After many years and many thousands of dollars in repair bills (and more than a few grey hairs), SRA commercial refrigeration have finally upgraded their first Cheesecake store. SRA took a little over 7 man hours to fully upgrade all the refrigeration equipmnet in the Vic Park store. "In the past year a local manufacturer has begun manufacturing equipment right here in Perth.  The equipmnet is very competitivity priced and has all the bells and whistles. We quoted this upgrade a few years ago and it was just too expensive, the job we have just completed was about 40% cheaper than the original quotation due to the new Enthalpy equipment," says Darren Dwyer from SRA commercial refrigeration.

The Problem

All the cheesecake shops operate the chiller(-12'c) and the coolroom(+2'c) all from one 6HP R22 compressor. This is an unsupported configeration from the manufacturer because they do not rate there compressors to operate at -12'c on R22. It is this misconfigeration that we see in the form of burnt-out compressors about every 2-3 years. The Vic Park store has burnt out 3 compressors in abut 5 years.

The configeration of the Cheesecake stores was an attempt to save money on the original purchase of equipment . Tthis can be the only explaination for such a design misconfigeration, and unfortunately the results are very costly for many years. The other small problem is that because both the chiller and the coolroom are operated from one unit, if there is a fault the entire store is affected .

The Solution

SRA commercial refrigeration separated the individual systems and correctly sized a new condensing unit for each system. SRA also replaced the old control system with the latest Carel electronic controllers with HACCP functionality. All new equipmnet is now operating on R404a gas (an industry standard for this type of application). The Enthalpy equipment also has weather proof covers fitted.

Advantages of the new equipment

12 months warranty on all new equipment

The cheesecake store now has redundancy in the event of a problem

The electronic controllers now are all fully controlled from the disply above the door (no more climbing on the roof to enable defrost)

The design life of the new equipmnet is around 7-10 years.

Lower running costs - becasue the equipment now cycles off because it gets to the set temperature quicker.

Equipment is locally  manufactured using  modern parts which means that spare parts are easily accessible.