Built For Maximum Reliability - How Colmac Coil Hygienic Air Handlers Protect a Beef Processing Facility

• Food-safe environment maintained 24/7 with zero product temperature exceedances reported post-commissioning.

• Production runs uninterrupted through defrost. Sequential 3-coil defrost limits capacity loss to just 24 minutes per 3-hour cycle.

• Built so one failure never becomes a shutdown. Four blower motors across two units means any single motor loss retains 75% capacity, no halted production, no triggered sanitation event.

• $75,000 removed from the construction budget. EC motors with built-in variable speed control on exhaust fans and air coolers eliminated the need for a separate VFD starter panel entirely.

• Hygienic air controls with custom programming integrated seamlessly into the facility-wide systems.

• Custom triangular corner diffusers, manufactured to RC&S exact specifications, delivered target airflow with zero louver adjustments required after installation.

The meat processing facility added a new addition that produces 98–99% lean beef protein, which demands uncompromising temperature control, contamination prevention, and continuous uptime. The production room required a hygienic air handling system capable of maintaining a strict 42–45°F temperature, managing humidity, filtering supply air to food-safe standards, and transitioning daily between production and cleanup modes, all while protecting against the operational and financial consequences of any unplanned downtime.

RC&S engineered and installed a system built around two Colmac Coil HygenAir™ Hygienic Air Handling Units, in addition to Colmac industrial air coolers (evaporators) specified earlier in the project for a cooler. The two-unit strategy, redundant blower motors, sequential defrost, EC motor technology, custom diffusers, hygienic materials, and HygenAir™ Controls combined to deliver a high-performance, hygienic, and resilient solution that’s verified to rated capacity during independent commissioning.