Trevor van Onselen received the prestigious Eskom eta Award for power saving in the Commercial Category which Jones & van Onselen won for their work with a major supermarket chain.
Eastern Cape contractor cuts supermarket refrigeration power usage 34 - 60% and wins award in national energy saving competition.
“Electricity costs set to skyrocket!”, the headlines scream. Meanwhile back at the store electricity is already running between 1.25 and 2.5% of store turnover. The asked for increases will more than double that again.
Trevor van Onselen received the prestigious Eskom eta Award for power saving in the Commercial Category which Jones & van Onselen won for their work with a major supermarket chain. Port Elizabeth based refrigeration contractor, Jones & Van Onselen has been working hard at reducing supermarket refrigeration power consumption with its corporate and franchise supermarket clients nationally. For example in one chain of 450 supermarkets they were able to save R8 000 per store per month just on compressor power usage. The projected group saving on this is R3.6m a month and could amount to R43.2m a year that goes straight to the bottom line. To save energy in supermarket refrigeration you need to start with the compressors’, says Trevor van Onselen, the company’s technical director. By replacing up to 16 simplex compressors with three large compressors in a multiplex circuit you can get an immediate 25% power saving.
The multiplex also makes intergrating computerised controls with remote monitoring cost effective. The ability of the remote monitoring and control facility to dial in, read and then reset the system for maximum efficiency will boost that multiplex system’s overall efficiency to a 34% power saving. Along the way, this set-up will also give the refrigerated foodstuffs a longer shelf life and improved quality for greater customer satisfaction.
Installing heat recovery on condenser units for use in the store’s hot water geysers will typically save an additional 30kW of power for the store.
Boxing clever in a tight economy
As electricity costs escalates it makes the new technology that much more effective with payback periods being reduced drastically. Wanting world class refrigeration Dennis Hayes approached Jones and Van Onselen to design and implement state of the art “Energy Efficient Refrigeration Systems (E2RStm). The system enables the Multiplex to continuously match the refrigeration output to the refrigeration demand from the cabinets and backup cold storage without the energy sapping start/stop of conventional compressor systems. Colin Head who has been involved with more than 160 refrigeration installations says this technology at Summerbreeze has produced the best results he has ever seen in any store. This can only be attributed to Jones and Van Onselen E2RStm Technology. Jones and Van Onselen are continuously improving the performance and energy savings of Refrigeration systems through ongoing research and development.
