Queen Anne's School

Founded in 1894, Queen Anne's School in Caversham near Reading is a boarding school for some 340 girls aged 11 to 18. The school has a strong policy of using only fresh produce and ensuring that healthy food is served to the girls, and has a catering team of 22.

But an outdated dishwasher was struggling to handle up to 400 covers at one time and Sodexho's general services manager at the school, Graham Heffer, was keen to reduce the cycle and cleaning times and generally improve cleanliness in the area.

Graham knew Carford from when he headed catering at Port Regis School in Dorset and had already sourced a freezer and combi oven from us for Queen Anne's. He now selected a Meiko K200 KVPi dishwashing system with our help and scheduled it for installation during the school's summer break.

The system boasts a partial heat recovery condenser to heat incoming cold water from 10 to 40 degrees using heat recycled from the waste air, so it reduces energy costs and humidity in the waste air to improve the working environment. Meiko engineers specially modified the unit to fit into a small-sized room.

The new system is operated by five staff at lunchtime, two at breakfast and three at dinner. By easily handling 100 racks an hour it reduces the cycle by around 15 minutes every lunchtime, which over the five staff is a significant saving.

Graham said: "It is also a lot more hygienic than our previous system, the area is cleaner (and it's easier to clean) and smells fresher. We are in a hard water area but the system doesn't scale up so much as it has two water softeners for both hot and cold water.

"Carford staff were very professional, the installation went very smoothly and the inevitable teething problems were ironed out very quickly. Carford's Cathy Wilcox saw us through the whole process, wrote our staff training programme and actually led the first part of training along with a Meiko engineer so we were up and running from day one. I can't thank Carford's enough for their professionalism on this job and look forward to another successful year with you. If you need to use the dishwasher to show potential clients please don't hesitate to call"