Smart control has added convenience
27th July 2016
IRELAND: Danfoss has been involved in the first Smart convenience store in Ireland to provide improved energy efficiency through full-store control of refrigeration, lighting and HVAC.
In cooperation with the contractors Cross Group and Danfoss, Irish family-owned oil company Maxol has pioneered the first smart convenience store in Mulhuddart on the outskirts of Dublin. The service station offers its customers a branded coffee shop, snacks, salads and convenience shopping – and now all these different franchises use a single, integrated control system.
“The project allowed us to engineer a total store solution that meets Maxol’s requirements for customer experience, food safety, HACCP compliance and energy efficiency,” said Paul Keegan, projects director at Cross Group. “The solution has run for four months and lives up to the expectations. So much so that Maxol is now asking for new features – for instance, metering of the individual franchises on the premises. We expect the Mulhuddart store to serve as an inspiration for similar Maxol service stations in the coming years.”
The Danfoss Smart Store solution is currently running in more than 5,000 stores worldwide and the proven energy savings are up to 50% per store.
A user-friendly dashboard that monitors refrigeration, HVAC, indoor and outdoor lighting, energy and alarms is said to make it easy for store staff to control all building services. Integrated refrigeration control provides automatic HACCP reporting for all equipment, and with the set-up and commissioning of all assets being completed with the help of built-in wizards, making additions to building control systems is said to be fast and easy to implement.
“The Maxol project has proven that our Smart Store concept is not only suited for bigger supermarkets and hypermarkets, but that it is easily adaptable to convenience stores with an expected pay-back time of only 1-2 years thanks to savings on energy bills and other operation and maintenance costs,” commented Shane Fleming, sales manager for Danfoss Electronic Controls and Services in Ireland.
The complete Smart control installation at Maxol includes:
• Integrated control of all refrigeration equipment including pack, cases, integral cases and cold room
• Monitoring of refrigeration, heating and air conditioning, lighting zones inside and outside store, energy consumption and alarms through one simple dashboard
• Power metering and energy management system
• Monitoring of temperature, air quality and humidity
• Control of outside signage and car park lighting controlled by photocells and schedules
• Wireless temperature monitoring
• Gas leak detection
• Alarm management
