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FROZEN PEAS GET THE WATERMATIC TREATMENT!
Story
When you stand in your kitchen and look at a one kilo bag of frozen peas or petit pois, you realise that 40,000 tonnes of peas is an awful lot of peas by anyone’s standards, but that’s the quantity of the little round green chaps that flood through Birds Eye’s pea processing plant on the banks of the River Humber, within a stone’s throw of the quite beautiful Humber Bridge, just outside Hull.
Grown predominantly on the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire Wolds and transported to Hull for processing and packing, the whole ‘pea’ process demands huge quantities of water – from one of the hardest water areas in the UK, and in order for the processing machinery to run smoothly, without the problems associated with limescale build up, they need a little help from technology.
One of the bits of technology the have turned to, to achieve this is Watermatic’s KalGuard + system. Watermatic is part of the Sentinel Group, and is increasingly offering many large businesses a way of reducing their energy consumption by reducing limescale build up in their plant and systems. Untreated limescale in hard water areas of the country – that’s more than 60% of the UK – results in a need to use far more electricity than should be required for clean, scale free plant and hot water systems and in Birds Eye’s case even more problems associated with the freezing technology they utilise at their plant.
The Birds Eye pea line operates for just 6-8 weeks every year when the peas are picked and processed as rapidly as possible to capture the freshness of the newly picked peas. All the water coming into the factory comes through the KalGuard + unit before heading on down the line for secondary treatment at the plant’s massive commercial water softener installation, before heading off to the refrigeration and boiler plant in the factory.
Straightforward to install, KalGuard ‘+’ is an in-line powered electrolytic water treatment device that manages limescale within a system. The unit incorporates a simple to use, yet sophisticated controller to match the level of treatment to suit the systems water hardness conditions producing a measurable “residual” effect throughout the system, and as a result in independent testing at Cranfield University, has been shown to reduce limescale formation on heat transfer surfaces by up to 80 percent.
Kalguard + doesn’t soften the water – it simply alters the nature of the water to contribute to the reduction in limescale ‘fall out’ from the water onto heated surfaces – in a process known as retro-precipitation. Amongst other businesses that have already installed KalGuard ‘+’ equipment to protect their systems and reduce their energy consumption are well known names such as BMW, Whitbread and KrispyCreme Doughnuts!
Watermatic’s KalGuard ‘+’ units are proving hugely beneficial around the UK to hotels, nursing homes, leisure centres, food processing businesses, offices and retail outlets and finding a warm welcome across the globe – in places such as Cyprus which has horrendously hard water and in the Middle East which also suffers the problems of hard water on a major scale.
