The International Institute of Ammonia Refrigeration will hold its 2012 Industrial Refrigeration Conference & Exhibition, March 17-21 at the Frontier Airlines Center in Milwaukee.

Featuring a space-saving design, the Serenity Series Cubelet Ice Machine, FS-1500MLH-C, produces up to 830 pounds of chewable cubelet ice per 24 hours. The shallow depth provides easy access to the dispenser bin.

In many aspects the first part of a job is like detective work — not only does a technician need to identify the problem but he also must determine its root cause. A good initial step is to visually inspect the entire system.

The supermarket chain Hy-Vee Inc.’s 64,000-square-foot store in Fairfield, Iowa, opened on April 12 as the company’s second Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-certified store. It is one of the few supermarkets in the country that has achieved U.S. EPA GreenChill Gold-Level certification.

Empirical testing has shown that the optimum time to defrost is when the evaporator loses about 10 percent efficiency. Traditional methods of defrost, based on time, cannot ascertain this loss of efficiency and will either waste time and energy in excessive defrosting, or never fully defrost the evaporator.

As new stores are built and older systems in existing stores replaced, an approach called secondary refrigeration is gaining wider acceptance and is steadily increasing in numbers.

As today’s supermarkets continue to evolve, advances in software technology are helping to simplify critical refrigeration management issues.

Centralized refrigeration systems have been in use for years. Distributed systems, on the other hand, are one of the newer commercially adopted refrigeration technologies.

Two refrigeration equipment manufacturers have received recognition for their energy efficiency efforts: Scotsman Ice Systems and Freeaire Refrigeration.

It is one thing to install efficiently running refrigeration equipment. But it also has to be energy efficient - according to a wide range of standards. That’s why Emerson recently issued a white paper called Status of Energy Regulations for Commercial Refrigeration Equipment.