Villa Maria Wines engaged Buzz Electrics to be their preferred contractor for the new winery build in Hawkes Bay. Chosen over other contractors for the project due to their proven capabilities and expert industrial installation, automation and communications team, the targets have been achieved.
The Villa Maria Hawkes Bay Winery project at its peak had 35 staff members working on it. This project time line was very short, the build was held up but the fruit was still coming in. The entire Buzz Electrics team pulled together to make it happen and the target was achieved. The project included installing multiple PLC's all with remote I/O, over 50 VSD’s and an industrial automation network all communicating over the fibre optic networks which were installed by the communications team.
Throughout the winery Buzz Electrics installed IFM’s IO Link to monitor analogue and digital values. There were three critical areas the team from Buzz Electrics designed and installed. Firstly the Wine Services Area. This included refrigeration, hot water, potable water, UV units, glycol strat tanks, hot and cold glycol high pressure delivery pumps, and two back up supply generators. A services PLC was installed with remote IO comms communicating to various areas of the winery.
The second critical area was the Receivals Area. Operating on its own fully automated process control system, the receivals area where the grapes are unloaded from the trucks, weighted, processed and the juice pumped into the winery. Receivals had two local SCADA PC’s controlling each individual receival path which could also be controlled remotely if required.
The third and final critical area was the Barrel Halls. This included a grape chiller, a chardonnay barrel hall and three Red Barrel Halls. These rooms were all individually controlled to heat or cool depending on the winery’s requirements. All setpoints were created to be accessible from SCADA and off site if required so the winemakers could monitor and maintain the barrel halls. For the control and monitoring we used Ignition SCADA, fully engineered by Buzz Electrics. Buzz Electrics are system integrators for Ignition Software by Inductive Automation.
This project is still on-going but so far, every target that has been set has been meet and the Buzz Electrics team continue to deliver the highest standard of work to Villa Maria Wines.
