Trying to tame the energy costs in a supermarket becomes more and more critical every year as store owners try to show their greenness to environmentally conscious customers and also continue to try to meet stricter efficiency regulations.
Energy Balance & Integration is a new company combining technical and field experience spanning over the past 25 years. Its combined staff and resources have been providing testing and balancing services in New Mexico since 1976 and have expanded services to Colorado, eastern Arizona, and western Texas.
The Heating, Airconditioning and Refrigeration Distributors International (HARDI) partnered with J.P. Morgan Equity Research in the company’s latest proprietary HVAC distributor survey released in July, which collected market projections for this cooling season. Results revealed a soft start to the summer selling season, driven by weather and continued deferrals by customers in a weak economy.
The use of HFC-422C in retrofitting HCFC-22 systems in supermarkets is being promoted as a way to reduce power consumption. Gordon McKinney of ICOR International said, “When replacing R-22 with R-422C in a low or medium temp refrigeration application, equipment owners are experiencing a dramatic drop in energy use.”
These days refrigeration in general, and supermarkets in particular, are making even more rapid advancements up the LEED ladder. No sooner does LEED come up with a higher ranking than Gold - that of Platinum - than a Hannaford Supermarket in Augusta, Maine, has become the first supermarket to gain LEED Platinum.
The Cologne, Germany-based Remis GmbH has formed a joint venture with Elkhart, Ind.-based Dehco Inc. to create Remis America LLC and put insulated glass doors, popular in Europe, on mechanical refrigeration cases in a growing number of supermarkets in the United States.
Master-Bilt has developed a new parallel rack refrigeration system that it says was designed to maximize energy savings, while minimizing environmental impact. The parallel rack system is a multiple compressor refrigeration unit piped in parallel to yield smooth capacity control as compared to a single compressor unit.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced that as of early August, it had quadrupled the number of participants in its voluntary program designed to reduce the use of ozone-depleting refrigerants in the nation’s grocery stores - the GreenChill Advanced Refrigeration Partnership.
Troubleshooting a refrigeration system is all about gathering information and using that information to determine the cause of a problem. Technicians are always measuring voltages, amperages, pressures, and various temperatures to help them find a problem. Besides these important measurements, there are other pieces of information that can assist a technician.
As mentioned earlier, most new systems will be manufactured with R-410A. However, the question of what is the best retrofit refrigerant blend for existing R-22 systems is often asked by technicians and equipment owners. There is no one quick-fix solution or answer to this question. The answer depends on several key factors.
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