Walk In Floor Sweating

[briangaylor]

We are trying to stop the walk in from making the floor sweat on the outside of the cold room. Our cold room has a damp perimeter around it in our non airconditioned production area in the warmer and more humid months. Not a big deal except where it is close to drywall (for example it butts right up to the employee restroom and that moisture is slowly ruining the drywall). Any suggestions on what can be done on the inside of the cold box to prevent this transfer of cold through the concrete? I can think of a few jerry-rigged options but hoping there is an existing and durable solution available.


Brian

[jebzter]

You would need to insulate your floor, so you would have to build a new floor in the cold room that sits on the concrete. The other option is to remove the drywall and replace with something that can deal with moisture.

[dast]

Hi,
You can try to install some kind of ceiling fan (or big ass fans) that normally can help if the difference in temperature is not to much otherwise you will need do do an insulation barrier in the floor under the cold box walls. In cold storage applications they normally install floor heating to heat just enough to prevent that so you don't create permafrost in the ground underneath the storage.
As an example we have a warehouse in Atlanta that is just normally storage with no air condition or cooling. Our warehouse have such a thick concrete slap so when you get hot and humid weather the slab is so much colder that the floors start to condensate and it get dangerously slippery, so we had to install big ass fans to get rid of the condensation on the floor. That air movement made a huge difference.

Dan Stromberg

[3cargarbrew]

Air movement around the area will help reduce it, but it will likely still be an issue on occasion. The cold (55F or so) concrete inside the cooler is still cold enough just outside the cooler walls to reach dew point. Hence, the sweaty floor.

I am a refrigeration contractor in Florida and I see this quite a bit. Contractors forget that a concrete floor is a continuous slab. A solution would be to have a freeze break cut in the concrete under the panel walls. That will stop the cold transfer from the cooler to the unconditioned space.

I had a brewery with this exact problem a couple years ago. The offices and part of the tap room were adjacent to the walk-in and after a year or so, the drywall was a mess. We used screw jacks to hold the ceiling up and then dropped the walls on the two sides so a concrete cutter could make a freeze break. Put the walls back up and put the cooler back into operation. Problem solved. It wasn't cheap or easy, but it did solve the problem.

Original contractor should have done it prior to install, a lot easier to do before there is a cooler and thousands of dollars in product to deal with.


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