A new guide from the Carbon Trust sets out easy, no- or low-cost steps that businesses can take to cut their refrigeration energy bills by up to 20 percent.

Refrigeration can consume significant amounts of energy, typically accounting for up to 50 percent of energy costs for businesses such as food supermarkets and those involved in meat, poultry and fish processing, explains the Carbon Trust. For small shops with refrigerated cabinets, the proportion could be more than 70 percent.

The Carbon Trust is calling on businesses to cut their energy bills by checking their refrigeration systems. A new Carbon Trust guide, Refrigeration Systems—Guide to Key Energy Saving Opportunities, is available online. The guide includes a range of useful tips and advice, including:

• Refrigerated display cabinets: Buy high-efficiency cabinets which are listed under the Enhanced Capital Allowance (ECA) scheme; these can use 30 percent less energy than a non-listed cabinet.

• Cold rooms: Open doors can cost £6 per hour for freezers; use an air-tight store with good door management, lighting and defrost control.

• Heat recovery: Recovering the heat emitted by refrigeration equipment can help to reduce boiler energy consumption by up to 30 percent; fit a new refrigeration system with an energy-saving "desuperheater."

• Chillers: Use a chiller engineered for U.K. temperatures, with good part-load capacity and efficiency, and it could save as much as £25,000 a year for a typical 800kW process chiller.

For example, by investing £4,700 in a new condenser, County Antrim Dairy saved £3,200 in annual energy costs, meaning that the costs were regained in less than 18 months. When Evron Foods, a cold store operator in Craigavon, reviewed its refrigeration control systems, it discovered that upgrading to defrost-on-demand technology would save £15,000 per year in energy costs, and payback would take just one year.