Case Study - North Brewing Co. / GalxC Cooling

Whilst the GB Controls team has worked with GalxC Cooling on multiple projects over the years, this is our first project involving North Brewing as the end customer. GalxC Cooling approached GB Controls in 2020, to enquire abut building a more modern and sophisticated system with remote connectivity and a graphical touch screen interface. Subsequently, GB Controls has since built multiple control panels of varying size for breweries around the country. This site in particular the control panel is to aid with future expansion and to replace out dated control systems within the brewery.

North Brewery in particular required the new control panel to aid with future expansion and to replace out dated control systems within the brewery. The system is able to monitor temperatures with the information available to produce graphs live on the front panel touch screen or remotely via a web browser. Email alerts can also be set up for issues such as faulty temperature probes or a high/low temperature alarm.

The initial enquiry for the North Brewery site came to us in August 2021, with a completion aim for the end of September. Due to unavoidable site delays the project got pushed back until the end of November where we delivered the panel to GalxC Cooling ready for installation and commissioning.

When starting to decide how we would modernise the system the decision was made early on to write custom software in house to control the vessels through the use of a PLC (Programmable Logic Controller). We then had to agree on the control philosophy with the customer prior to building the control panel.

Once the control philosophy was agreed with the customer, the software was written then tested in house with screenshots sent to the customer of the user interface for their approval.

Feedback has been good on the vessel control panels we have supplied so far, we have also worked directly with the end client to enable wireless connectivity on one occasion. We have also simplified the user interface based on end user feedback.

Living in a digital world where information is key, we are increasingly seeing a rise in demand for remote monitoring. Systems that monitor values, such as temperature and pressure, with the need to be accessed remotely are becoming more popular. Monitoring a systems performance can now be done from the office instead of traveling to site, alongside allowing for remote trouble shooting with the aid of fault logs.