Spiral Freezer RFQ Checklist

Nineteen items an engineer needs before a spiral belt freezer can be sized. Fill it in once and the quotation comes back with numbers instead of questions.

How to use it. Answer every row you can and write “unknown” where you cannot. An honest gap is faster to close than a guessed figure, because a guessed rate or a guessed piece thickness changes the belt area and therefore the price.

Section A — Product

#	What to state	Why it changes the machine
1	Product name and form (portion, fillet, patty, dough piece, tray meal)	Decides belt type, spacing and whether pieces will stick together
2	Thickest dimension of the thickest piece you will actually run	Sets the dwell time; sizing on an average piece is the most common cause of an under-freezing tower
3	Weight per piece and pieces per square metre of belt	Converts belt area into hourly capacity
4	Product temperature at the infeed	Sets the heat load the refrigeration circuit has to remove
5	Required core temperature at the outfeed	Defines when the product is finished, and it is the acceptance criterion at handover
6	Surface state: wet, glazed, marinated, breaded, dusted or dry	Drives the frost load on the coil and therefore the defrost strategy
7	Whether the product is packaged or naked on the belt	Packaging insulates, which lengthens dwell time at the same air temperature

Section B — Line and rate

#	What to state	Why it changes the machine
8	Sustained rate in kilograms per hour	Belt area is sized on this figure, not on the peak
9	Peak rate and how long the peak lasts	Decides the design margin; a short peak is cheaper to absorb than a raised baseline
10	Upstream machine and how product arrives (single file, random, on trays)	Decides the infeed design and whether a spreader is needed
11	Downstream machine and required outfeed height	Decides the discharge geometry and whether a transfer is added
12	Number of products sharing the freezer and their changeover pattern	A multi-product tower is set up on the hardest product, not the most frequent one

Section C — Site and services

#	What to state	Why it changes the machine
13	Clear ceiling height and any obstruction above the intended position	A spiral trades floor area for headroom, so height is a hard constraint on the design
14	Available floor area and access route for installation	Decides whether the tower ships in sections and how it is assembled on site
15	Electrical supply available at the position	Standard supply for these machines is 380 V three phase; anything else changes the control cabinet
16	Process water availability and floor drainage	Decides whether a water defrost route is available at all; a dry site needs a different design
17	Room temperature and humidity around the tower	Warm humid room air is a frost source at every opening
18	Daily production window and sanitation window as two separate figures	Together they decide how the defrost window is built into the production plan

Section D — Commercial

#	What to state	Why it changes the quotation
19	Destination port, required trade term, and the date the line has to be running	Manufacturing and ocean transit are two separate clocks and both have to fit inside your date

Before you send it. Check rows 2, 4, 5 and 8 against someone on the production floor rather than against the original line specification. Those four decide the size of the machine, and they are the four most likely to have drifted since the line was commissioned.

Back to the spiral belt freezer page