Mountain View
Mountain View is a mushroom farm in British Columbia which produced and
filled phase 1 compost for their growing rooms. In order to increase the
mushroom production there were two ways to go: Increasing the number of
growing rooms and keep filling phase 1 compost or shorten the cycle time in
the existing growing rooms by building a phase 2 and 3 tunnel facility and start
filling and casing phase 3 substrate.
In 2004 Art and Ron de Ruiter decided to build a Phase 2/3 tunnel facility. The
time they need, in cooperation with Christiaens, from design to start up was
about 1 year. The new tunnels were connected to their existing Phase 1
operation by a belt system. The 4 tunnels have a capacity of 200 tons input of
Phase 1 each. Christiaens delivered the building, technical installation and
machinery turnkey.
The floor of the the tunnels is a grid floor and are filled by a filling cassette, a
net pulling winch empties the tunnels. The Christiaens air handling
unit and CCF control system with manual control take care of a good
pasteurization and incubation process.
The filling and emptying hall are supplied from fresh air to create
overpressure during working hours and for heating the hall during not
working hours.
Parallel to the start of the phase 3 production they started filling with a
Christiaens hydraulic head-end filling machine.
The advantages of the whole transition are obvious; lowering the
production costs and increasing the productivity and quality.
In 2001 Christiaens Controls delivered also the air handling and control
systems for 22 growing rooms for Mountain View Mushrooms Ltd. They also
engineered the central energy systems, which were constructed and delivered
locally.
