Humidity control for walk in cooler

[Pauuly48]

Hi Everyone I need to figure out how to control the humidity in a walk in cooler for storing chocolate. I need to keep the humidity down. Does anyone know how to calculate or is their a rule of thumb here for controling the humidity? Thank you all for your help! Paul

[powell]

Is this a large manufacturing process cooler or a small cooler? The ASHRAE designs for chocolates is quite extensive. Many different design temps and humidity requirements. I would ask the customer what he wants.

With that said, sometimes a 65 degree storage temp and 50% RH is used for storage.

But I caution, do not use this criteria without more information. Ask the customer what he wants. Chocolate can go bad fast if not kept in the correct conditions. I suggest getting an engineer to design the box if the job size supports this.

[madhat]

For Godiva Chocolate stores, we were using the smallest ducted miniMates splits and a walk-in box. On some of their smaller stores we used dataMates splits inside the walk-in. Just don't mount them at floor level, as they will get trashed. All their Chocolate was double wrapped, so the health dept. couldn't give them trouble. I don't think they "health dept." ever looked at the cooling units.

[Randy S.]

If you design from scratch, design for the same kind of sensible to latent ratio as you would find in a Liebert or other data center kind of stuff. In other words, oversized evaporators in comparison to typical HVAC gear.

And then, depending on your ambient conditions, the tightness of the room, etcetera, blah, blah, you might even have to humidify.

Get the customer to give you the temp and humidity requirements in writing, first and foremost.