Campbell Soups reduces air conditioning costs & CO2 by 26%

Campbell Soup Company is a global manufacturer of high quality soup, beverage, confectionery, and prepared food products. The company is 136 years old with over $7 billion in annual sales, and a portfolio of more than 20 market-leading brands.

M3G delivered:

Campbell Soups installed M3G, to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions from their air conditioning systems. Actual reduction in energy consumption of 26% was achieved.

What is M3G?

M3G is an electronic, self learning, memory-based control system and can be integrated with most existing commercial air conditioning systems. M3G ensures that the air conditioning system is always working at maximum efficiency by effectively eliminating inefficiencies caused by the air conditioning system being ‘oversized’. Oversized systems are defined as having excess operational capacity over what is required to cool the space. BSRIA claim that 88% of ventilation systems are oversized resulting in 62% of installed cooling capacity being superfluous and resulting in wasted energy.

M3G measures the temperature of the cooling air entering the room from the air conditioning evaporator and monitors the rate of change. The compressor is stopped when the air temperature from the unit’s evaporator has fallen and plateaus. Cooling air continues to be transferred into the room until all liquid refrigerant has evaporated through the system. Once the off coil temperature has risen to 2oC below the room thermostat set point, M3G will allow the compressor to restart and the process is repeated.

The M3G’s intelligent software will anticipate non essential starts and stops and allows a minimum 4 minute rest period that ensures the air conditioning unit is not damaged by rapid cycling. The compressor running hours can be reduced by as much as 20% and 50%, resulting in a significant reduction in energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Building Management Systems (BMS)

The M3G integrates seamlessly with Building Management System. The majority of M3G installations are in buildings which have Building Management Systems already in place.

Pilot Methodology:

The pilot was conducted in one of Campbell’s offices, next to a boiler room. The office was chosen because the air conditioning ran for 24/7 with a constant heat load from within the boiler room. This heat load may change seasonally especially as the shutter doors to the room can be open or closed. At the time of installation it was noticed that there was a considerable heat increase in the office during the downtime of the M3G installation.

The air conditioning unit was monitored via run meters. A time clock switched operational modes of the M3G between operating and bypass every 24 hours at 7.15p.m. This also switched the run meters. A comparison was then made between the compressor run time and operational hours, with and without the M3G.

The savings on the run time of the compressor with theM3G was 26.17%. Staff confirmed the office temperatures during the pilot were not affected.