If your client wants the ultimate outdoor enclosure for the heart of their Zero-C CO2 rack, the Rack House is the answer. Many clients don’t have an existing engine room and would rather skip the permitting, construction costs, and timeline headaches that come with building a dedicated one. Or maybe, they don’t want to use that valuable real estate inside their facility for an engine room. Zero-C’s Rack House is the perfect solution, offering better protection than many existing engine rooms.
Zero-C’s Rack House offers the best protection available for an outdoor enclosure. The Rack House features IMP walls built around a heavy steel frame. It even comes with an insulated floor, finished with a tough industrial coating, so the foundation stays protected for years of regular service.
Standard Features
Delivered ready to go from Zero-C’s factory, the Rack House comes loaded with everything you need to keep your equipment operating at peak performance and features that increase the longevity of the CO2 rack and components. It is second only to a fully climate-controlled engine room.
Standard key features:
- Heating to maintain the temperature inside the Rack House
- Air conditioning to maintain temperature and humidity inside the Rack House
- Ventilation
- Dedicated space for the computer controller. So there’s no need to run it remotely indoors away from the rack, as you would with an insulated or non-insulated enclosure option
The heating and air conditioning aren’t just a nice perk for service technicians. A conditioned space also protects the refrigeration equipment itself. The conditioned space allows proper oil control, proper pressure regulation in vessels, prevents insulation breakdown, and keeps all the rack components in top shape. In short, the Rack House completely shields your Zero-C CO2 equipment from the elements for the life of the system.
Electrical
The Zero-C Rack House simplifies your electrical setup with single-point power for both the rack and the gas cooler, and its controller is housed right inside. All you need to do is run the main power to the Rack House and evaporator panel(s), connect the refrigeration piping, and run control wiring from the Rack House to the evaporator panel(s). That’s it. You’re ready to go.
Rack House Options
Zero-C offers two versions: the Standard Rack House and the Heavy Duty Rack House.
With the Standard Rack House, the gas cooler(s) sit next to the Rack House or in a separate location.
The Heavy Duty Rack House takes things a step further by incorporating structural steel into the enclosure to support a gas cooler mounted directly on top of the Rack House. This frees up valuable ground or rooftop space. The unit includes the steel beams to secure the gas cooler in place. Just note that a catwalk for servicing the gas cooler is required but not included. (You might notice in the photos that the catwalk hadn’t been installed yet at the time they were taken.)
Work Environment
A big benefit that often goes unconsidered is that your service technicians will perform better when performing maintenance inside a Zero-C Rack House than when working outside in the elements. There have been countless occupational studies on the impact of the work environment, high heat, and frigid temperatures, on performance. It has been proven that a climate-controlled work environment provides the following benefits for workers:
- Perform tasks at a faster pace
- Experience lower fatigue
- Decreased rate of injuries
- Make fewer mistakes
- Concentration is sustained longer
Having a climate-controlled work environment is not only good for your technicians who maintain your client’s equipment, but, I would argue, it also improves your and your client’s bottom line, and this compounds significantly over the lifetime of the Zero-C CO2 rack.
The Zero-C Rack House ensures your service technicians always have a dry, climate-controlled area for regular maintenance of the Zero-C CO2 rack.
The Bottom Line
Zero-C’s Rack House is the next best thing to a dedicated, conditioned indoor engine room. With square footage at a premium these days, it’s a smart, practical alternative for owners who want maximum protection for their refrigeration equipment investment but save valuable space inside the facility or save the additional capital expenditures of building a dedicated engine room.