Fyffes Basingstoke – 14 x 54 Pallet Banana Ripening Rooms

This facility allows Fyffes to ripen an additional 756 tonnes of bananas per cycle. Coupled with the existing single and two tier rooms, the full site capacity has been increased to a total of 2148 tonnes per cycle.

With the increased capacity, the existing chilled water plant had to be reviewed. The outcome was that the existing 400kW Daikin chiller was de-commissioned and two 750kW free-cooling Airedale chillers installed. The free-cooling allows the client to benefit from external ambient conditions. If the ambient air falls below 7°C a valve is opened by-passing the inlet water through a free-cooling coil which is exposed to the ambient air cooling the water before the evaporator. This results in the lower the
ambient conditions, the greater advantage of free-cooling, subsequently reducing the load on the chillers’ compressors. Other energy management systems that have been installed on this project are a chiller sequence control system, refrigeration saving modules and fan inverter drives. These all contribute to the efficient operation of our ripening system, resulting in reduced energy consumption.

The entire design, installation and commissioning, including the mechanical and electrical was managed in house with the project handed over on time and within budget.