Samsung “wind-free” causes a stir

UK: Samsung’s “wind-free” air conditioner caused a stir at last night’s ACR News Awards by snatching the Air Conditioning Product award from multi award winning favourites Daikin and Toshiba.

The Samsung wall-mounted AR9500M air conditioner won the product award despite being up against a number of strong finalists including Daikin’s R32 Sky Air A Series and Toshiba’s SHRM-e three-pipe heat recovery VRF.

While unlucky in that category, Daikin did pick up the Ancillary Air Conditioning Product of the Year for its Auto-Cleaning Duct accessory for its VRV and split air conditioners.

The 300 guests attending the evening’s celebration at the 155 Bishopsgate venue in the City of London also saw Bitzer taking the Refrigeration Product of the Year Award for the Ecoline+ CO2 compressor.

First time winner in the Ancillary Refrigeration Product of the Year category was Guntner UK with its Masterpanel controller.

Kooltech’s Stephen Taylor, a finalist in the 2017 SkillFridge competition, was named Apprentice of the Year, while a previous SkillFridge winner Chris Bailie of BL Refrigeration, who also won the Silver Medal in the 2015 WorldSkills competition, won this year’s Service Engineer of the Year Award.

The coveted Wholesaler/Distributor of the Year Award this year went to TF Solutions.

The recipient of the Alan Moor Award for contributions to the air conditioning and refrigeration industry went to Star Renewable Energy director Dave Pearson.

In other awards, Panasonic won the Environmental Project of the Year title for its work at the up-market Marina Village housing complex at Greystones, Co Wicklow, while Mitsubishi Electric’s blog about sustainable solutions, the Hub, picked up the Online Initiative of the Year award.