In most cases, Econolisers are installed to replace traditional water bath style immersion sterilisers. There are a number of problems with these type of sterilisers, including:
- In order to be compliant, immersion sterilisers should be supplied with water at or above 82°C/180°F either constantly flowing or refreshed so often that the water is always clean and above 82°C/180°F. This is consistent with EU Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 which requires all equipment to be kept clean and to minimize the risk of contamination.
- In order to reduce water consumption, some sterilisers are fitted with manual refresh buttons or levers which the operator is supposed to press regularly to keep the water clean. In the reality of a meat processing plant, operators do not often have the time to press buttons so the water gets gradually more contaminated by organic matter. This introduces considerable risk of non-compliance both in terms of the same water being used across multiple carcasses and also in terms of your HACCP plan which cannot legally rely on the unmonitored visual discretion of a fast-moving line worker to maintain food safety.
- On top of this, because the water is not being refreshed often enough, the >82⁰C water in the feed pipe is sitting in the pipe and cools down (like a switched off radiator). So when it does enter the steriliser it will bring the overall temperature of the water in the tank down below 82⁰C. This is an immediate non-compliance scenario.
- Some immersion sterilisers will have a heating element which they will claim keeps the water >82⁰C. For this to be the case, once the water has been refreshed, the operator should wait for the whole bath to come up to temperature before dipping their knife in. This doesn’t happen, again resulting in non-compliance.
- This cooling problem is further exacerbated if the abattoir is feeding their immersion sterilisers with lower temperature water, for example at hand wash temperature.
- Due to the cooling effect of adding water that is below 82⁰C, there is a temptation not to refresh at all. Leaving water in the steriliser is effective at keeping it >82⁰C but that water gets more and more contaminated.
- All of the above means that a steam boiler or equivalent is needed to constantly produce >82⁰C water. The plant can never move away from this and adopt things like heat pumps or other forms of renewable energy.
The design of the Econoliser completely removes all of the above problems.
- In the Twin-Knife Econoliser, our spray approach means that only 0.14ltr of water is used per sterilisation cycle.
- Using such as small volume of water means that our knife steriliser only needs to keep a small 0.5ltr tank of water at 90⁰C to feed the spray cycle.
- The steriliser spray is triggered by the insertion of the knife into the Econoliser so there is no additional button to press for the operator, keeping you HACCP compliant.
- Every sterilisation cycle uses clean water at well above 82⁰C and that water immediately flows out of the sterilisation chamber. There is no standing water to become contaminated with organic material.
- Since the Econoliser has its own built-in water heater, it does not need to be fed with >82⁰C water. On beef kill floors processing an animal every 60 seconds, the Econoliser can be fed with cold water. On faster pork or sheep lines, the Econoliser will work effectively when fed with hand wash water at c.45⁰C.
- Removing the need to heat so much water centrally opens up the opportunity to turn down central boilers and potentially move to other approaches to heating water. Heat recovery from refrigeration units or Anaerobic Digestors is already working well and customers are also looking at heat pumps and electrically heated systems using wind and solar power.