How to Save Energy with Grocery Store Refrigeration

This podcast episode focuses on practical ways to save energy with grocery store refrigeration systems, with Matthew Taylor from Kalos Services sharing insights from both a technician and business owner perspective. The hosts emphasize that proper, consistent operation and preventing short cycling of compressors can have a major impact as the largest power consumers.

Proper control strategies, like ensuring evaporator pressure regulators (EPRs) are working, maintaining subcooling, and preventing excessive compressor staging and rapid on/off cycling, are critical for reducing energy consumption. Often, technicians troubleshooting issues bypass these controls when they could be tuned and optimized instead. Matthew stresses the financial benefit for owners when technicians understand the original design intent and how to optimize performance, not just apply a band-aid fix to problems. He advises business owners to track power bill anomalies to catch inefficiencies.

Other key factors covered: ensuring clean evaporator coils, properly functioning doors/curtains, humidity control, condensed maintenance, addressing core issues like suction pressure rather than quick fixes, compression ratio impacts, and coordinating refrigeration with HVAC equipment. Implementing complex new networked equipment has trade-offs as well – while offering more data, it requires different skill sets to leverage.

Topics covered:

• Optimizing EPRs and refrigeration controls
• Preventing short cycling and improper staging
• Following the original system design intent
• Tracking power bills to catch system drift
• The impacts of evaporator coil cleanliness
• Building envelope considerations
• Humidity control relationship with refrigeration
• Compression ratio and suction pressure optimization
• Evaluating networked controls vs. ease of maintenance
• Recommissioning

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