Days in the Cold Room (6/17/2021 - 6/18/2021)

On Thursday, we were working in the cold room. The cold room is in between the preparation room and the walk-in freezer room. The flash freezing and the bagging of the mangos happens in the cold room. The cold room is cooled with a fairly standard home mini split AC unit. In order to get more cooling ability out of the AC, we used a CoolBot controller. It gets chilly. The AC is factory programmed to make the room no colder than 60 °F, but with the CoolBot we were able to get the room down to nearly 45 °F. We were running some tests with both the AC and the flash freezer, and everything was going well. The picture below shows me inside the cold room with AP standing outside in the preparation room. Also visible in the picture is the mini door (below the window) where peeled and sliced mangos can be passed into the cold room for freeze processing.  

On Friday, we were working in the cold room again. The equipment testing was going very well until it wasn't. We were about to start flash freezing actual mangos, and then the flash freezer wouldn't turn on. We did everything we could to get it working again, which involved reading the user manual and pushing buttons on the controller. We had a pretty good system. When one of us would get tired of reading and pressing buttons, he would pass it off to another. When the next got tired, he would do the same. Rinse and repeat, for hours. Since the flash freezer was the critical piece of the entire process, it was imperative that we did everything we could to try to get it fixed. 

On a different note, we're going to start a band. We're not sure when this picture was taken or what was happening, but we've decided that it will be a great album cover picture. Our band's name will be Boys out the Fridge. Look for our album drop Fall 2021.