energy waste and electrical cost reduction

are high electrical costs eating up your kitchen's profits?

While modern commercial kitchen equipment is designed to be energy efficient, these large devices and appliances still siphon significant amounts of electricity. For many restaurants and cafés, the associated electrical expense can feel like a second rent. Despite this, there exists a general assumption that the cost of electricity is an immmutable monthly expense.

so, where's the waste?

Inefficiently designed and programmed HVAC systems, improperly-sized and poorly maintained appliances and equipment, unnecessary devices that duplicate one another's capabilities, devices left to run for countless unneeded hours, and standby power, sometimes called vampire power or phantom load, all contribute to energy mismanagement.

We regularly find equipment configured to battle other equipment in their conflicting goals of maintaining differently programmed room temperatures. We discover fan belts too loose to ever turn a fan blade. We find heaters heating the interstatial space above suspended ceilings. Each exploration reveals new and innovative sources of inefficiency and waste.

Together, these many points of inefficiency typically end up accounting for upwards of 50% of the electricity a restaurant or café consumes each month.

can we not just flip off all the switches?

Sure, and you can still get your car to start in the cold by placing a pen in the carburator choke!

It would seem the solution would be to just turn everything off.  However, it's not that easy. Some equipment is not natively designed to be shut off. In fact, much modern equipment can be damaged by improper shutdown. Then, much of the equipment we'd want to turn off is not properly wired to a shut off device, while just as frequently, the darned switch just can't be located (quick answer: the switch is logically mounted to the original ceiling, safely hidden just above the newly installed suspended ceiling).

Staff correctly point out that turning devices and equipment off at night is not only tedious, but impractical, especially given how long it takes for equipment to start and warm up each morning, usually just moments before the rush of caffeine-starved customers.

we can significantly reduce your electric costs

While eliminating nighttime power waste is important, and comparatively easy to achieve, our research and experimentation finds that reducing daytime power consumption is not only possible, but represents a much more significant means of reducing energy expense. In fact, with commercial electric rates steeply dropping in the nighttime hours, some energy intensive activities, like heating water and making ice, can be shifted into that time period to reduce expense, without reducing productivity. Reaching this goal means knowing your daily activity cycles, allowing tech and automation to assist with monitoring and maintaining energy use, and making the absolute best use of every expended kW of energy.

Achieving energy use reduction in a modern facility requires assessing, measuring, calculating and re-engineering, so that your venue functions holistically. All of the equipment must work in concert, with automation serving as the conductor. We perform such analysis, producing a complete report that details current conditions, recommended actions, and predicted efficiency outcomes. When approved, we implement corrections, revisions and repairs, all the while tracking the changes in your overall energy consumption.

Contact us to schedule a prompt assessment!