Welcome! Here are the website rules, as well as some tips for using this forum.
Need to contact us? Visit https://heatinghelp.com/contact-us/.
Click here to Find a Contractor in your area.

Generic Engineering ?

JCL
JCL Member Posts: 3
I need some help with a project. I have a local dairy farmer bottling his own milk in glass bottles. ( A nice cottage industry here in Washington State, able to deal with the economy his own way with a Niche "old school milk") He recently purchased a used bottle washer with no specifications or instructions. Manu. date around 1960. It originally was steam driven to make the hot water with a 1-1/2 coil in the lower tank and silent heaters in the upper 2- compartments. The bottles ride a conveyor and are submerged in the lower tank, then pumped water sprays through orifices on the upper end to finish the washing and rinsing.

What I want to do, is switch to a hydronic hot water boiler method and custom make some stainless manifolds, headers, radiators, coils to drop in the tank and pump 190'f water through them to make the hot wash water or other method.

What I can not find, do to lack of experience or otherwise is how to determine the BTU capability of 1-1/2" pipe.

The reason to bag the steam option is that a low pressure steam boiler with a 100% make-up water with a pre heater is absolutely ridiculous in price.

A hot water boiler would be much easier to deal with.

Thanks,

Jamie

Comments

  • Paul48
    Paul48 Member Posts: 4,469
    What

    does the local regulatory agency say about the temperature requirements for sterilizing?It's not something you can,or should make assumptions about.
  • JCL
    JCL Member Posts: 3
    Temp?

    The unit used to live elsewhere in Washington, however the previous owners will not help as they are out of business. The chemical guy is my source of temperature at this point. He is aware of the required temp as is the Dairy Farmer. He is already in the process of washing bottles, just on a smaller scale till we fire off this much bigger unit. 

    A clarification, I want to build indirect-fired coils out of Stainless Steel.

    Jamie
  • Mark Eatherton
    Mark Eatherton Member Posts: 5,853
    Immersed coil versus flat plate heat exchanger...

    If it were me, I wouldn't attempt to use immersed coils. These coils need a huge temperature differential to get the BTU's to jump across the bridge. I would use a flat plate heat exchanger, which can add a LOT more square feet, and it also utilizes forced convection to assist in the transfer of BTU's. With that said, you have to know what your load is before you can size ANYTHING pertaining to this system.



    Loads include heating the water from cold start to the final temperature as dictated by the health department (probably in excess of 180 degrees F), evaporation cary off, bottle cary off, and machine skin losses. It all has to be sized based on worse case scenario (maximum number of bottles, coldest ambient temperatures, etc). Don't forget to provide a good wye strainer which can be easily serviced to eliminate milk stone from the process stream. I'd also recommend you consider some means of drain waste heat recovery for the rinse cycle if it is a one pass cycle.



    ME
    It's not so much a case of "You got what you paid for", as it is a matter of "You DIDN'T get what you DIDN'T pay for, and you're NOT going to get what you thought you were in the way of comfort". Borrowed from Heatboy.
This discussion has been closed.