Refrigeration is one of those f/s equipment areas in which innovation comes not with great leaps forward, but gradually, with adaptations here and there that help increase efficiency and user-friendliness. Nor, generally, does innovation come to the f/s arena first. Much of it targets retail first because the demand can be so much greater. In time, then, it trickles over to the f/s side and is embraced by commercial and noncommercial operators alike.
For example: Chris Brisco, sr. design mgr for f/s contractor HMS Host Corp. in Bethesda, MD, praises an increase in usage of refrigerator units that can be positioned directly below a griddle or fixer-burner range.
"I think it's a big help because it saves space," says Brisco, whose company operates food, beverage and retail shops at airports and travel plazas. "They just condense the compressors to make them real compact and smaller, while still allowing for the necessary mechanics to work a four-burner range."
Also impressing Brisco and his colleagues at HMS Host is the appearance of a greater number of two-ft.-deep refrigerated merchandisers. These are used mainly for grab-and-go sandwiches and salads, as well as for bottled beverages.
Such refrigerated merchandisers have traditionally been a lot deeper—three or four feet, he points out. "But now some manufacturers are coming out with sleek, slender refrigerated merchandisers. They take up less space and are more user-friendly for operators. It's a design dream."
Around a loop: Veteran f/s consultant Dave Stewart, FCSI, pres. of Stewart Design Assoc. in Madison, WI, lauds the arrival of a refrigeration system designed primarily for larger operations, which basically sends a continuous flow of refrigeration around a loop.
"Let's say you've got three walk-in coolers and a couple of air curtains and some reach-ins," says Stewart. "All you have there is expansion valves at these units which open, and so it's sort of like a parallel system—but you're not running separate refrigeration lines out to each coil. You're just running one loop of liquid refrigerant and one suction line back to this unit."
The benefit is that operators and maintenance personnel have far fewer refrigeration lines to monitor and maintain. "If we're talking about 15 fixtures out there that are getting served, with most parallel systems you'd have 15 pairs of refrigeration lines running all over the building," Stewart points out. "Now you just have this continuous loop, and it's like an electric line in that sense. You just draw what you need at the source."
This system has been found primarily in the higher-end grocery stores today—not much of a surprise given the huge amounts of refrigeration they use. "I haven't seen it used a whole lot in f/s yet, but it has advantages," Stewart points out. "We have a couple of applications that are going in right now."
Applications: One is the massive $100-million Overture Center in Madison, WI, a Stewart project scheduled to open next year. Because of the performing arts center's need for extreme noise control, compressors have been banished to a remote mechanical room. "There are a lot of ups and downs and lefts and rights, and extremely difficult access because of the nature of the building," he notes.
The system he's using there powers several low-horsepower bar coolers. "You normally wouldn't think of a system like that for anything that small," he reasons. "But because we're now able to run one simple loop through this building the installation is so much easier to do."
Stewart is implementing another such system—and potentially as many as three of them before the project is done—at Camp Randall, the football stadium at the Univ. of Wisconsin which is currently being expanded. There, the operator uses a large number of walk-in coolers; the lower level alone has nine or 10 of them.
Another benefit of these systems is the electronics that go along with them, which provide the ability to monitor "anything and everything that goes wrong with this system. Grocery store chains with their headquarters in Atlanta are able to know what's wrong with any cooler anywhere in the USA because of computer links. It's not just at the compressor. They wire out to expansion valves and watch anything that could go wrong."
In systems with critical temperature control requirements, such as cook-chill, the monitoring capability of the system "spots the problem before it happens, to some degree," he notes. "When something begins to fail it will alert you."
Tight spaces: "It is truly a great product if you have a tight space and a building with a year-around chilled water system," adds colleague Foster Frable, FCSI, pres. of Clevenger-Frable-LaValle, a consultancy in White Plains, NY. "We have used it in a half-dozen projects thus far, including Children's Hospital in Boston, Bear Stearns World Headquarters in New York, and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, DC.
"The product is a great concept," notes Frable. "It works well, and it really helps in tight spaces where no other rack would fit or be tolerated from a noise standpoint. It also allows hot swapping of compressors without shutting down the system in case of failure—a big point for critical operations like hospitals and central kitchens with food banks."