Key dates: F-Gas regs
1 January 2010 – No
virgin HCFC can be supplied or used for servicing existing equipment
4 July 2011 – latest date by which personnel servicing equipment covered by the regulations must have obtained an appropriate national qualification
4 July 2011 – The
commission will publish a report based on the experience of the application of this regulation, which may include an extension to the ban on use.
1 January 2015 –No
recycled or recovered HCFC can be supplied or used to service existing equipment.
>
and have a low GWP. Over the past 20 years, legislation has restricted the use of many ozone- depleting refrigerants including CFCs and HCFCs. Under the EU’s F-gas regulations, from January this year, firms are no longer allowed to buy virgin HCFC refrigerant and they have five years to use any recycled refrigerant. Faced with several thousand major supermarket
stores in the UK, the refrigeration industry potentially has a huge task to meet the planned roll-out of new refrigeration systems in many of them. CO2 (or R-744, as it is known) is the refrigerant now favoured by many of the supermarkets. It has a GWP of one, is non-toxic and non-flammable,
and so is suitable for use on refrigerant runs through the customer area. In November 2009 Sainsbury’s announced that
all new stores will use CO2 refrigeration as standard. Moreover, the retailer has pledged to switch to CO2- based fridges in all stores by 2030 and has earmarked the first 135 stores for conversion by 2014. Meanwhile Tesco, which opened its first store using CO2 four years ago, has stated that, from this month, all new stores will have CO2-based refrigerant systems. Marks & Spencer has a policy that all installations
M&S has a policy that fridge installations will be based on CO2 where possible.
will be based on CO2 wherever possible. Bob Arthur, M&S head of store refrigeration and a committee member of the British Refrigeration Association, says the firm has a replacement schedule that will see all the firm’s HCFC systems replaced. In the interim, M&S will retain refrigerant from the HCFC systems it has replaced and use it in the remaining systems (although, recycled HCFCs will have to be phased out by 2015). But it is not just HCFC-based systems that M&S is
reviewing. Arthur says the retailer’s use of HFC-based systems is also under consideration. The supermarket
There is a vested interest by some
in the industry to keep things as they are because some of the big, global manufacturers are tied into HFCs
– Tim Mitchell
is in the process of rolling out the use of the HFC refrigerant R407 across 90 stores by next month. Waitrose, however, has taken a different route, opting
for an ambitious hydrocarbon-based refrigeration solution using the flammable gases propane and propene – a system which, says the retailer, is ‘cost neutral’ and ‘wholly natural’. Its solution is based on a combination of high-efficiency air-cooled chillers utilising propane, R-290; and supermarket cabinets operating on a propene, R-1270. Propane has a GWP of five. The system has been devised and developed by
Waitrose working with refrigeration specialists Carter Thermal, Geoclima, Synergy Building Services Consultants and chiller specialists Klima-Therm. Chilled cabinets are often scattered throughout a
store. Each cabinet and freezer in a store has its own small self-contained propene-based refrigeration unit. The system works using a chilled water circuit to cool
the condenser water in each refrigerated cabinet, which makes it easy to refurbish a store. Large propane-based chillers are used to cool this chilled water circuit. It is also more energy efficient, since cooling the condenser water means that the chilled water temperatures can be relatively high (24C/18C), which means the system is expected to run for 55 per cent of the year in free cooling mode, with the chillers turned off.
54
CIBSE Journal April 2010
www.cibsejournal.com
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