A major malt and malt ingredients manufacturer had identified the possibility of using waste hot water from one part of their process to heat water for another process.

Suffolk Automation identified that technology used to control all these processes centrally would provide a number of advantages and, after investigating the current market and realising there was no current technology available that could achieve this ‘off the shelf’, began a development project to see if the development of such technology would, in fact, be achievable.

We developed and installed a control system that monitored both operations and diverted the hot waste hot water through a heat exchanger to heat water required for the steeping process. This gave significant energy savings to the customer.

As well as enabling an operator to manage the physical aspects of the process centrally from an industrial PC (SCADA) and in real time, it was vital that the technology also include an alarm system to alert the operator of any issues during operation.