New kitchen ventilation will save energy at Claridge’s
Claridge’s in London has achieved a 30% reduction in the cost of kitchen ventilation following the installation of two 11 kW ABB variable-speed drives to control air supply and extraction, amounting to over £10 000 a year. The drives were installed by Food Industry Technical, which specialises in ventilation control systems, as part of the hotel’s total kitchen refit.
FIT supplied a cooker-hood system that automatically reacts to conditions in the kitchen, increasing extraction at busy times and reducing flow in quieter times to achieve significant energy savings.
Previously the cooker-hood system was using over 450 kWh a day, which has now fallen to 315 kWh a day. The installation will save nearly 50 t of CO2 a year and achieve a return on investment in 1.8 years.
FIT installed its Cheetah cooker-hood extraction system, which incorporates two 11 kW IP54 ABB standard drives. The system incorporates a range of sensors to measure temperature, smoke, steam and airflow in extract and supply ducts and uses these data to control fan speeds.
Peter Evans, sales director with FIT, says, ‘We had six hours to fit our system before the kitchen opened up to customers. Using ABB drives offered a significant advantage. The drives are extremely easy to configure because the built-in keypad tells you exactly what the parameters are without having to reference them. With competitor models, the drives have numbers that represent each parameter; the engineer then has to look up an instruction manual to see what the numbers mean, resulting in a significantly increased installation time.’
