FORECOURTS AND CONVENIENCE STORES
Claiming, not losing
Chris Chisman, director of Marstair, discusses why there has never been a better time to think about heat recovery.
T
he energy used for refrigeration and air conditioning is estimated to be 17% of global electricity use according to the EU strategy document for heating and cooling published in early 2016. The EU has implemented various directives under the ECO-Design remit which has forced manufacturers to improve the energy efficiency of many individual components and units to help reduce this. It is however, more difficult to legislate for the introduction of heat recovery as this generally requires multiple different products. It is also difficult to define heat recovery targets across all the potential heat recovery applications.
In this new greener world, the possibilities for heat recovery to make significant savings in our carbon footprint are abundant and this applies perhaps more to the HEVACR industry than many others. There have been many strides forward for heat recovery in our industry throughout the years, such as improvements in the airside heat recovery on fresh air systems which allows heat to be recovered from extracted air that would otherwise be wasted. Meanwhile, in refrigeration technology, plate heat exchangers have been used for preheating hot water by recovering the heat that would normally be wasted to atmosphere. It has not until now been used extensively to recover heat for the use of space heating. This is probably because the companies involved with either an air conditioning or a refrigeration contract have typically operated within their own silos. Whether that be at the consultant, installer or manufacturing level, air conditioning and refrigeration have
32 June 2017
been kept very much as their own separate entities. There are, of course, many potential opportunities for recovering heat through combining the refrigeration and AC systems, the most obvious perhaps is within food retail. The traditional separate approach to refrigeration and air conditioning would often have split refrigeration systems wasting heat to atmosphere, while a totally separate heating system (often an AC Heat pump) would provide the space heating, or worse still, an integral refrigeration system pumping heat into the store and a separate AC system providing the space cooling.
There have, of course, been some innovations in recovering the heat from refrigeration systems for space heating, but with the introduction of the new F-Gas regulations, there now seems to be much more of an appetite for completely combining the refrigeration and AC systems together to maximise the potential benefits.
New higher cost solutions with low GWPs for future proofing against the new F-Gas regulations can be further justified with running cost savings. These savings can be generated from the economy of scale on the cooling side, plus the large heat recovery savings available on the heating side with a completely combined AC and refrigeration system. Heat recovery is not only suitable for the larger food retailers, there are also opportunities for the smaller independent retailers as well.
In fact, when you think about it, just about every refrigeration application rejects heat throughout most of the year and will probably also have a nearby space heating or hot water requirement.
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Marstair Greenheat system.
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