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northeastern Ohio | In 1987 we built a new parlor and put in a new Surge 1500 gallon tank with two 5 hp compressors. It worked great and cooled fast. In 1995 we needed to upgrade to a 2000 gallon.
We purchased a tank from Surge, but by then they were made by Mueller. We installed it and cooling was terrible!!!!! Not even close to the specs. Our dealer made many calculations and tried everything to get it to cool better with no success. Surge sent another tank and it was worse!!!!!!! They sent area reps and company techs and none of them could make it cool normally.
They finally did a flow test and found that the plates did not have enough flow. They sent a guy with a tank of high pressure nitrogen and expanded one plate to see if that would fix the problem. It worked!!! Surge showed all the test results to Mueller and proved that Mueller was responsible for the poor performing tanks (our tanks were not the only ones with this problem.... all the Surge tanks that Mueller was shipping at that time were under spec). Mueller "fixed" the problem and sent us a THIRD tank.
Tank #3 performed perfectly... until 2010 when it developed a Freon leak at one of the plates. We had it repaired at a cost of about $2700. Repair guy told me that it was a poor design with too few of support legs. This allows the tank to flex and weakens the spot welds.
So long story and I'm not sure that I have a point. Was Mueller to blame for the poor cooling? Was Mueller to blame for the poor design? I don't know the answer. They might have simply been following Surge specs and the failures would be the fault of Surge. Or they might have cut some corners to make a competitor's product look poor..... But it makes me hesitate recommending Mueller.
I would call the tank repair guy (he advertises in the Hoards classifieds) and ask him for his expert opinion on which is the better design. I would think the main factors would be plate area (might not matter if the flow is poor), number of legs and thickness of material used (compare the weight of each tank).
Edited by Jay NE Ohio 6/21/2017 16:04
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Which milk tank is better?
