Michael Berning, Director of Sustainable Design Heapy Engineering

John Lawn

Start with simple things. “Swap out incandescent lamps with compact screw-in fluorescents. If your fixtures still use T-12 flurorescent tubes, change out the lamps and ballasts so you can use T-8 lamps. This reduces wattage requirements and heat gain without reducing illumination levels. If you are replacing fixtures, you can achieve even more savings with T-5 tubes.”

Move on to the water flow in handwashing sinks and spray heads. “You may still have 3.5-4 gpm heads. Efficient heads use half that much water and the design of the new nozzles makes their effectiveness virtually identical. It makes a huge difference over time — if you cut the flow rate 30 percent, you can use a spray even more than you used to and still save water.”

Meter and submeter. “Managing the schedules for when equipment is turned on or off is a responsibility thing. Is someone assigned with that responsibility or is no one responsible? That is where submetering comes in. Metering tells you where you are starting from and where you can go to. The metering and data logging equipment you can get today is a lot simpler and less costly than it used to be.”

Establish good working relationships with facilities management staff. “Foodservice operators need to work with facilities managers to establish setbacks and ventilation modifications that match operating schedules. All this really requires is better communication because the schedules are computer controlled.”

Understand how kitchens tie into building energy systems. “Variable speed controls on exhaust hood fans let you adjust the airflow to how much you need depending on what is being used under the hood. Look into how your system is providing makeup air to make up for the exhaust. It is feasible to recover heat from the exhaust and put it back into the makeup air, but in kitchens the grease makes that problematic. On the other hand, you can still want to control makeup air so it is not excessive, another application for variable speed fans.”

“In cafeterias, operators should consider demand control ventilation. If you have 1,500 students in the room at lunch, that is what the system is sized for. But what about late in the afternoon, when there are only a half dozen people there? You can use CO2 sensors to determine that and adjust makeup air requirements to match. In that kind of situation this can often give you energy savings of 30 percent.”