POWER PLANNING
Flour Mill Power Connection: B2 or B3?
The question every new mill investor asks late, and should ask first. Machinery arrives in weeks. A B3 connection and a transformer take months.
What electricity connection
does a flour mill need?
It depends on total connected load, and the figures below are planning figures — the final load list is produced at design stage. Broadly: a mill around 100 TPD runs on a B2 connection, and above that you are into B3 at 11 kV, with a dedicated transformer at the top end.
| Mill scale (24-hour basis) | Approx. connected load | Connection |
|---|---|---|
| ~100 TPD | ~400 kW | B2 (up to 500 kW, 400 V) |
| ~160 TPD | ~630 kW | B3 (above 500 kW, 11 kV) |
| ~250 TPD | ~1000 kW | B3, 11 kV, dedicated transformer |
Planning figures only. The final load list is produced at design stage. We publish three worked capacity points because those are the ones we can stand behind. If your mill is smaller than 100 TPD, we will not guess a number at you — the load is calculated from your actual machine list during design, and a wrong figure on a connection application costs real money and months of delay.
02Where the Load Sits
It is not just
the roller mills.
Each roller body takes a 10, 15, 20 or 30 HP motor — that is 7.5, 11, 15 or 22 kW per body. On an 8-body line, that alone is a substantial block of your load.
Then add the rest of the plant: cleaning machines, the plansifter, and the aspiration and dust-collection system running continuously across the whole mill. Aspiration is the one people forget, and it runs whenever the mill runs.
Motors are quoted separately from the machines on every one of our quotes, which means you can see exactly what you are adding to the load before you commit to a motor size. Full specifications on the machinery price list.
Apply at project start, not at delivery
B3 applications and transformers take months. This is the single most common sequencing mistake we see: the buyer treats the connection as something to sort out once the machines arrive, and then the mill sits finished and idle waiting for power.
Machinery fabrication starts from 10 days. On a whole-mill contract the machines are built in parallel with your civil works, so machinery is rarely the critical path — the connection usually is.
On turnkey projects we start this paperwork with you at contract signing, for exactly this reason.
Solar is sized and installed with the mill as an option, because the electricity bill is the running cost that decides the business.
Ask About Power PlanningWho is telling you this.
Shabbir Hussain has spent 40 years inside flour mills and built seven end to end — design, civil, machinery, installation, electrical, training and first flour. The power connection is part of that scope every time, which is why the sequencing advice above is not theory. Read the mills.
Talk to the engineer, not a salesman. Send your target TPD and we will tell you what we can size now and what has to wait for the design stage.