The door frames of your SRC walk in display cooler are heated and will stay moisture free (except in extremely harsh conditions). However, the walk in cooler door frame heaters will have no effect on the glass surface of the doors. Glass heat is not needed in a properly conditioned environment.
A refrigerated walk in cooler display will not only remove the heat from the air in the cabinet, but it will also attempt to pull heat from the walls of the display and walk in cooler display doors. The effects on our walk in cooler wall panels are very minimal—we use high-grade solid insulating materials in the construction. Even though our glass doors are the highest grade on the market, they cannot achieve the same degree of insulation as our walk in cooler walls.
Because of this refrigeration effect, the surface temperature of the walk in cooler glass doors is below the temperature inside your store. The colder you operate your display, the colder your doors will be. When the Dew Point of the indoor air rises to or above the surface temperature of your doors, moisture will begin to condense on the glass surface.
What does Dew Point refer to? At any given temperature, air can hold a certain quantity of water in the form of vapor. Warm air can hold much more water vapor then cold air. The amount of moisture in the air is expressed as a percentage, referred to as the Relative Humidity. Completely dry air would have 0%RH; totally saturated air (that cannot hold any more vapor) would have 100%RH.
As an example, if you had a room at 77 degrees with 56%RH, and simply lowered the temperature down to the Dew Point of 60 degrees without removing any moisture, the air would be totally saturated and dew would form on everything in the room. In the same example, leave the room temperature alone but set down a cold glass of ice water (itself well below the Dew Point of 60 degrees). The glass will eventually begin to sweat. The same thing will happen to a walk in cooler glass display door if the surface temperature drops to 60 degrees. So, what can be done to insure your walk in cooler glass doors stay as moisture free as possible?
a) Raising the temperature in the walk in cooler display case will also raise the surface temperature of the doors—possibly above the dew point.
b) If the air conditioning is on a nighttime setback, you may just need to clean off the walk in cooler doors first thing in the morning. As the air conditioning begins to operate, the problem may go away.
c) A colder setting on the air conditioning may help to pull more moisture from the air near your walk in cooler (pictures). This may lower the Dew Point below the door temperature.
d) Is the air conditioning thermostat actually sensing the air where the walk in cooler doors (pictures) are located? If the thermostat is in a separate space or room, it may not be controlling the correct area.
e) Is there proper air supply and return distribution to appropriately condition the surroundings of your walk in cooler? Is the air conditioning system sized correctly for your building?
f) Are you are leaving any outside doors open (perhaps to take advantage of cooler weather outdoors)?
g) If all other avenues have been exhausted, and the problem is more than you can accept, the final option would be to replace your present walk in cooler doors with new heated glass doors to compensate for the ambient conditions. This is an expensive alternative, since there would be no credit given for your present doors.
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