AJ Baker & Sons (Baker Refrigeration) has been at the forefront of CO2 natural refrigerant installations in Australia since 2008.
The first CO2 cascade system was installed at Supa IGA Lynwood, Western Australia in August of that year. The project was complicated even further by it being a retro-fit to an existing trading supermarket.
In fact, the first two CO2 cascade systems were supermarket refurbishments, as well as three out of the first four transcritical CO2 system projects which were operational store refurbishments.
Since then, the company has installed over 300 CO2 packs from their European supplier, Epta.
This range includes combined cascade CO2 - R134A packs, standalone 3 & 4 compressor CO2 packs, liquid recirculation CO2 pump stations and transcritical CO2 packs.
The end users of this technology range from the small single owner independent supermarkets, to two of the major national supermarket chains. Other customers also include those from the food processing industry.
The benefits of CO2 are numerous. As well as being an environmentally friendly refrigerant, equipment footprints are reduced with the use of double-stack packs.
Energy efficiency with reduced electrical consumption and highly optimised cooling systems in the display cases offer monetary savings from day one. Improved temperature performance and post-defrost recovery response are also added benefits.
The first transcritical CO2 project saw the customer install an additional 26% of refrigeration case load into the store, whilst seeing a power saving of 25% per month. Other installations are seeing similar reductions in electrical consumption.
By the end of 2016, Baker Refrigeration had completed or were nearing completion of 10 transcritical CO2 installations in Australia.