IMA Case Study – Crystal Ice Cream

Do you have unreliable power?

We at IMA know that refrigeration, along with lighting, and cooling account for a significant proportion of energy use in a building. In Kenya we are installing our latest generation of cold rooms to help bring down the running cost of Freezer rooms.

IMA had installed a new state of the art Freezer Room for Crystal Ice Cream. Ice cream temperature is critical, a couple of degrees to hot and the product can be irreparably damaged, and this can lead to tens of thousands of pounds of losses.

Installed system

The system installed had twin back up freezer unit, so that if one machine happened to go down the other unit can maintain temperature. This coupled with our voltage protection system ensures that the system is unlikely to go down due to mechanical or electrical reason other than power failure.

IMA also install an SMS texting service into the control box for power failure alert to be sent to the director’s mobile along with cold room temperature.

The real world scenario

On one weekend the director of Crystal Ice Cream received a text power failure temp -22C, he thought nothing of it as the backup generator would kick in. An hour later her received another text power failure temp -22C, he thought this is not right then realised that the backup generator was under maintenance that weekend, but as the temperature was the same he didn’t initially worry.

After 4 hours and receiving the same text every hour he began to worry that the temperature maybe wrong. At 4am he decided that he need to go and double check the temperature and so got in his car and drove to the factory, Sure enough the temperature had stayed the same, in fact when he returned to the factory later that morning the total temperature gain for 12 hours was only 2C.

Back