From Lab to Bar ...

When Innserve, a leading innovator in the hospitality drinks dispensing market needed a monitoring system for their new test centre, surprisingly they found what they were looking for from medical equipment manufacturer Planer plc - specialists in freezer control and temperature monitoring in the medical cryogenic industry.

Innserve, based in Tadcaster York, needed a system to provide technical data on the spectrum of dispensing equipment - from cellar to above bar. They commissioned Planer of Sunbury to build a computerised dispense and temperature software monitoring system as well as to supply the hardware.

Innserve, part of the BDA Technical team, wanted the test centre to be available for brand owners, retailers and equipment manufacturers to gain useful and independent test results on various equipments so that OEMs, purchasers or end users could be satisfied that choices had been independently tested and approved in order to avoid any problems in implementation.

The Test and Development Centre comprised three areas; a cooler bath temperature monitor for integral coolers’ with python recirculation in-line sensors, plus an energy monitor capturing power consumption, linked to the main software data system; an ice wash performance test equipment to BFBi standard - as well as the BDA python value procedure - with in-line dispense sensors with multiple temperature capture (per drink dispensed) and an automatic average figure calculation plus digital weigh scales for accurate ice bank and cooler weight measurement.

The Planer system is specially adapted from its Assure24 seven range and is capable of capturing core and peripheral temperatures, flows and also energy consumption of the cooler during the test. The system uses 29 different temperature probes spread across three separate rooms. It has ten flow monitoring units, three humidity sensors and three power monitoring units. This enables the capture of a variety of data from across the entire spectrum of dispense equipment.

At the heart of the computerised dispense system there is a programmable logic controller which, coupled with the Planer proprietary software, enables the user to configure tests at infinite ranges of dispense amounts and test length. The dispense system enables control of up to ten different product lines, product dispense and dispense dwell times.

The three separate test rooms are first, a Cold Storage Room (4oC - 20oC) with full gas and dispense systems, with liquid storage capability to a maximum of 1,150 pints for full cooler ‘load’ testing. Secondly a Bar Top Dispense Test Room (18oC-40oC) and humidity control (20%-95% RH) with surface temperature monitoring for use in condensation Font testing. Thirdly a Main Cooler Test Room (18oC-40oC) with computerised test dispense system facility and BFBi cooler benchmarking python helix for correct storage of python undergoing test.

Typical the test centre aims to capture data on the Liquid storage temperature, the temperature and humidity measurement directly in all three test rooms as well as the Python recirculation temperatures. Additionally the In-line dispense temperature can be measured by product line and a predetermined dispense schedule tested with cooler bath temperature monitored. As an extra, the energy usage is monitored and the ice wash performance is tested along with the cooler weight measurement.

Click here to download the full press release (Adobe Acrobat PDF, 4231KB)