Farmfoods chooses ammonia cooling from Star Refrigeration

Farmfoods has chosen a high efficiency ammonia cooling system from Star Refrigeration for its new distribution centre near Bristol. The frozen food specialist operates around 300 retail stores in the UK. The brand new distribution centre in Avonmouth supplies frozen and chilled goods to Farmfoods outlets across the south of England. Farmfoods was looking for an energy efficient refrigeration system for cold and chill stores at the new facility. A cooling system operating on an environmentally conscious natural refrigerant was a key requirement. Following a competitive tender, Star was chosen to design and install a cooling system comprising two modular Azanefreezers and an Azanechiller. Star’s Azane range of ammonia packages is ideally suited to applications in temperature controlled storage, food processing, building services and process cooling. Operating on natural refrigerant ammonia, the Azanefreezer package provides 540kW of coldstore cooling at -22°C. The Azanechiller is an ammonia/glycol system, providing 120kW of cooling at +2°C to the Farmfoods chillstore. James Ward, Star’s Director of Food Sales, says: “Azanechiller offers a significant increase in performance compared with standard HFC chillers. Its packaged design and careful component selection result in an ultra low refrigerant charge, with all ammonia contained within the chiller and outside the production facility. This means a refrigerant charge as little as 0.1kg per kW.” The Azanefreezer packages utilise waste heat recovered from the refrigeration system. This provides heat to a glycol underfloor heating system contained within the Farmfoods coldstore. Read the Farmfoods case study in full here.