Smart investments in maintenance and energy-saving equipment will help you control energy costs. These can cut your total energy usage by more than 40 percent.

Cash incentives from Energy Trust of Oregon and any available tax credits may help cover costs and reduce payback periods on many measures.

In addition, the Oregon Department of Energy offers the Oregon Energy Loan Program. The program provides low-interest, fixed-rate loans from $20,000 up to millions of dollars for energy-saving projects in Oregon.

To maximize your savings, evaluate your options based on their life-cycle costs, not just first-costs.

Typical measures and what you can save*
Building improvements
Insulate new cold-storage facilities to maximum recommended levels. Also, ensure that the roof and south-facing wall are light-colored. Combined, these two simple measures can reduce the temperature of the wall and roof by 20 degrees.

Equipment maintenance
Check and adjust refrigeration controls. A “tune-up” can cut electricity consumption for refrigeration by four percent to eight percent, improve equipment capacity, reduce maintenance and downtime and protect your products. Make it part of your annual maintenance. A tune-up can include:

• Measuring superheat values and adjusting thermostatic expansion valves to a target superheat
• Adjusting condenser holdback valves, condenser fan sequencing and head pressure control settings
• Reducing suction pressure set-points

Install heat recovery systems to use waste heat from display cases to heat water. For instance, a 7.5-hp compressor may meet most of a medium-sized grocery store’s annual hot water needs.

Install pull-down blinds on open dairy and produce cases to keep refrigerated air inside the case.

New equipment
Invest in premium efficiency equipment. New technologies for refrigeration, lighting and heating/cooling save energy every day. Consider replacing your equipment when it is near the end of its useful life; your facility has expanded; your air conditioning costs are high; or your existing system is unreliable, difficult to control or provides unsatisfactory space conditioning.

Buy ENERGY STAR® commercial solid door refrigerators and freezers. They can cut electric use for refrigeration by as much as 46 percent. Estimated payback is just 1.3 years.

Replace air-cooled condensers with evaporative condensers. This can cut energy usage from three percent to nine percent for grocery store refrigeration systems.

For packaged Freon refrigeration systems, consider the following:

• Install a compressor without an artificially high head pressure constraint.
• Lower the minimum condensing pressure (use an electronic expansion valve in lieu of conventional TXV).
• Install controls for electric defrost based upon refrigeration run-time.
• Cycle the evaporator fan off when space temperature is satisfied.

For ammonia refrigeration systems, consider the benefits of installing:

• Variable speed compressors
• Floating head pressure controls
• Variable speed evaporator fans
• Oversized condensers

Lighting
Install energy-saving lighting in your coolers and freezers. T8 lamps and electronic ballasts cut electricity consumption and reduce the cooling load on the compressor. This is especially valuable in cold storage applications, so you don’t have to cool the product and the lights.

Install lighting sensors in walk-in coolers and freezers. These also reduce the load on the compressor.

Timed use
If you’re a time-of-use customer with cold storage facilities, make ice at night and use it to cool your buildings during the day, when electric rates are higher.