Lakeside Foods

Energy Efficient Ammonia Refrigeration - Lakeside Foods

Setting evaporative condensing unit

“The Rohde Brothers team does an outstanding job communicating with me all deadlines and any changes taking place throughout the project. Rohde’s foreman on the stand-alone freezer project at Lakeside Foods work hand-in-hand with our foreman to ensure the project was completed safely and on time,” 

“Because of their (Rohde Brother’s) professionalism and ethical work practices…it is easy to see how they’ve been successful for so many years.” 

Michael Bartelt

Project Manager

Rohde Brothers Inc. installed the refrigeration and HVAC systems for a new stand-alone freezer building for Lakeside Foods in Manitowoc. The freezer is 138,000 square feet and operates at -10°F. The aggressive construction schedule for this project did not allow room for any missteps or delays in any phase of the work. The complex mechanical systems within the building required careful coordination, Rohde used 3D building information and shop prefabrication, instead of the traditional method of field coordination to avoid substantial delays in the schedule.

Customized Solution:

  • Rohde used 3D building information and shop prefabrication to the fullest extent possible in order to reduce field manpower requirements, increase the speed of project delivery, and to ensure space was allocated to fit everything required by all contractors including plumbing and electrical contractors
  • Allen-Bradley programmable logic control system was employed at the facility to continuously monitor and control the entire system to ensure safe and energy efficient operation
  • Rohde fabricated a variety of system components in our shop including ductwork, piping, and control panels
  • Rohde built subassemblies as large as practical considering trucking and material handling requirements. Building components before space on site was available helped us maintain the demanding project schedule
  • Rohde installed all components for the freezer including:

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Boutique Hotel – Ground Loop Geothermal

Boutique Hotel - Geothermal Ground Heating

Completed Entryway After First Snowfall

Through innovation in engineering Rohde collaborated with a full-service boutique to install a $10 million snow melt system to enhance their guest experience and to protect their parking structure. The design-build rehabilitation included engineering, steam fitting, plumbing and HVAC work.

The system was one of the most aggressive design solutions ever done for such a large and varied area of an outdoor structure,” said Rick Nierzwicki, CG Schmidt Managing Director. According to Nierzwicki, “I don’t believe the project would have been successful without the attention to detail by the Rohde team and their commitment to meet an extremely aggressive construction schedule.

Rick Nierzwicki

Managing Director, CG Schmidt

Customized Solution:

Design and installation of a 70,000 square foot in-slab snow melt system for the entire parking structure, including the parking deck, drives, sidewalks, stairwells and ramps. It included 25 zones and over 22 miles of buried PEX tubing.

Furnish and install steam to hot water heat exchangers, pumps, hydronic equipment, hot water piping in-slab tubing and controls for the entire snow melt system.

Major equipment supplied included a 3-stage high pressure steam reducing station, two steam to hot water heat exchangers, hot water pumps, expansion tank, glycol fill system and snow melt controls.

Addition and modification of storm water drainge for the parking deck.

Replacement of parking structure ventilation equipment with new fans along with controls to maintain ventilation rate to prevent carbon monoxide buildup.

Mercury Marine

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Gold-N-Plump Foods

Waste Heat Recovery - Gold N Plump Poultry

Custom-Heat-Pump-Uses-Waste-Heat

“As we look forward to this cost savings over time we realized that we would have gone in the same expensive wasteful direction if we had not met with Rohde Brothers, Inc. The solution that they provided in two of our locations is exactly what we’d hoped for, and that is pretty challenging to come by in today’s business environment.

Anonymous

Senior Facilities Engineer

The Rohde team fully engineered the mechanical and electrical systems to recover waste heat being generated from the ammonia cooling system for use in heating water for production sanitation needs.

Customized Solution:

  • A custom designed heat pump that is 8 times larger than what is traditionally available

  • Directly recovering heat from an ammonia refrigeration system

  • Integration of hot water heating system controls with the ammonia refrigeration controls

  • Remote monitoring and data collection

  • Rohde designed, engineered and implemented the system within 6 months, typically during scheduled plant shutdowns. Working closely with Gold’n Plump’s team, Rohde ensured integration of the new system with minimal disturbance to the existing facility and processes in place

  • Rohde engineers scaled an existing heat recovery design to accommodate the plant’s daily use of 1,000,000 gallons of 140°F water for production and sanitation

  • This is the largest heat pump heat recovery unit in Wisconsin

  • Saved Gold’n Plump $178,000 per year in energy costs

Mercury Marine

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Energy Conservation – Grande Cheese – Multiple locations

Energy Conservation - Grande Cheese

Evaporative-Cooling-Towers-w-award

“As we look forward to this cost savings over time we realized that we would have gone in the same expensive wasteful direction if we had not met with Rohde Brothers, Inc. The solution that they provided in two of our locations is exactly what we’d hoped for, and that is pretty challenging to come by in today’s business environment.

Anonymous

Senior Facilities Engineer

In just 7 ½ months, Rohde redesigned, engineered and implemented an ammonia refrigeration system expansion, with integrated controls, using the existing infrastructure. The plan was to save the client’s capital in installing a much more efficient system that not only uses less energy, but requires much less maintenance to operate between service oriented repairs. The design needed to be changed to reduce the amount of ammonia in the system while still providing the proper cooling needed for their cold storage facility. The benefit of lower pressure operations were felt by keeping the system out of the threshold of the EPA’s PSM Program, saving $30k in consulting fees.

Customized Solution:

  • Rohde’s redesign eliminated the high-pressure receiver and significantly reduced the ammonia charge required in the system. Rohde’s design reduced it to 7,000 lbs. from the initial base bid of 14,000 lbs.

  • Variable frequency drives on all components including the two new 150 HP compressors.

  • Low discharge pressure design that allowed the system to run at much lower pressure in the cooler months.

  • Redesign of all the expansion devices such that high pressure liquid was not required to get the liquid into the various evaporator coils.

  • Eliminated the need to change relief valves every five years by redesigning to remove surge drums.

  • Coil circuiting designed to carry oil back to the recirculation vessel to drain at a single point in the ammonia room rather than several points on the roof.

  • Saved the client over 38% in electrical costs and significantly reduced maintenance and operating costs.

  • Gas costs reduced by 5-10% with significant reduced maintenance costs.

  • · Eliminated the need for a full Process Safety Management program (PSM) and $30,000 in consulting fees by reducing charge holds below EPA and OSHA thresholds.

Mercury Marine

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Mercury Marine – Utility Piping Retrofit

Mercury Marine Utility Piping

Filter installation 2020-05-19

“We (Mercury Marine) are continuously modifying and adding to our operations to accommodate new engine programs. Rohde Brothers, Inc. has provided design, engineering support and installation for many of these projects in our manufacturing and design facilities. In sever of the recent addition, Rohde Brothers, Inc…to provide entire mechanical systems integration packages and added their own value engineering to reduce installed cost and operating cost while enhancing our original performance expectations,”

Stephen Mlinaz

Senior Facilities Engineer, Mercury Marine

Mercury Marine utilizes a central recirculated cooling water system for cooling components in their die casting plant. Without cooling water, components and equipment begin to overheat within minutes.  As Mercury prepared for long-term growth of the die casting operations, the need for upgrading the recirculated cooling water system became critical.  The cooling towers were maintained well by Mercury Marine, but were operating many years beyond their rated life, and were showing signs of their age.  The original system was expanded multiple times through the decades, with multiple supply and return lines in each of the utility tunnels.  Rohde worked closely with Mercury Marine to upgrade the system over a three year period with new cooling towers, pumps, controls, piping, and filtration equipment processing up to 2,330 gallons of water per minute. Changes in die casting technology required improved filtration to prevent plugging of die cavities and ineffective part cooling, which resulted in significant downtime, loss of productivity, and defective parts.

The Rohde team completed a sequenced rebuild of a plant-wide recirculated water cooling system for their aluminum die-casting operations, with no disruption to plant production. Water flow rates were reduced to allow for lower pumping energy costs and improved water quality, leading to reduced maintenance costs.  The phased upgrade of the system started with replacement of one cooling tower in a temporary location.  Sequential replacement of the entire network of supply and return piping for the system was started after the first cooling tower was replaced.  Installing new piping while maintaining flow of water to the plant with highly congested utility tunnels required careful layout and review off every piping system within the plant.  With the piping replaced and new cooling towers in place, planning for the permanent system installation started.  The final phase of the project included replacement of the pumps and controls along with relocation of the cooling towers to a permanent location on the roof of the plant.

The Rohde Customized Solution:
  • Replaced cooling towers sequentially first in temporary location and then final location to maintain plant operations

  • Replaced recirculated cooling water piping in the tunnels serving more than 30 die cast machines

  • Added and upgraded piping at die cast machines as individual cells were added or reconfigured

  • Replaced the original side stream strainer with two full flow multi-bag filtration units.

  • Allen-Bradley Micrologix control system integrated with the plant Factory Talk SCADA system

  • Careful planning and coordination with plant operations to complete the installation without disruption of plant operations

  • Ongoing monitoring and maintenance of the complete system to ensure peak efficiency and performance

Mercury Marine

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