Refrigeration Plant Optimisation and Energy Management System, Ethos, Shortlisted as Double Finalist for RAC Cooling Industry Awards 2018
Refrigeration consultants Star Technical solutions have been announced as a double finalist for RAC Cooling Industry Awards 2018 for their groundbreaking Ethos system.
Finalists have today been announced for The Cooling Industry Awards taking place in September 2018, and Star Technical Solutions have been recognised twice for its revolutionary remote management system Ethos. The company claimed 2018 Product of the Year in January at the National ACR and Heat Pump Awards, and hope to add two more awards from the RAC event to their list of prestigious industry achievements.
Ethos, an energy management and plant optimisation service for refrigeration and heat pump equipment, has been shortlisted and named as a finalist for Refrigeration Product of the Year and the Refrigeration Innovation – Components/Peripherals/Processes categories. On choosing the finalists judges were looking for evidence of products which improve performance, energy efficiency, or contribute to environmentally friendly refrigeration – and Star’s Ethos ticked all the boxes.
Anne Flanagan, Business Development Manager for Ethos said, “We are delighted to be finalists for not one but two prestigious awards at the renowned RAC Cooling Industry Awards. It’s important to us to be recognised as leaders in our industry, especially when it comes to energy efficiency and reducing CO2 emissions which is one of our core values. Ethos has the capacity to record extensive plant data , analyse it and identify corrective actions that will save energy and improve performance
Star Technical Solutions, which is a core part of the Star Refrigeration group team, developed the ground-breaking Ethos remote monitoring system. The bespoke analysis software gathers data around the clock from the heatpump or cooling system to which it is applied. The data is analysed and delivered to theonline dashboard which displays details of plant performance and provides insight into energy saving opportunities identified by energy consultants. and how much money will be saved as a result This provides customers with total control over performance and efficiency, contributing to a significantly reduced carbon footprint and energy bills.
Anne Flanagan added, “The bespoke system has been found to offer customers 10%-30% cost savings based on the recommendations made by the innovative, industry specific monitoring and analysis software. By putting the data collected to use to identify operational inefficiencies, informed decisions can be made to ensure plants are running at optimal efficiency and money isn’t being wasted.”
The Ice Co, Asda, BrewDog and Campbell’s Prime Meat are a few of the companies benefiting from the use of Ethos to tackle a number of different challenges, from addressing common maintenance issues or improving the control strategy, to assessing future investment.
Niall Murphie, Chief Engineer of BrewDog, said, “Our expansion over the past 5 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.”
“A key feature for us is the online monitoring dashboard, it gives our managers and engineers clear real-time visibility of all our connected systems health and performance and allows them to drive energy savings and preventative maintenance.”
Campbell’s Prime Meat used Ethos to assess future investment. Darrin Leslie, Factory Manager for the company, said, “We planned to expand our production facility and were not sure whether our existing refrigeration plant had sufficient capacity to handle the additional cooling duty required. Rather than taking a risk or buying additional equipment that maybe wasn’t necessary we employed Star Technical Solutions (STS) to assess our site’s cooling demand over a 2 week period. The assessment revealed that our existing equipment could comfortably handle the new production load. Star’s appraisal allowed us to capitalise on surplus capacity and avoid the unnecessary purchase of new equipment.”
The RAC Cooling Industry Awards take place on 26th September 2018 at London Hilton Park Lane. To find out more about the event, visit: https://colingawards.racplus.com/
To find out more about Star Technical Solutions and the celebrated Ethos system, go to https://www.star-ts.co.uk