SACK 'N SAVE TESTS TUNNEL AIR SYSTEM

RICHARD TURCSIK

NORTH RICHLAND HILLS, Texas -- The Sack 'n Save division of Minyard Food Stores has seen the future of the frozen food department -- and it is underground.

The chain's newest unit here is experimenting with a state-of-the-art refrigeration system that uses a tunnel under the frozen food aisle to recapture cold air from its Kysor/Warren glass-walled coffin cases. The system should save on air-conditioning costs.

"The tunnel is used for the air conditioning in the store, to return air to the main area of the sales floor," said Johnny Whatley, service manager for Minyard Food Stores, Coppell, Texas.

"Anytime you have frozen food cases like this, there is a certain amount of spillage. We're just recovering the spilled air and using it to lighten our load on the air conditioning. "We're taking a credit per foot in frozen food on our air-conditioning calculations to take that air and put it back in the system and lighten our load.

"All the frozen foods are pretty much in that area, so we concentrated on the system to deal with frozen food. "What we've done is to have a unit on the roof and then we have a remote header down in that tunnel, and we shortened our length of pipe and saved about $2,000 in copper tubing, as a result," Whatley told SN.

The catacomb-like tunnel is accessed by lifting a grate in a back room and climbing down a ladder. When the system is in operation, the small corridor acts like a wind tunnel.

Minyard officials told SN that while they have been initially pleased with the tunnel, one drawback is that it can only be used in new stores constructed from the ground up.

The Kysor/Warren units save money because they run on three screw-drive compressors, the equivalent of 12 piston-driven compressors found in a standard coffin case, which should result in a 20% energy efficiency gain and additional savings on maintenance costs, Minyard officials said.

To further cut costs and help the ozone layer, Minyard is installing CFC-R22 refrigerant, which is safe enough that it is not scheduled to be phased out until 2030, along with synthetic polyolester oils in place of mineral-based oils in the freezer cases of its stores.

"We're going from store to store changing the oil, which costs about $30 a gallon. Hopefully, we're going to get that done by the summer, and by the fall we'll hopefully start putting in the new refrigerants. "We're trying to do it at a time when it will have the least financial impact on the company," Whatley said.

"We're conscious of the CFC situation. We have service men assigned to a group of seven stores, and they check those stores for Freon leaks. Finding and repairing the leaks has put a big dent in our Freon costs," Whatley said.