Today is World Refrigeration Day (26th June 2024), it's a campaign covering the globe to raise awareness of the importance of refrigeration, air-conditioning and heat-pumps. Modern day living is heavily dependent on this industry – such as for food safety, air-conditioned offices and hospitals, data centre cooling systems, chilled vaccines or the transport/storage of blood and donor organs.
A ‘refrigerator’ started off as little more than a box with a block of ice used to keep food cool. Many years later, chemicals like calcium chloride were added to water used for cooling and this eventually led on to an array of countless different refrigerants used in refrigeration and air conditioning systems, changing and adapting over many decades and culminating with HFCs which were a better alternative to certain older refrigerants (as less damaging to the ozone layer), but HFCs were never going to be a ‘forever’ solution.
Now around 100 years since the first refrigerators were produced, the next big thing in refrigerant is A2L. It’s non-toxic, only mildly flammable, has a far smaller environmental impact and still offers similar performance to that of HFCs.
Beehive have been developing A2L products over the past year or two and we are now pleased to be able to offer A2L (CAT I & CAT II) ready products for our customers.
Nowadays we understand how goods can be affected by poor temperature management and can keep food/medicines with a longer shelf life, if properly managed.
Air conditioning isn’t just a luxury, it is now an essential requirement in any office, especially with continual increasing global temperatures. It provides not only a warming/cooling service, but also has the added benefit of reducing allergies and asthma symptoms by ventilating the area to reduce dust and pollen in the environment. Investing in a good quality air-conditioning system will save you money on the long run and if properly (and regularly) maintained, can keep energy costs down and provide a comfortable working environment.
Keeping up to date with the maintenance of your system is a must. Even just leaving the filters unchanged can decrease the air flow and become a new source of air pollution. Other ways to maximise the efficiency is to carry out regular visual checks, ensure nothing is impairing the air flow, keep the coils clean and repair any leaking ducts.
At Beehive, we recognise the value of our industry. We manufacture coils for a multitude of sectors and applications; whether that’s for cooling data centres, air-conditioning hospitals or refrigerating supermarkets, to name but a few.
Whilst we design and produce many ‘new build’ projects, we are very keen to promote refurbishment as an alternative wherever possible. This is beneficial in many ways to the customer as 'REFURB, NOT REPLACE' can save time, money, energy and should result in a much smaller carbon footprint for your project.
Have a look at our recent news articles where we’ve been working on refurbishing some large data centre coils to save our client cost and give results in a much faster timescale compared to buying a new unit.
We look forward to supporting our customers as we continue into A2L development and are excited to see what the next 100 years bring!