Most of the retrofit enquiries we receive open with a decision already made: a refrigerant has been chosen, a budget has been drawn, and the question to us is how quickly we can install it. The problem is that nobody has measured what the plant uses today, which means nobody will be able to prove what the retrofit saved.
An energy audit is not a delay. On a mid-size retail site it takes a fortnight, and it routinely changes the scope of work — often reducing it.
What the audit actually looks at
- Baseline consumption per unit, logged across a full trading week rather than a single day
- Suction and discharge pressures against the design envelope, not against the nameplate
- Condenser fouling and airflow, which is where a surprising share of the loss usually sits
- Defrost frequency and duration, and whether either is still tuned to the original load
- Door discipline and air curtain performance on display cases
The last two items cost almost nothing to correct. We have handed clients a report where the recommendation was to fix a defrost schedule and clean a condenser bank, defer the refrigerant change by a season, and reassess. That is a smaller invoice for us and the right answer for them.
If you cannot say what the plant used last month, you cannot say what the retrofit saved this month.
Then the retrofit
Once the baseline exists, the refrigerant decision gets easier, because it is now a comparison rather than a preference. And when the work is finished, the same logging that produced the baseline produces the verification — which is what the finance team wanted from the beginning.
