Lithauanian manufacturer Freor has installed its first propane (R290) glycol-based Hydroloop system for a Slovakian supermarket chain, completing the process in early 2022.
The system was installed for supermarket chain Fajne Potraviny in a store in Košice, eastern Slovakia. Fajne Potraviny is a new chain aiming to “make quality food not a privilege, but part of customers’ everyday story,” Freor said in a post on their website. The chain requested equipment featuring both “outstanding quality and an environmental approach,” Freor added.
The R290 Hydroloop system from Freor enables the connection of several plug-in cabinets and cold rooms to the glycol condensing system. A glycol solution is circulated within a closed loop as a medium to remove heat to the outside of the store, using a water pump and an externally located dry cooler. Only one loop for medium- and low-temperature display cases is needed. This allows for a quick store set-up with simplified system installation and maintenance costs, according to Freor.
Fajne Potraviny chose a number of different cabinets from Freor’s Green Wave R290 line of refrigerators, all cooled by the R290 Hydroloop system with glycol. For meat products, Fajne Potraviny chose a NEPTUN Storage multideck cabinet with extra space in front for product storage and hooks with price holders. For ready-made foods, the supermarket chose ERIDA upright freezers. Both selections offer a “large merchandise display at customer eye level while also being space efficient,” Freor said.
For medium-temperature cabinets, the Košice store went with JUPITER low front multidecks, for a total of 38 meters in length. The JUPITER is a reach-in cabinet featuring “ample storage capacity and a large display area.” It is billed by Freor as energy efficient thanks to its innovative “dual air curtain” technology, where air curtains prevent cold air from escaping opened cabinets, saving energy and “letting customers enjoy a comfortable shopping experience without feeling any cold air.”
Fajne Potraviny is not the first supermarket to choose the Freor R290 Hydroloop system, far from it. In 2019, Bulgarian supermarket chain BulMag installed its first such system in a store in Varna. Also in 2019, Dutch food retailer COOP opened a R290 refrigerated store in Delft, in southern Netherlands.
More recently, in January 2002, Cypriot bakery chain Zorbas installed two R290 Hydroloop WPI systems from Freor at two new bakeries in Paphos and Limassol. The WPI designation stands for Water Pump Integrated, meaning that each cabinet has a small integrated water/glycol pump saving 30% of the energy normally needed for the glycol circulation in the system, making the system even more energy efficient.
