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.
One of the most coveted recognition systems is that of the Consortium for Energy Efficiency (CEE), made up of efficiency program administrators from across the United States and Canada who work together on common approaches to advancing efficiency.
Many refrigeration systems are installed using an outdoor air-cooled condenser. When these systems are installed in a climate where the outdoor temperature drops below 60°F, some means of preventing the condensing pressure from dropping too low must be incorporated into its design.
When evaporation occurs in a cooling tower, only the water evaporates; it exits the cooling tower as water vapor, but leaves the minerals behind to concentrate in the cooling tower’s water system.
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