Orion air conditioning & refrigeration ltd were kindly asked to install 2 x Sabroe 100Kw R404A refrigeration compressors at March Cold Stores Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom. The existing equipment was over 35 years old and running on R22 refrigerant which was made obsolete for use in the UK in 2010 but is authorised for use until 2015.
2 x R404a Sabroe Compressors units which provided 100Kw of cooling capacity were installed to replace the 30 year old existing R22 Sabroe Compressors which were failing and in need of a major overhaul.
March Cold Stores is a major regional refrigerated store, food factory and distribution centre with clients such as McDonalds Corporation, Tesco and many more. The client did not want any long term shut down of refrigeration plant as there was a estimated down time of up to 1 week. This was not possible because of 500 Sq meters of cold rooms with £1000,000's of their client’s product on the shelves at -25 DegC. A complete shutdown of the equipment would not have been possible at this time. It was suggested that we use the existing R22 refrigerant in the system and retrofit the oil in the new compressors to suit. R22 will still be in service until 2015 so the client has up to 5 years to replace this.
The compressors sat side by side on a connecting manifold with shut off valves to isolate each compressor individually, this gave the ability to change each compressor at a time while leaving the other compressor running and refrigerating the cold store. The new Sabroe compressors were R404a refrigerant based but were able to run on R22 once the oil had been retrofitted to suit.
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