Hi all,
I came across this yesterday suggesting that by pre-cooling the water to 10C, the OP was able to reduce freeze times.

At couple of plants, I had incorporated a smaller refrigeration unit to bring the temperature of water being filled in the cans to 7 to 10oC. That had improved the timing of freezing, thus increasing the production.
However the thread doesn't say how much actual freeze time was shaved off .

Then I came across this today:

If 288,000 Btu are required to make one ton of ice, divide this by 24 hours to get 12,000 Btu/h required to make one ton of ice in one day. This is the requirement for the phase change from liquid to solid — to convert water at 0°C (+32°F) into ice at 0°C (+32°F). As a practical matter, additional refrigeration is required to take water at room temperature and turn it into ice.
To be specific, one ton of refrigeration capacity can freeze one short ton of water at 0°C (32°F) in 24 hours.
http://www.powerknot.com/what-is-a-t...igeration.html

So ~24 hours to state change given water temp of ~0C. Our current plant takes 48 hours to freeze water. I am looking at some chillers that can reduce water temp down to 0.5C and their power requirements is half that of the Ice Block plant. If we added a water chiller to the system, would it effectively reduce the freeze times close to half, while reducing our cost of production, thanks to the higher efficiency of the water chillers? If not half, roughly what kind of freeze time reductions can we expect?

Sounds too good to be true. Am I missing something here? Whats the catch?