Compressor electronics technology can enhance compressor and system performance by sensing and interpreting information found inside the compressor, providing new levels of protection and diagnostics.
The use of R-744 (carbon dioxide/CO2) as a refrigerant in HVACR applications has been gaining attention. But it faces installation and servicing challenges for technicians familiar with fluorocarbon refrigerants.
An oft-repeated comment from me in recent years is that while the air conditioning side of the HVACR industry has been dealing with 13 SEER and R-410A as its basic components, we over on the refrigeration side deal with a wide range of efficiency standards.
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.
Centralized refrigeration systems have been in use for years. Distributed systems, on the other hand, are one of the newer commercially adopted refrigeration technologies.