and compact-sized adiabatic air cooler units that reject the heat from the cooling plant. JD Cooling also provided the cooling for the offices, canteen, and IT requirements of the new facility.
The system utilises water cooled ammonia/glycol chillers. The driving decision behind this selection, rather than using air-cooled ammonia chillers was that the actual ammonia charge within a water-cooled chiller is less than 10% of that which would be contained within an air-cooled version. Given the end user’s previous lack of experience with ammonia chillers, applying water cooled chillers to the project has given a peace of mind, allowing minimal measures having to be adopted to accommodate them into the site.
The advantage of using water cooled chillers is that a common heat rejection loop can easily be introduced so that any heat taken from the cooling process can easily be “tapped into” for reuse in various energy efficient applications.
Adiabatic air coolers were installed to reject the heat from the cooling plant, these offer compact sized units with highly efficient heat rejection.
JD Cooling’s sister company JD Power Systems design, installed and commissioned all control wiring, cabling and electrical main supplies to the refrigeration system.
Customer satisfaction
Commenting on the “very efficient and highly controllable” refrigeration system and the impressive solar PV installation, Duncan Pierce (Page Surveyors) said the Berry Gardens project had not just been a good example of collaboration but had been “a road map for how buildings of this type could be done in terms of energy efficiency, control systems and design”.
In the press
Take a look at South East Farmer’s fantastic news feature on Berry Garden’s new headquarters here.
Photography undertaken by: South East Farmer.
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