Many of the projects we get involved with begin with removing the basic cold room that was installed, often chosen on price.
When we are involved in a project we try our best to communicate the differences between a standard food cold room and a pharmaceutical grade cold room – there is often a large difference in price because they need to be designed and equipment selected to achieve the conditions required.
Its a very costly exercise and unfortunately we see many Clients going through the process of finding out the hard way.
A validated pharmaceutical cold room is expensive because the components used are often modified and carefully selected and installed to achieve suitable control stability with additional components and set up to achieve the control.
In 2020 we assisted a global pharmaceutical company to remove existing rooms built at the end of 2019 that simply couldn’t pass validation. We considered utilising the existing structures and HVAC plant but in the end we simply couldn’t guarantee the performance due to the very low standard of construction and undersized refrigeration equipment.
Within an 8 week programme we successfully designed, installed and validated 16No. pharmaceutical grade stability cold rooms and currently delivering a similar suite of rooms in Germany at the companies headquarters.
We will also be honest and upfront regarding the differences from an engineering perspective, it’s worth it in the end.