COMPARISON OF ELECTRICITY CONSUMPTION FOR AMMONIA AND FREON REFRIGERATION SYSTEMS

In the Refrigeration Industry, there is always the same question of whether to choose ammonia refrigerant or one of the “Freon” refrigerants, with a sincere attempt by the owner of the facility to choose the most cost-effective system.

One of our clients has a CT-TECHNOLOGIES cold store with Ammonia system and another cold store – by others – with “Freon” (R404A) Refrigeration systems.

Each cold store has its own electricity meter, so we thought, that it would be interesting to compare these two systems according to copies of ten months’ electricity bills that the owner has provided for us.

They showed, that for the Freon systems, the average monthly electricity consumption had been 16,640 kWh per 1,000 tons of storage capacity. The same figure for the ammonia plant was 11,695 kWh, i.e. 4,945 kWh less – 30%!

Assuming the electricity cost rate of 0.25 Euro per kWh, the annual saving with the ammonia plant would be EUR 14,835 per 1,000 tons storage capacity.

An additional interesting fact is that just one of the two ammonia compressors shown below can easily handle the 2000 tons cold store, while the other unit is on standby.

At the same time, the below 13 Freon units in the 6000 tons cold store are struggling to maintain the temperature, while drawing 42% more electric power than an ammonia system would have done.