In the late 1980′s Scott Sovereign, a Professional Engineer with expertise in Thermodynamics, was working part-time for a large cold storage/freezer facility in West Michigan. He noticed large amounts of energy being wasted in the facility’s refrigeration system using standard defrost clock and thermostat control. Scott designed and perfected for this plant what is now the ENERSAVE Refrigeration Control System, reducing the facilities refrigeration energy costs by nearly 50%.

In 2001, Frank Van Kempen, owner of Van Kempen Electric Inc. and a Master Electrician, partnered with Scott , copyrighted the ENERSAVE Refrigeration Control program and started the company ENERSAVE, LLC. Since then, the ENERSAVE Refrigeration Control Program has been installed in over 30 refrigerated apple storage facilities in West Michigan comprising over 5.5 million bushels of storage, 1 refrigerated facility in Canada comprising 1 million bushels of storage, and 4 storage customers in New York comprising 1.5 million bushels of storage. The electrical cost of product storage in all these facilities has been reduced significantly. The ENERSAVE program is being supported with customer grants from multiple sources(see Federal and State grants). ENERSAVE will assist customers with grant applications available in their specific area.

The application for the addition of the ENERSAVE system to an existing refrigeration system consists of a three-step process:

1. ­Identify optimal system configurations at a customer’s plant for savings and cost estimates of the ENERSAVE system design
2. Design and install an ENERSAVE system for the plant
3. Evaluate information gathered by the ENERSAVE system data menus and apply this information to the ENERSAVE system control menus

With these three steps in place, the customer’s refrigeration system will operate primarily at optimum system configurations, saving large amounts of energy while increasing cooling efficiency.

The ENERSAVE system utilizes a 10” touch screen coupled with a programmable logic controller (PLC) for operational control and data compilation. Customers with facility internet attached to an ENERSAVE System will be able to monitor and control their refrigeration from any location in the world offering internet access. The ENERSAVE system fully integrates with existing control systems so that the existing controls become a back-up control system. All liquid solenoid, fan, defrost and compressor control points are installed with hand/off/auto isolation relays to protect the ENERSAVE system from outside interference and provide the operator with the ability to switch back to the original controls for troubleshooting purposes.