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Faunsdale, AL | The control box is between the ears of the guy that's running it right now. I want to rig up a thermostat and a programmable relay, but haven't spent the time to learn how to program the darned thing!
We bring the milk from the dairy with a skid steer and hook it up to the pump and heat exchanger, put in a filter, take off the drain valve for the "tank washer" and replace it with a cap and then turn on the water heater, the water pump and the milk pump. It takes a half hour or so to heat up depending on how cold a day it is, how much milk etc, so once the milk is rolling in the tote, I can go check heats or something for a little while before coming back to turn off the water pump. I stop at 153 F or there abouts, but I begin counting the hold time when it reaches 150 and hold for 15 minutes, but go a bit higher so it doesn't cool down below 150 before it's time. We can also run 145*F for 30 minutes, but that does take quite a bit longer. I have attempted 161 just to see if I could get there, but it takes long enough to get the additional heat in and then back out that it's not better. Also made a batch of cottage cheese a couple times when we had a lot of fresh cows' milk in the tank and I was trying that.
Our cooling down process is to turn off the water heater and open a faucet that allows cold water to come through the heat exchanger tubes and run out onto the floor. I usually use it to wash the buckets we bring milk from another site with, as well as cleaning up the area, the top of the tote tank etc. It will take 15 minutes or so to get down to 110F when we put it in 5 gallon buckets with snap on lids to take it to the calves.
I had saved a set of 3 "tubemaster" heat exchangers from a parlor remodel we did about 20 years ago and dug out an old milk pump and a water pump that were sitting on the shelf unused. I didn't know any way to calculate anything about how it would work, so I decided to just build it and test it. I wanted to do a HTST (161*F for 15 seconds) with a single pass, but once we piped it all up, the flow rate was so slow I couldn't really control it with the valve and milk pump like I had planned. That would have had us pumping from a raw milk tote through the pasteurizer and into another clean one.
At the time, we really needed to get this thing up and running, so I just reassembled everything to go to a batch process and we've been using it over a year now and really like it. The milk recirculates until it gets hot enough and we keep it circulating until it's ready to be put into buckets. If there is some delay and the milk gets cool before the calf crew arrives, it's not problem to warm it up a bit. Had planned to install a cooler in the space, but once we got going, I haven't really wanted one. We did install a control cabinet from an old bulk tank so that the system will CIP automatically. | |
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Pasteurizer room pics
