quires ventilation, care must be taken in
placement of the exhaust and/or the intake units so that the intake units are not
in line with the dirty air exhaust ducts.
Small oversights like the misplacement
of these units can and do cause contamination problems in food processing
plants that sometimes take months and
many dollars to track down.
down condensate from overhead areas
and from the equipment prior to
startup. n
Don Graham, president of Graham Sanitary Design Consulting, LLC, has provided
sanitary design consulting services to the
food industry since 1998. He can be
reached at grahamdj@prodigy.net or
517.796.1733.
Reference
1. Food and Drug Administration Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Division of Cooperative Programs
Milk Safety Branch. 1986. Dairy Products Initiatives Preliminary Status Report. Washington, DC.
Ideal Air System
The ideal air system can be summa-
rized as follows:
• It cools or heats to the degree
required
• It humidifies and/or dehumidifies to
the degree required
• It filters for clean air
• It keeps air ducts out of the process-
ing room
• It is not a source of contamination
• It distributes the air to the necessary
places
• It pressurizes the room
For more information about air flow design,
visit
www.foodsafetymagazine.com/
signature.asp
Cold Room Cleaning
One last idea for the processor utilizes cold room processing. When
cleanup time comes at the end of a processing shift or shifts and hot water is
utilized to clean the equipment and processing room, a heavy fog develops. This
fog is not only dangerous for the cleaning workers but also creates a lot of condensate on the equipment, ceilings, walls
and any cold surface in the room. The
solution to this is the following: At the
end of the processing shift, immediately
turn off the refrigeration and turn on the
heaters. Heat the room up to around 80
°F. Then, start the washdown procedure.
Much less fog will be produced, and a
faster cleaning/sanitation process will result. As soon as the hot water cleaning is
finished, turn off the heat, start up the
exhaust fans and turn on the refrigeration. Sweep all that moisture-laden warm
air out of the room and start the cool-down process. This will not cause a more
expensive cool-down because cold air
holds relatively less moisture than warm
air and quickly becomes saturated. It will
cost less to cool down a partially saturated warm room than a completely saturated cold room due to the latent heat
of water. It will also save time and
money when you do not have to wipe
