Star Refrigeration’s Operations team has been commended for helping to resolve ongoing maintenance issues at a leading global healthcare provider’s site in Scotland, and reducing their energy spend by as much as £8,000 per year through remote energy efficiency monitoring.
Star Refrigeration had developed a good relationship with the company over the past ten years and gained a good reputation for the design and maintenance work carried out at other sites across the country. This led to the customer taking out a three-year maintenance contract with Star Refrigeration Operations Group, which has proved to be a worthy investment.
When Star engineers arrived on site recently, they found that the customer’s ammonia plant was overcharged with oil due to incorrect setup. Soon after taking over the contract, the plant’s expansion valves were replaced in order to regulate gas back to normal working pressures and working levels. Star’s proactive and planned maintenance routines had no impact on the customer’s operation. An important part of Star Refrigeration’s aftercare work was to ensure that the British pharmaceutical company’s ammonia plant was up to date with current regulations. The team of engineering experts also implemented site SAP routines to ensure that air conditioning systems were routinely assessed and subject to regular and consistent maintenance.
Additionally, plant performance was reviewed on a regular basis to ensure it was working at optimum conditions. Working together with the customer’s energy supervisor Star Refrigeration monitored the plant energy usage and quickly picked up when the plant was not operating at maximum efficiency. Through the installation of air conditioners with timers in all of the site’s central offices, Star was able to reduce the customer’s energy bills by £8,000 per annum. Star’s good performance during the initial contract period resulted in the customer renewing their aftercare contract for another three years. In addition, the customer trusted Star Refrigeration’s Aberdeen team with a new project to design and install a brand-new plant for an extension to their facilities.
Furthermore, the customer also requested Star’s services to assess the need for an Ethos system, a performance optimisation and energy management system, for their ammonia chillers. The award-winning Ethos system is a new scheme developed by consultants Star Technical Solutions (STS) which identifies efficiency problems and can save plant owners thousands of pounds in electricity bills – typical energy savings of 30% to 40%. It effectively measures the gap between how the plant is operating and how it should be operating and identifies corrective actions to reduce the gap. The Ice Co, Asda, BrewDog and Campbell’s Prime Meat all use Ethos in order to address common maintenance activities, improve the control strategy as well as replace inefficient equipment. Niall Murphie, Chief Engineer of BrewDog, said, “Our expansion over the past five years has been rapid and we’ve needed to ensure our equipment is ready to meet demand. We commissioned STS to measure operation and performance of our existing chillers through Ethos so that we could gain a better insight into refrigeration load and spare capacity ahead of increasing production”.
Malcolm Dufton, Property and Energy Manager at The Ice Co & Logistics said of Ethos, “Energy consumption is a large operating expense for us. Add on charges increasingly diminish the control we have on our electricity costs. Therefore, we focus on reducing energy usage and already the improvements identified on one system will reduce its energy cost by 10%, encouraging us to roll out the service to our other systems and sites.”
