Steam Meters Justify Investments To Interbrew

Spirax Sarco steam meters are helping Interbrew track down the best ways to save energy around its Boddingtons brewery.

"If you can't measure it you can't control it," says Utilities manager Barry Thorpe.

The Boddingtons Brewery (producer of Boddingtons beer) operates three 11,350kg/h boilers, which supply steam to process and space heating applications over the entire site.

The company has been working to cut its energy consumption since the introduction of the Climate Change Levy, but efforts were being seriously hampered by the limitations of the company's existing steam meters.

A meter had been fitted to each boiler to monitor its output and two more meters were positioned on the steam mains on the factory floor.

These units were vortex flowmeters that could not provide the utilities team with the information that they needed to make a case for energy saving investments.

"When the steam flow rate dropped to below about 25 per cent of its maximum they would read zero," says Barry Thorpe.

"This meant they couldn't measure the base loads at weekends.

After we tested out some energy saving ideas on one of the boilers we couldn't tell from the readings which one was the most efficient." This made it very difficult for Barry Thorpe to justify investing any more in upgrading the other boilers.

Spirax Sarco's solution was to replace the old meters with five of its Gilflo ILVA flowmeters.

"These meters have a turndown of up to 100:1, which means they can go down to practically nothing and still read correctly," says Barry Thorpe.

When testing an energy-saving idea on one boiler, the team will now be able to quantify the savings and judge whether it's worth making similar changes to the others.

Their next big idea is to test whether it's worth turning the boilers off completely at the weekends.

"At the moment the system is kept ticking over to avoid the added complication of starting it from scratch each Sunday.

Now we can use the meters over several weekly cycles to compare whether it is worth shutting off the boilers for the weekend or leaving them running," he says.

Back to top