News

New chiller - greater resilience and energy efficiency - April 2010
Each of the Condale factories is equipped with back–up facilities for all of the key services such as the supply of compressed air or the provision of chilled water. This redundancy in these key resources enables production to continue in the unlikely event of the failure of one of the primary systems. Our current back-up chiller is a little undersized for the 20 lines in factory A and hence we have committed to replace it and instal a new chiller in this factory during May. The capacity of this new unit matches that of our existing main water cooling unit but the new chiller will utilise more energy efficient refrigerants and compressors. The installation will be configured to allow the immediate switchover between units in the event of a failure. We are pleased that this investment will give both added peace of mind and a reduction in our carbon footprint.

New capacity for tool manufacture - February 2010
With almost a complete disregard for the general state of the economy we are pleased to say that our customers have continued to invest in tooling for new extruded profiles. In 2009 our tool manufacturing facility produced a total of 174 tools for new applications. Naturally such demand highlighted the bottlenecks in the process. We are pleased to say that we have now added a third Wire Erosion machine to address the largest constraint in our tool room. The new machine, supplied by Mitsubishi, will not only relieve the bottleneck but will further enhance our ability to offer very competitive lead-times for the development of new extruded profiles.

Update for the Quality System
Condale's Quality Management System has been accredited with the BSi for a number of years. In 2008 the quality standard ISO9001 was itself updated. Within this new standard, greater emphasis was placed on corrective and preventative action. We are pleased to announce that Condale has been audited and accredited with the latest version of the new standard, BS EN ISO 9001:2008. The latest version of our Certificate of Registration, issued on the 1^st October 2009, is available from the Quality page of this web-site.

Intelligent Lighting - November 2008
In keeping with recommendations made by the Carbon Trust during a recent audit, a new lighting system has been installed in two of our manufacturing units. The new lighting maintains constant illumination levels within the factories but adjusts to compensate for the background lighting levels from windows and roof lights. Furthermore when the lighting does not sense the presence of an operator the lighting is programmed to automatically dim or turn off. At night, for example the main operating areas remain illuminated brightly but material storage areas and un-manned areas remain dark unless accessed by a member of staff. The lights also use the most energy efficient fluorescent tubes for minimum electricity consumption when in use. The new lighting system will be installed in the other factory shortly when the present system comes up for replacement.

New warehouse for Condale Plastics...

On July 1st Condale Plastics completed and opened its new raw materials warehouse. The new storage facility will hold almost 400 tonnes of plastic and together with other distributed storage locations will bring Condale Plastics total raw materials capacity to 800 tonnes. Give the diversity of material grades and colours produced at Condale, the new warehouse enables the company to offer maximum flexibility and short production lead-times on a wide range of products without the need for finished stocks.

World class tool-room facility opens...
Rapid tool development is essential to the quick delivery of new products for customers. Hence in-house tool design and production has been an essential feature of Condale Plastics service to its customers. With the successful growth of the business in recent years Condale had outgrown its previous tool-making facility.

In April 2008 the company opened a new purpose built tool room. It houses both tool design and manufacture. All tool design is completed on a CAD system and once approved is transferred directly across the network to the 3-axis CNC milling machines and the wire erosion machines. The new unit has a capacity of over 200 new tools per annum and also provides support to the extrusion production plant. In this environment close co-operation between designers, tool-makers and development engineers continually enhances their expertise which in turn relentlessly reduces tool production times.

With the future in mind, the new tool room is also equipped with host of environmental features. Lighting is all sensor controlled, automatically adjusting to changes in daylight and room occupancy. Rainwater is collected and re-used in the toilet systems, significantly reducing fresh water consumption. Lessons learned here are now being re-deployed in other areas of the business.