Fullwood Soft Start Cooling for Efficient Milk Chilling
Published:May 29, 2008
Source :Stackyard
A new cooling system that reduces the risk of small volumes of milk becoming frozen has been launched by Fullwood under its Packo brand of milk cooling tanks.
The Soft Start Cooling system (SSC) has been designed to safely and efficiently cool small volumes of milk quickly, but without the risk of the milk being frozen. The system is available on the complete range of Packo direct expansion (DX) milk cooling tanks and cooling units.
The new system adjusts the tank’s cooling power according to the current milk temperature and the volume of milk in the tank. The Packo SSC system continuously assesses the temperature of the milk as well as monitoring the milk that is entering the tank. This ensures that no ice is formed within the tank and results in a gentle and soft cooling of the first milk that enters the tank. This helps to protect the quality of the milk and reduce the risk of lost income due to poor milk quality.
When the milk level exceeds a pre-set volume, the intermittent cooling function is by-passed enabling the bulk tank to function normally.
“The new Soft Start Cooling system is designed to be used in situations where there may only be a small amount of milk in the bulk tank,” explains Les Strickland, Fullwood UK field sales manager. “For example, the system is ideally suited to dairy units that use Automatic Milking Systems (AMS) or which only have a relatively small number of cows in comparison to the tank volume. Similarly, the system is perfect for herds with very seasonal calving patterns. For these farms, there will be certain times of the year when there is very little milk being produced as most cows will have been dried off.
“Usually, when there is only a small volume of milk in the bulk tank, the milk will either not be chilled quickly enough or will freeze. Either way, this can have a detrimental effect on milk quality, and in the worst case scenario can have a negative impact on the price paid for that milk. The Soft Start Cooling system overcomes these problems by assessing how much milk is in the tank and adapting cooling requirements accordingly.”
The new system works in conjunction with Packo’s Dolphin control system that uses a large LCD display screen to allow quick and easy access to the tank’s cooling, agitating and cleaning functions. Dolphin also monitors the tank’s activities and has the option to forward an SMS message to a mobile phone to warn of any problems.