Energy Supervisor are capable of handling any project, either domestic or commercial. A small selection of the work we have done is shown below.
Etherson’s Family Butchers
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Etherson’s Family Butchers is a craft butchers situated on the New Cabra Road in Dublin. It is a well-established, vibrant business, with a retail store and large food preparation area to the rear of the premises. There are up to 10 staff employed at peak business times. The business was experiencing high energy costs, and was keen to investigate ways of reducing its energy consumption and cutting operating energy costs.
The first step in achieving these cost reductions was to install Energy Supervisor energy monitoring hardware to measure where exactly within the business the energy is being used. After all, what cannot be measured, cannot be improved.
There are two main distribution boards within the premises. Both distribution boards contained a mix of single and three-phase circuits. One distribution board was located towards the back of the premises, with another located towards the front and containing the main incomer cable. A 36-port Ethernet Power Monitor was installed in each distribution port in turn, determining the consumption at each board.
This allowed a picture of business energy use to be created.
It was discovered that the single largest contributor to energy demand within the retail distribution board was the refrigeration equipment. The business contained a number of open-style refrigeration and display units, along with the expected freezers and cold storage.
The majority of the rest of business energy consumption was accounted for by the back distribution board, which supplied lighting, electric immersion heating and 3-phase process circuits. The single biggest consumer of electricity within this distribution board was the electric immersion heater, accounting for over a third of energy demand when in operation. Process use was found to be a relatively small contributor, as energy intensive process machinery was in operation for a relatively short period of time, barely totalling an hour in every week.
Furthermore, it was discovered that the immersion heaters were operating in a continuous mode, maintaining a set temperature within the storage tank, even at times when there is no demand for hot water, such as overnight when the business is otherwise closed.
Lighting circuits were controlled by a simple time-clock, providing full external illumination even at times of the year when it was not required.
From these observations, a report was prepared and list of recommendations were drawn up for the customer. Amongst these were:
- Installation of control on the hot water production to limit production to business hours
- Installation of controls to control display lighting during business hours and based on illumination demand.
- Further investigation of the individual refrigeration units to determine which units were drawing the most load, and why.
- Making operational changes to determine non-critical loads which can be shut-down when not required.
- Using high load preparation equipment on night rate hours to avail of cheaper electricity costs e.g. before 8am in winter or 9am summer.
As a result of their consultation with Energy Supervisor, Etherson’s Family Butchers were able to achieve a measureable cost reduction through the adoption of some of recommended measures.