Cooling formula for walk in + alternative cooling solution question

[CarterJ]

Hi All,

Can't tell you how much I've appreciated the forum. The knowledge here has been great. So, as my first post, I wanted to get some specifics on cooling. We're in the process of sketching out a small canning facility that we hope to have up and running by summer. One of our big questions is cooling. We're not a beer company – at the moment just carbonated beverages. We're looking at two 3bbl tanks as our starting point (perfect for our size with room to grow). We are planning on doing a coolbot system to cool down our tanks, but for the life of me I cannot find any hard data or formula for crunching our time needed given our starting temp of liquid, end temp of liquid, and walk in temperature. Does anyone have any knowledge here?

Also, besides the walk in or as a supportive system: we thought about having some sort of cooling coil to submerge that we could sump-pump chilled water through (basically water we would keep in our walk at all times in 50 gallon drums to act as a sort of reservoir). I imagine this would be much faster since air is poor at heat transference?

LAST also: our other option is to look at a super small glycol system but this would increase our costs significantly by needing jacketed tanks. However, if we want to copack when we aren't at full capacity, that gives us some higher quality control if they're using our tanks.

This is all apples to oranges, but any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I think our DIY cooling reservoirs w/ coils to drop temp + walk in to maintain temp would be our best option, but still not knowing a ballpark on how long that volume of liquid would take at 75ºish to drop down to 33º is where I'm lost at – no point in building out a system that costs 2-3x as much as just the walk in if it only saves us an hour or two of time (although I'm optimistic this won't be the case).

Thanks in advance! Super stoked to be apart of the forums.

-Carter

[jimvgjr]

Hi Carter;

To calculate the pull down load from 77 F to 33 F, its a pretty simple formula- multiply the weight of the fluid (water is 8.36 lbs per gallon) X the temperature drop. This is the total BTU's that need to be removed. Divide this by the number of hours you want to cool this down, and you will get your BTU/HR cooling load.

so for example:
3 bbls is approximately 800 lbs fluid (93 gallons X 8.4)
800 lbs X 42 F (75 F to 33 F) = 33,600 BTU/HR
Cool this over 10 hours will require 3,360 BTU/HR cooling capacity

I'd apply some safety factors to cover motor heat, line loss, etc- but this formula will get you close.

Id suggest that you reach out to our sales team (you can find the salesperson who covers your region on our website www.prochiller.com, or just email sales@prorefrigeration.com). With a short conversation they can at least give you an idea of cost for a glycol chiller that could service jacketed tanks and also your cold room. You are definitely correct that it will cost more than a "coolbot" type setup- but long-term it might be the better option for you.

Good luck as you get this project rolling.

Jim VanderGiessen Jr
Pro Chiller Systems

[bbesser]

If you are committed to going the Coolbot route, shoot them an email or give them a call. They are helpful and prompt regarding sizing cooling systems based on size of room, incoming product temperature, final temp, etc.

[mmussen]

I can't really give you any hard numbers. I can tell you that with well built jacketed tanks you'll have your product down in the 30's in less than 12 hours (as long as you're running nice cold glycol).

I've never tried to cool any serious volume of liquid in a fridge or other air cooled area. Best I can say is that it seemed to take about as long (overnight) to cool a 5 gal keg in my keezer back when I was homebrewing. But that's years ago and not a good comparison.

Cheers

[mswebb]

We used Coolbots to manage a fermenter room (6 1Bbl tanks) and a cold room. Keeping 1Bbl fermenter tanks in the 20-22C range and dropping to 3-4C took nearly 3-days in uninsulated tanks. This was done by moving the tanks from one room to the other, not trying to cool the room around the tanks. In our new facility I can manage the same temperature drop in a 15Bbl tank overnight.

Invest in the basic infrastructure. You don't need jacketed tanks to use glycol (you can pump glycol through internal coils but this is potentially risky (leaks, sanitation) or circulate the liquid through coils in a cooled glycol bath with similar risks associated. You could also flow the liquid to be cooled through a heat exchanger with glycol on the cooling liquid side; running your liquid from your process tanks through the chiller to the storage/packaging tanks. This could be done with cold water rather than glycol as well. Putting chilled liquid into tanks inside the cold room will reduce the load on the cold room equipment.

Dropping temperatures with a properly sized glycol system is the "real" way to get it done.

[CarterJ]

Thanks for the speedy replies everyone! Let me respond to you guys here:

Jim – I assume this is for a glycol system? I did a similar formula to find BTU's needed online and came to roughly the same BTU/HR need but, none of these said it was strictly in regards to a glycol chilling system? My assumption being that it's much more efficient/faster at transferring heat energy when it's directly touching the tank with a better thermal conductive medium: water being about a 20x better thermal conductivity medium than air – with all these formulas, I do not have any spot to plug in thermal conductivity of the medium or see what it's for exactly but most have been from glycol manufacturers and the like.

bbesser – gave them a call today, they were a huge help

mmussen – That's why I'm worried the refrigeration won't get us anywhere in any reasonable time frame :/ we primarily chilled our kegs and would then force carb but if we loaded our entire freezer full with 6 kegs, it would take a significant amount of time to drop that thing down in temp.

mswebb –*I assume your new facility utilizes jacketed glycol tanks whereas the old one did not?

Off the top of your heads, what do you think would be our smallest glycol system we could invest in upfront for cooling two 3bbl tanks? I would love to buy the infrastructure that will get us room to expand, but unfortunately this is a grant we're utilizing and we are very thin on how far we can spread it. We'll have to stick with the bare minimum for now and we're fine upgrading later when we need to bump our tank sizes up along with it. Think pico canning operation, just below nano

[mswebb]

mswebb –*I assume your new facility utilizes jacketed glycol tanks whereas the old one did not?

- correct, sorry I didn't specify but at our new size, ambient cooling is not an option.

Some back up detail on the small system we used.

Fermenter room with capacity for 6 1Bbl tanks. 5' * 10' * 8' high, uninsulated floor. Coolbot on 5000Btu air conditioner, usually didn't need the coolbot to keep the room temp suitable for fermenting. Tried using this as a cold room but without floor insulation couldn't get room below 5-6C. Ambient temp outside room as high as 40C at times.

Cold room with room for 4 kegs on a tap wall, 6-8 keg storage and room to crash or cold condition 4 1Bbl tanks. 8' * 10' * 8' high, insulated floor. Coolbot on 8000Btu air conditioner holding room at 3C. Same exterior ambient as above. Moving the tanks from the fermenter room to this room for cold crashing and it would take 3 days to achieve 3-4C liquid temp; didn't affect temperature of other product even if we moved 2-3 warm tanks in at a time.

[CarterJ]

Hmm. Okay, so on ambient cooling then, the consensus is that it seems to take minimum 72 hours. So that's no bueno for us unfortunately.

So:
A) On the chilled water reservoir pumped in a walk in that we'd pump via sump-pump through a coil, any ones best guess as to how long that would take?
B) What size glycol system do you guys think we could get away with for a healthy minimum (10% buffer, no need for a larger expansion-ready system)?

Thanks for the help so far gang, much appreciated!

-Carter

[wlw33]

Hmm. Okay, so on ambient cooling then, the consensus is that it seems to take minimum 72 hours. So that's no bueno for us unfortunately.

So:
A) On the chilled water reservoir pumped in a walk in that we'd pump via sump-pump through a coil, any ones best guess as to how long that would take?
B) What size glycol system do you guys think we could get away with for a healthy minimum (10% buffer, no need for a larger expansion-ready system)?

Thanks for the help so far gang, much appreciated!

-Carter

If you did a 55 gallon drum full of cold water in the cold room you would probably only shave a few hours.
When the tank is first wheeled in and the liquid is at 77*, running cold water from the reservoir into an immersion coil and back into the reservoir is going to warm up the reservoir fairly quickly. You'll probably get the tank of product into the 50s in a couple hours and have to crash ambient the rest of the way.

[CarterJ]

If you did a 55 gallon drum full of cold water in the cold room you would probably only shave a few hours.
When the tank is first wheeled in and the liquid is at 77*, running cold water from the reservoir into an immersion coil and back into the reservoir is going to warm up the reservoir fairly quickly. You'll probably get the tank of product into the 50s in a couple hours and have to crash ambient the rest of the way.

Which I just realized is still going to suck because the bulk of our time crashing will be in the latter portion of degrees, due to temperature being kind of exponentially slower when dropping if I remember correctly. Damn, lol. Hmm ok, so I guess either sticking 100% with ambient or glycol!

[mmussen]

In terms of sizing Jim's formula should give you the minimum you need. Although his calculation is for 1 tank. I would guess that going up to say 5000BTU/Hr would give you enough cooling to ferment 1 beer, crash a second and have say 10% extra capacity.
That being said if it were my place I would try to at least double that cooling capacity. you will probably outgrow 2 3 bbl tanks quite quickly.

[CarterJ]

In terms of sizing Jim's formula should give you the minimum you need. Although his calculation is for 1 tank. I would guess that going up to say 5000BTU/Hr would give you enough cooling to ferment 1 beer, crash a second and have say 10% extra capacity.
That being said if it were my place I would try to at least double that cooling capacity. you will probably outgrow 2 3 bbl tanks quite quickly.

I'm using that formula and we're looking at only crashing one take in a 12 hr period since we'll be close to that capacity bottle neck anyways with our canning line. We're looking out there for some small options, but right now all the systems around this size (that aren't way over sized) are for line cooling with seemingly small reservoirs? I'm totally unfamiliar with this area of equipment but that's my consensus so far.

The Chill&Flow unit is the only thing I've seen (yet) that's in our price range without being overkill but I'm waiting on some quotes.

I'll note: we aren't looking for a unit that is future-forward that we can grow with: we are stretching out some money from a possible grant that we'll be applying to here soon, so this will just be temporary to get us going. We can cover expansion costs later if we can validate all of our SKUs, so that's not a worry right now. Any ideas from y'all on other systems perfect for our size?

Edit: Like this unit: http://www.beveragefactory.com/draft.../EG-1_2P.shtml – it has the needed BTUs, but is it for some reason totally unusable for a jacketed system for whatever reason (my assumption as to why it's much cheaper?)??? Oh to have the combined knowledge of this forum in my head ha