Ep. #13: Deep Dive - Trends in Cold Storage

This episode of Right from the Source features Matt Fleckenstein, a regional vice president of sales. even more energy efficient. You're listening to right from the source, expert insights on safety, security, Productivity, energy savings, Environment. At the loading diamond. Industrial or commercial facilities.

This is Right from the Source, and today's guest is Matt Fleckenstein. Matt, thanks for being on the podcast again. Ken, it's a pleasure. Thank you. Ready to talk about some trends in cold storage? Absolutely. All right. First off, let's uh remind everyone what your title is and and what your role is with Right Height. Matt Flackenstein. I am a uh regional vice president of sales.

as well as an industry specialist. My past twenty plus years has been in cold storage uh food and pharma grade facilities. Any hobbies or passions that you have? I'm in a little bit of a transition right now where it was uh maybe last time we spoke I was I was coaching and involved in kids' sports and all that. My kids are getting to the point they're

in college, out of college and uh one just exiting high school. So it's now transitioning into some fishing and uh and uh a little bit more enjoyment time with my wife and uh not focused so much on the kids a little. So you are a repeat guest here on the show, and in episode seven, we talked about general cold storage trends, but in this episode, we'd like to give um a little bit of a deeper dive into specific solutions.

Can you tell me a little bit about trends in making cold storage facilities more energy efficient? Uh energy's the biggest cost in in cold storage. You know it accounts for tens of thousands of dollars monthly that distracts from their bottom line of their profitability. Uh as we talked earlier about buildings getting taller. One is the the availability of land, two is the efficiencies of just dropping that cold straight down instead of setting it horizontally.

Some of the things that have led to this and led to a more efficient building, first and foremost, would be at the exterior of the building, the ceiling ability between a trailer and the building itself. Eliminating that white light, eliminating environmental exchange when the sectional doors are open into the building. to make this complete vapor barrier building.

and then we fill the sides of the building full of holes to let all this heat gain in when the whole goal of cold storage is to eliminate the ability for heat to enter the building. Heat and humidity is our faux So starting out at the seals and shelters. There's been an evolution of compression seals, which essentially are a gasket that go between the trailer and the building. Trailer compresses them tight, gives you a great environmental seal.

Uh but it's a very violent environment. Every time a a forklift goes in and out of the the trailer over the air ride suspension, that trailer goes up and down. You have forty to eighty thousand pounds. Pushed against that building. As you can imagine, there's a lot of friction, a lot of wear and tear on those products. Making those products to be able to absorb that impact and put materials that can uh endure that that abuse has been revolutionary in that sense.

having materials whereas a vinyl will start to crack or delaminate at fifty thousand folds, having a material that'll go to a hundred and fifty thousand fold. There's a lot of wear and tear and so forth that goes on out there. Along with that, shelters. A shelter is something that goes around the perimeter of the the exterior perimeter of that trailer, and the trailer penetrates into it.

Again, being able to seal up tight around that trailer. And regardless of whether you have a seal or a shelter, you have a 53 foot long trailer, 8.5 feet wide, amounting to well over 400 square feet of roof surface. And when they move that trailer or if they elevate the nose of that trailer, if there's any rain or any moisture or any water on top of that trailer,

all of it's coming back to your building. Therefore water diversion being a part of either your seal system or your shelter system is really becoming essential, especially in food and pharma, climate controlled environments, you know, electronics Paper products, pulp and paper and things of that nature as well. Other ways of sealing that building is traditionally people would use what we call a pit style leveler. It sits horizontal, it's at rest horizontally.

And there's a void underneath it, open to the outside elements, allowing air exchange underneath it, allowing air exchange up into your building, and we've gone into what we call vertically stored level. And just as it sounds, they're stored vertically. They stand upright. inside your building so your overhead door or your sectional door no longer

sits on top of a leveler which may not be level with the floor, adding seals to the bottom of the door constantly and so forth. Now with the vertical leveler, that overhead door comes all the way down to a nice level concrete floor. Eliminating that redundant replacement of seals and so forth. Uh seal, eliminating that air exchange, eliminating insect infiltration, rodent access to your building, the whole gamut.

Traditionally or up till just recently, even with the vertically stored leveler, once you open that overhead door before you put the leveler down in place, there was a void at the back of the trail. And there would be a big open space. Generally it'd be about a foot and a half tall, eight and a half foot wide. If you have a nine foot, ten foot door, then there you have it, nine, ten foot wide. Adds to a lot of square footage and an exchange of air there.

versus having a seal on the bottom of the leveler, which didn't come in place until the leveler's down and in place. Now we actually have new seals that stay in the pit floor at all times. They're removable for sanitation, cleaning, and washdowns. But anytime that you open that overhead door with the vehicle in place, you have the proper seal in place, eliminating that white light, eliminating that air expensive.

So again, just the evolution of these products, of the ceiling products between the trailer and the access of the building. Right. Stopping that infiltration of warmer air, humid air from even getting inside the facility to begin with, just eliminating that whole battle. Absolutely. That that is that is the battle in cold stores.

Yeah. Now you talked about um several products that work in the loading dock area. Can you talk a little bit about some products maybe that could work inside the facility that can help with uh in cold storage applications specifically with energy savings? Absolutely. So going in into the building, we've sealed up the outside of it. We're not allowing that heat and humidity into your building. Your dock may be refrigerated, however it's not gonna be as cold as your cooler or your freezer.

We look at doors. Vertical doors have been very popular because of the small footprint of them. As the buildings are getting taller, even if your door is moving 100 inches per second, once you start going 16 feet tall, 18 feet tall, then you want to start looking at doors at bipart or go horizontal. Uh a slower door even if it's going eighty five inches per second.

horizontally, you get full access, full height immediately. Again, sealing ability. The biggest thing with a cooler door or the freezer door is when that door is closed to seal around the perimeter properly. One of the phenomena, I guess you may call it, that's happening in cold storage is as you remove the heat from that room, as the room gets colder, that air becomes much more dense. Heat rises, cold air settles. So what's happening is as that cold air settles, we create a void up at the deck.

So when that door opens, your cold air spills out. It creates a turbulence at that door opening. And with the void up high, it starts grabbing all that warm air out on your dock. And the higher that door opens, the warmer the air it can grab and really sucks it into that room. So we want a quick door that's gonna open and close quickly.

seal well and have enough thermal value to it to avoid the convection uh or the migration of temperature through it. A lot of doors will use air curtains, air blowers, radiant heat. to help in their defrost system. When you're up 14, 16 feet in the air and you want to utilize radiant heat all the way down that door, you use an exponentially large amount of heat. It may be upwards of an 18 kilowatt heater. You may have multiple units up there.

So that door may cost you eighteen thousand or thirty six thousand dollars a year just in defrosting or or heating costs. to operate that door. So it becomes real important when you look at your door and the operation and functionality of that door is how much energy is it going to consume to protect that opening? Can you give um a specific example of a cold storage facility that has implemented this kind of equipment and

Kind of maybe give a a before and after almost like a a mini case study, if you will, on on potential energy savings that they experienced? It's exponential. it really does amount to tens of thousands of dollars per opening per per year. When we look at something as simple as somebody who has pit style levelers and closing off the face of that pit with a curtain.

That can amount to anywhere from three hundred to five hundred dollars a year per position in energy savings. So the the payback on it is In months, not years. Wow. Um you know, safety is another focal point for many facility managers.

Can you talk specifically about some of the equipment that might exist in a cold storage facility that can also improve safety? And you kind of mentioned some of those already at the loading dock. Absolutely. So what we're talking about now is more of a hazard recognition. So starting at at some of the most dangerous places is the outside of the building at the loading dock. People getting trapped behind the rear of a tractor trailer and the building and physically being crushed.

What we'll do is we'll put a motion sensor uh above that that seal or shelter at that position, which notifies you when a vehicle starts is backing up into position and we'll give you a thirty to forty foot uh advanced warning. It's an audible and visual warning saying, hey, something's coming at you. Heads up, head on a swivel, figure it out and get out of the way. Getting inside the building. And again, the goal is to keep people safe inside and outside of the building on and off of fork.

So a lot of uh safety has gone to and a lot of facilities have gone to blue lights on their forklifts. Wherever these forklifts drive on the back side of them, they have a blue light that hits on the floor about 10 to 12 feet behind them. Unfortunately when this drives into the trailer, once they're ten or twelve feet into this trailer,

that light disappears. So you don't know that there's action going on inside that trailer. So if you're a pedestrian or a forklift driver, you may not be aware of somebody's about to come flying out of that trailer or come backing out of that trailer. What we'll do is we what we call pedestrian view. Pedestrian view is letting you know that something is happening in that trailer. There's movement in that trailer. I know there's a person in there, I don't want to run him over.

If I'm outside that trailer and I'm driving perpendicular as passive traffic, Now all of a sudden that identifies the fact that hey Something may come out of there. A trailer could come out of there, heed the warning. So whether I'm a person, uh a personnel walking or somebody in a forklift. Know that I'm in danger. When it comes into identifying when somebody's on the other side of a door opening, as I said, we don't have a lot of windows.

in freezer doors, in cooler doors. What we do is we put motion sensors on both sides of the door. And again, keep you in a safer environment. Same things with intersections, traffic intersections. Being able to identify when more than one vehicle is coming to an intersection from more than one direction. You now have the identification on the floor as well to see it, stop, enter with caution.

Along the whole topic of safety comes business intelligence. What we do, and now all of our equipment has the ability to talk to software. We have radios on all of our control boxes, which now tell you everything that's going on in your facility. How many interactions did you have at that at that intersection?

How many conflicts did you have if you came from the north or from the south or from the east, from the west? To be able to look at your traffic flows, when are you having these conflicts and how frequently are you having them? Do you need to change your traffic flow within your facility? So now all this intelligence can be collected and it's not just data, it can be organized and and put in in a uh uh more of a preemptive format which g allows you to make decisions before you have a problem.

Before we move on to our next question, I want to bring it back to uh just another sort of uh physical uh side of things with safety. Um as it relates to uh to doors. Can you can you go into uh some of the options there uh as far as um soft edge technology and and things of that nature as well? Most certainly. High speed doors came to the US in the nineteen eighties.

And that today it was how fast can you get them up? How fast can you get them closed? When they get hit, how fast can you repair them? What we've learned is doors don't tend to hit people, people tend to hit doors. So we've really simplified things with our soft bottom doors. We just don't see anything safe about putting a piece of metal over your head and giving you the potential for that image.

uh simplifying the door, allowing that door to be impact at great speeds with great impacts, and then to self-r uh refeed itself into the track.

So I think that just about does it for the questions that we had lined up for you today, Matt. Uh is there anything that uh we missed that you wanted to touch on? You know, it's really kind of the tip of the iceberg. We manufacture over 180 products for facilities. So we're talking about a small group of things. Uh and additionally, as we talked about doors within cold storage, uh a great disruptor or really industry first has been our our blast cell door.

You're in a five to ten below freezer, and a blast cell is a small room with large fans created to push that cold air through products to speed the freezing process. Generally you have about a sixty below zero wind chill in that area. So as you can imagine, that it's not a great place to hang out. Doors that were previously on the market to handle that environment may have been a$60,000 to$100,000 door.

So people would build their own. They'd use corrugated steel. They would use insulated sandwich panels. All of these options were very heavy, very cumbersome, and people would a lot of times use forklifts to move them. With that event, obviously they would rip them out of the tracks that that would help support them up at the opening of the doors. bringing them tumbling down, or just in the regular maintenance of them, took huge amounts of time, effort, and cost to keep them operational.

We make a soft door. It's a real lightweight frame. We put insulated curtains on it and allows it to very easily be open and closed, slid to the side, just like a barn door. The cost of these doors really almost makes them disposable. Though they're not and they're not intended to be disposable, but priced comparatively to what people were doing and the efforts and the costs that were going into their doors on a monthly basis.

comparatively simply say, Oh my gosh, I could throw this away and get a new one and I'm still coming out ahead. Um they have great longevity to them. And again, we're not looking for hermetic seal here. We're looking for the ability to trap that air in there and get that convection going through that air.

the product. So that's a whole that's another example of it. Like I say we manufacture uh just uh just north of 180 products within right height for the warehouse, loading dock equipment, barriers, uh high volume fans. uh and high speed doors. So Always happy to talk about this. Ken, it's always a pleasure to sit down and and talk cold storage with you.

Awesome. Well Matt, uh we thank you very much for the time here today and I'm sure we're gonna be talking about more details uh in the cold storage industry in in upcoming uh episodes. I love it. All right. If you enjoyed this episode of Right from the Source, be sure to subscribe on your preferred listening platform. Follow right height so that's the same. Want more supply chain logistics solutions for your facility? Visit right.com.