Ever wondered what keeps bulked food products fresh? The answer is a cold room.
Essentially, a cold room is a large, refrigerating storage where a specific temperature is artificially generated and controlled. These rooms are usually developed and used in food processing industries like frozen fish and meat products, agro-products, chocolate factories, supermarket storages, large warehouses, and so on. These rooms allow storing products in a cold environment below the outside ambient temperature, keeping them fresh.
Thus, keeping the cold rooms clean and safe is paramount. Below, we look at some effective ways to keep your cold room clean and safe by maintaining a checklist.
Why this Cold Room Maintenance Checklist?
A cold room maintenance checklist represents an organized guide, laying out the important and necessary aspects and steps that ensure safe and robust facilities inside your cold room storage area. You can ensure a proper safety audit of the area, and minimize risks by maintaining this checklist.
Also, this checklist ensures your food is kept safe and fresh.
Cold Room Features to Check
Before knowing the checklist and ways of maintaining it, you should know what aspects it covers.
Insulation
This is a key aspect of cold rooms because they are designed with high-quality insulation materials that help to maintain low temperatures. This also prevents the transfer of heat from the surroundings.
Temperature
There are cooling systems in these areas that regulate the temperature inside of it. Typically, these systems use a refrigeration unit, to remove heat in the area. The temperature is adjustable as per the products’ requirements.
Hygiene and Sanitation
These storage areas need vigorous cleaning and tidiness. Pest control and disinfection are important ways to keep these places safe and hygienic.
Furniture and Equipment
Cold rooms are usually stacked with shelves or racks to maximize storage capacity. The furniture is made of materials, like stainless steel, that can withstand cold temperatures and can be swiftly cleaned.
There are doors, too, designed to provide a robust seal from warm air infiltration. Made with insulated materials, the doors help to maintain a sufficient temperature and minimize energy loss.
Fire Safety
Fire drills are common to ensure prompt fire detection and suppression systems. Employees receive training, too, for fire emergency responses.
Lighting Systems
Also, proper lights generate minimal heat and suit low-temperature environments. A good lighting choice could be LED lights because they produce minimal heat and consume energy less.
Staff Safety
Ensuring a safe environment for your employees is paramount. You should ensure adequate break and restroom facilities as well as PPE materials if needed.
Documentation & Records
Logbooks are essential as they provide records of temperature, inspections, and incidents. These records offer you patterns, trends, and data for audits, evaluations, and continuous improvements, as and when needed.
Before beginning any maintenance, it’s important to prepare adequately. This includes gathering the necessary tools and ensuring the cold room is empty and defrosted.
You can also read this article to understand more about the cold room in detail.
How Frequently Should You Clean Your Cold Room?
Ensuring the safety of cold rooms can done daily, weekly, biweekly, or even monthly. Depending on the priority of the aspect on the maintenance checklist, safety checks are done on varying periods.
Also, before initiating the maintenance checks, you should gather and keep aside the important cold storage tools and equipment, ensuring an empty and defrosted room. This step is crucial as it helps you keep the all-important equipment clean, ready, and properly functioning.
Following, we look at the checklist components as per time and duration:
Daily Checks:
- Leaked water, compressor oil, or waste materials clean up.
- Adequate temperature for products’ freshness and safety.
- Ensuring no buildup of ice in the evaporator.
- Checking the Freon levels.
Weekly Checks:
- Possible wear and tear or broken parts/components on entrance seals.
- Applying cleaning chemicals to the room for deep cleaning of the area.
- Proper organizing of equipment, materials, or products (can also be done daily, if enough time is at hand)
Monthly Checks:
- Setting the cold room temperature as per season.
- Cleanliness of both the evaporator and fin. In the case of the evaporator, ensure that the casing and blowers are clean, too.
- Properly working check valves.
- Reversed blowing is working effectively.
- Adequate and proper defrosting function
- Comprehensive system tests to detect and fix any possible malfunction.
Cold Room Maintenance Practices in Bangladesh
Bangladesh’s economy is driven heavily by businesses and factories that produce edible, agricultural, or food products. So, the demand for cold room manufacturers and suppliers is always high.
Companies like Earnest offer world-class manufacturing facilities making it a leading cold room manufacturer, exporter, and supplier in Bangladesh. You can buy cold storage rooms from Earnest, either in prefabricated units or specially fabricated only, depending on your specific needs. Learn more about Earnest’s cold room solutions.
Final Words
The rapid advancement of technology and the development of more plants across Bangladesh has boosted the demand for factory components and equipment.
Consequently, the number of cold storage or cold room manufacturers is on the rise. However, businesses and owners want the highest quality and safest cold rooms. So, you can choose the best cold room suppliers that offer superiorly fabricated rooms, with heavy-duty flush-fit doors and properly designed walls and ceiling panels.
By harnessing the power of technology, proper cold room aspects, timely maintenance measures, and enhanced architectural designs, firms like Earnest can pave the way for more industrial developments, boosting and sustaining businesses across the country.
