The frozen food manufacturer has commissioned a second Grundfos pump audit, which found its pipes were 82% inefficient and it has upgraded to one of its Hydro MPC-E booster systems, which it claims saves £12,262 a year.
Hungary expansion
Ian Dure, business development manager, Grundfos, told FoodProductionDaily.com the firm celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and plans to have a big party for key clients and staff in May.
He said the company is continually evolving as an organisation globally, opening factories in Mexico, North America, and China, and has plans for an expansion in Hungary.
“The Food and Beverage industry didn’t exist for us as a market 20 years ago but things have evolved and now there is more demand for technical expertise,” said Dure.
“Optimizing pump efficiency has grown in the last five years and high efficiency motors and pumps are the number one buying factor. We worked on the expansion of Nestlé’s coffee manufacturing facility in Tutbury, Derbyshire, UK and we’ve seen increased demand for our energy audit and we launched a dedicated team two years ago.”
He said its energy team was called in to Birds Eye to investigate three pumps that were causing process issues due to high running and maintenance costs.
Following on-site investigations, Grundfos provided an energy check report that enabled the customer to make an informed decision about replacing the pumps.
Old equipment
“The old pumps were causing process issues because Birds Eye had been running them for too long at low demand. Because of the age of the equipment, there was a significant amount of maintenance needed on it,” he said.
Dure, who has worked for Grundfos for 10 years, added because of interest in its energy audits the company was setting itself an ‘ambitious growth target’ for the F&B sector with strategic projects in mind to ‘become better than our competitors’.
He said by using two digital gauges on the suction and discharge side of the pumps it can measure the fluctuation of pressure that then sends a single to a data logger, so it can evaluate what’s happening in the line.
It set up a niche sector of Corporate Responsibility Managers, two years ago to deliver a program of identification, system auditing, suppliers, new product installation and removal of existing equipment which it can scrap and give the customer the off-set costs from that.
'Manually throttled'
“We want to be responsible as a business and over the last five years we have developed a programme where we take to market the concept of energy optimising existing plant equipment,” added Dure.
“A lot of industries are using old pumps which are 35 years old and running them 24-hours a day, they don’t realise how much their pumps are costing. As long as the pumps are seen to be doing their job and they deliver water that’s all the manufacturers care about.
“What we see on a daily basis is an awful lot of old pumps that aren’t controlled, they are manually ‘throttled’ and wasting energy.
“If companies invest money following an energy audit, they are looking at payback of six months to three years.”