Hubbard makes sure it’s blooming comfortable in Scotland

Commercial refrigeration manufacturer, Hubbard Products Ltd, has supplied one of Scotland’s leading flower wholesalers with a sophisticated, bespoke flower store conditioning system. The installation of the system at James Taylor Flowers brand new premises located in Siemens Place, Glasgow completes a major period of growth for the Wholesale florist. The company has relocated from its old established base in Glasgow’s wholesale fruit and flower market to new, 3000 sq ft purpose built premises nearby. The move has allowed James Taylor to make buying a much more pleasurable experience for their customers with more space, more parking, and a new sundries department. In addition they are now offering extended opening hours including Sunday opening and a ‘direct to shop before it opens’ delivery service.

The Hubbard conditioning system offers cold storage and heating for both a retail room, open to the public and a separate purpose built cold storage unit. Installed by Edinburgh based Nelson Refrigeration and Air Conditioning, the bespoke system consists of two Hubbard Scroll Condensing Units (HCPS Z30) fitted with SMDS 245 Evaporator each with independent Hubbard digital control panels controlling both heating and cooling for the retail area. For the storage area a single Hubbard Scroll condensing unit (HCPS Z21) was specified, this time combined with a SMDS 148 Evaporator and controlled by a dedicated Hubbard digital control panel for both heating and cooling.

Grant Nelson, principal of Nelson Refrigeration and Air Conditioning says “This is a highly bespoke system that will create a range of climatic conditions that are best suited to the wide range of exotic and domestic products that James Taylor Flowers stocks. The evaporators are low velocity dual discharge units and can both heat or cool. The low velocity element was critical to our client as minimising damage to their products from air movement and by ensuring a consistent warm up or cool down was at the centre of the specifying process. To achieve the optimum sales span of the products requires a constant 5°C room temperature throughout the year for the storage room and the 2000 sq ft retail area requires a constant 7°C combined with high humidity levels to combat wilting and dehydration. This was quite a challenge from an engineering point of view but the Hubbard Products technical team were able to immediately identify the correct specifications and in conjunction with both Nelson Refrigeration and Air Conditioning and James Taylor Flowers put forward a specification that our client is extremely happy with.”

Installed in April 2008 the units have proven their worth through a summer and autumn that has proven difficult to predict, with periodic hot spells set between long wet and cool periods, hardly ideal for preserving highly temperature sensitive perishables.

Nelson Refrigeration and Air Conditioning also fitted out the new display areas specifying and installing lighting for the retail room that is designed to enhance the show characteristics of a wide range of colourful and exotic plant life highlighting the luminosity of the individual species.

Grant Nelson says “This was an extremely demanding task to satisfy but one of the best elements of the whole project is that all of our engineers are already familiar with the Hubbard Products ranges of commercial refrigeration equipment, and whilst this combination of equipment is new to us, the confidence we had in Hubbard’s technical and manufacturing teams made us sure that whatever our client asked of us, we and Hubbard were more than capable of handling”.