Restaurants use the heat from the kitchen to generate their own energy

Food business owners extract energy from kitchen smoke and use it to “heat” their entire business.

On the roof of a Burger King in Malmö, southern Sweden, Maggad Khalidy points to a large metal box attached to a “jungle” of pipes and wires.

At least from the outside, it’s far from an attractive innovation. But Khalidy, who owns the fast food franchise that runs this restaurant, says he’s saved the equivalent of $16,000 a year on heating bills at the location.

The metal box contains a new form of heat exchanger called Lepidus, developed by a to boot A Swedish girl named Enjay.

The company has identified a gap in the market: how to recover energy from kitchen vapors and use it to heat other areas within restaurants? This new mechanism helps reduce the company’s energy bill and reduces polluting gas emissions.

“We were a little skeptical at first,” says Khalidy, whose franchise was selected for the initial Enjay pilot in 2016. “But we’ve seen the savings generated and the catch-up is pretty quick.”

Enjay believes the patented product is the first in the world to offer beneficial energy recovery from kitchen fumes.

Lepido became commercially available in 2018 and has since been installed in around 250 Burger King franchises in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, as well as in school and hotel kitchens in the Nordic countries, as well as in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. .

Enjay co-founder Nils Lekeberg says a medium-sized restaurant can reduce its heating bills by up to 90% annually and reduce its annual carbon footprint by 30 tons with Lepido.

With the global energy crisis, Enjay says he is now seeing increased orders from restaurateurs in other parts of Europe, as well as Canada and the US, despite doing little marketing outside the Nordic countries.

Trials of the new technology have recently begun at several UK locations, including a Burger King located in Hertfordshire. The canister has also been installed in branches of the Caribbean food chain Turtle Bay, near Manchester, and at the Brindleyplace restaurant, in Birmingham.

Matt Mansfield, manager of Turtle Bay in the UK, says he was “impressed” by the idea after seeing Enjay’s test results in Sweden. “We were looking for ways to reduce our costs and become more sustainable, and this technology was at the forefront of that.”

Systems that transfer heat from one part of a building to another are already commonplace in many industries, but recovering energy from industrial kitchens is a challenge, explains Arne Speerfork, a professor specializing in thermodynamics at the University of Technology of Hamburg in Germany.

That’s because the hot air in kitchens is full of grease and soot particles that stick to the surface of traditional heat-exchange technologies, making that energy difficult to recover.

As a result, the hot air produced during the cooking processes is often expelled directly from the restaurant buildings to the outdoors.

Enjay’s technology is larger than conventional heat exchangers and is designed so that grease and soot particles pass through the metal coils without sticking to them, says Speerfork.

The warm air can then be pumped through pipes carrying cold water, which then heats up and can be used to heat other parts of a building.

“This can certainly be effective,” says Speerfork. The specialist understands, however, that the price of the product is likely to be a challenge for small and independent restaurant owners.

The average cost to purchase and install a Lepido heat exchanger is approximately USD 30,000 (R$150,000).

However, Enjay’s Nils Lekeberg argues that most companies should recoup that money within a year or two.

In central Malmö, Orestis Georgiadis, 56, is heating up pork on a barbecue to make kebab or shawarma-like snacks at a family restaurant he’s been running for 13 years.

He is very interested in installing new technologies to save energy, help reduce costs and limit the carbon footprint of his business. But Georgiadis says he “absolutely” could not afford a technology like Lepidus without a bank loan or support from the Swedish state.

In addition to heating his grill, he needs energy to keep pizza ovens running around the clock, power an industrial-sized dishwasher, and store food in his eight freezers and refrigerators. Paying your heating and electricity bills has been a struggle this past year, especially as food prices in Sweden are also at their highest level since the 1950s.

Georgiadis even had to turn off the heat in the venue’s main hall to save money, which left his restaurant “almost dead” after 8pm during the winter months.

He says things are looking up due to the warmer temperatures of the new spring, but he’s not convinced he’ll be able to keep the restaurant open if expenses stay this high. “If we have these prices for another year, I don’t think I will survive.”

Speerfork says heat recovery from cooking vapors could become a more competitive and ‘robust’ market in the future if high energy prices persist.

“The higher the energy price, the more attractive it is to invest in more expensive heat recovery technologies,” he says.

Currently, Enjay’s main competitor is a small four-person British company called Dext. It has teamed up with the Nando restaurant chain and Sheffield Hallam University to develop an energy-exchange product that performs a similar function to capture “waste” heat from kitchen vents.

Source: Terra

Rose

Rose James is a Gossipify movie and series reviewer known for her in-depth analysis and unique perspective on the latest releases. With a background in film studies, she provides engaging and informative reviews, and keeps readers up to date with industry trends and emerging talents.