Introduction
These reefers were installed for Better Meals, a frozen meals delivery company based in Burnaby, British Columbia. This company provides a delivery service from Vancouver Island, throughout the Lower Mainland, and into the interior of BC (Salmon Arm, Kelowna, & Vernon). The reefer vans that service parts of the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island use Volta Air’s reefer units. Their current fleet of 4 Nissan NV 200s is equipped with Volta Air’s Technology’s VAR150, a roof-mounted, powerful all-electric reefer unit designed for cooling smaller commercial vans. Cool-it Highway Services had completed a number of retrofits very similar to this case. Click here for another example of retrofits for home deliveries.
User’s Application:
Better Meals cooks, packages and blast freeze their meals prior to customer deliveries. Within the Lower Mainland, their delivery vehicles go out every day, each with its own jurisdiction to serve. Deliveries to the Island and the Interior are transported by semi-truck trailers also equipped with cooling units to ensure meals are kept frozen during transport.
Better Meals dominantly deliver to seniors living independently at home. With Volta Air’s no-idle units, drivers are able to comfortably leave the units running while the vehicles are off and locked to help their customers. This way, drivers won’t necessarily have to travel in pairs so that their vehicles are constantly being looked after as well as ensure that there won’t be any loss in the quality of their product.
Retrofit Information:
The vehicle was insulated with 2” rigid poly-iso board, giving an R-value of approximately 13 Km²/W. The foam is finished with a white finished FRP (fiber-reinforced plastic) paneling and caulked in all the seams to keep the moisture away from the foam and air inside the compartment. After the floor framed and insulated rubber flooring was secured to make for easy loading and unloading of boxes and less sliding during the drive.
Note: It is important to know your application. Sometimes, a user will be loading skids that have nails or sharp objects poking out in every direction. If a rubber floor is used for the finish, it would start to resemble a cheese grater in the first couple months, now I mean if you are a dairy farm that might be fit your companies “image”.
Reefer System:
The reefer unit is from Volta Air Technologies, which is a company that is based out of Vancouver, British Columbia. With over 50 years of HVAC experience, they have designed and developed an all-electric refrigeration unit that can be easily integrated into most vehicles’ electrical system for power. The unit used in this case was the VAR150TBLi which can provide cooling “down” to -10 °C (16° F) in a compartment from 3-5m3 (110-200ft3).