I'm looking at an interesting old industrial complex on a sloped site. The section that I'd use for the brewery is 14k SF on the 2nd floor, but it's similar to a walk out basement – the north side of the space is at grade level, and the back side of the space is 20' in the air. The north side has 2 truck-high loading docks, one will be converted into the main public entry, the other will be our main distribution dock. There is one other dock available, but it's a shared dock by other tenants, and is down a freight elevator and a common corridor, so while it's something we could use in a pinch, it's not something I want to rely upon for major use. My goal is to eventually be distributing 10k+ bbl/yr, so that'll need to go through our primary dock. What I need now is to find a solution for spent grain and garbage removal that doesn't put any more load on our distribution dock.
The east wall is accessible to vehicles and the landlord said we could use that side for a dumpster and spend grain removal. The trick is that there's no loading dock, but it's also between 12'-20' above grade, so I was thinking of chutes for garbage and spent grain. Here's a pic, hopefully it's worth a 1000 words (not to scale, just giving an overview of the general layout)...
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My thought is that we could use the height near the southeast corner for a spent grain chute, so the truck could pull up and we could dump it in directly from the 2nd floor. Similar thought for the dumpster, we'd have some chute out of the east wall that would drop garbage down into the dumpster. So, has anyone seen this in action? I think I've seen examples of a 2nd floor garbage chute, but I can't find any examples for spent grain removal. Any gotchas or other reasons this would be problematic or a bad idea? It seems it'd be easy to let gravity do some work, but I'm not sure if it'd be a free fall, or if there needs to be some conveyor or auger to move the grain. Thoughts?
The east wall is accessible to vehicles and the landlord said we could use that side for a dumpster and spend grain removal. The trick is that there's no loading dock, but it's also between 12'-20' above grade, so I was thinking of chutes for garbage and spent grain. Here's a pic, hopefully it's worth a 1000 words (not to scale, just giving an overview of the general layout)...
[ATTACH]34578[/ATTACH]
My thought is that we could use the height near the southeast corner for a spent grain chute, so the truck could pull up and we could dump it in directly from the 2nd floor. Similar thought for the dumpster, we'd have some chute out of the east wall that would drop garbage down into the dumpster. So, has anyone seen this in action? I think I've seen examples of a 2nd floor garbage chute, but I can't find any examples for spent grain removal. Any gotchas or other reasons this would be problematic or a bad idea? It seems it'd be easy to let gravity do some work, but I'm not sure if it'd be a free fall, or if there needs to be some conveyor or auger to move the grain. Thoughts?
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