Summer Cooling Strategy

Spring has sprung.  Flowers and trees are in bloom.  Here in Iowa, we are starting to see temperatures in the 70’s, and I’m loving it!  As we shift from winter time ventilation solutions, to summer time solutions, it’s important to understand the different strategies we use to create comfortable workplace environments.

 

Summer Strategy

As the temperatures start to increase, we start to see employees in shorts and short sleeves, we start to see doors being propped open, dock doors left all the way up, exhaust fans turned on, and personal fans being used (most production floors are not Air Conditioned!).  The problem is those fans are only moving the inside air.  Inside air that is hot and contains whatever contaminants that are in the building.  We do things a bit different.

 

When we get calls for summer cooling applications, 9 time out of 10 the customer already has several exhaust fans installed.  But they don’t seem to be doing much.  Sure, if they close all the doors, they will see a negative air pressure situation which often can become dangerous, but it’s not helping with the heat  inside the building.  Those exhaust fans are being fed randomly by whatever door, crack or crevice the outside air can come in through.  This is not nearly enough to affect the production floor.  You have to FEED those exhaust fans.  We do this with 11,000 cfm Blue Fans.  Bringing fresh air in, through the wall, and pointing the Blue Fans to the floor, directly at workers and workstations is the BEST solution.

 

Recently we had a customer call who has 18 large ovens in their facility.  Not only do they have ovens, the product that comes out is 225 degrees!  Pallets of this product just sit in front of these (3) Blue Fans waiting to be processed.  The workers on each side are sweating all day long.  When it’s 90 degrees outside, it’s 110 inside.  Miserable.   The plethora of personal fans spread throughout this area are caked in dirt and grime, just spreading that hot inside air around.

 

Now they have fresh, cooler, outside air coming at them, at a high velocity and quantity!  At the opposite end of these fans, is a 36,000 cfm exhaust fan that will draw this air through the facility and out of the roof.  Not only will this cool the employees, it will also help cool those hot parts that sit overnight waiting to be processed.  This customer plans to keep the fans running through the night when temperatures drop which will make the a major difference to employees coming to work in the morning.

 

In total we installed (6) Blue Fans for Phase 1 of this project.  They have 176,000 cfm of exhaust fans they would eventually like to match with Blue Fans.  I suggested (16) total fans so we can make ALL the employees comfortable.