When restaurant chain Carluccio’s wanted to reduce their energy bills as well as their carbon footprint, it was the Panasonic Aquarea air to water heat pump system that provided them with the perfect sustainable solution. The implementation of an intelligent and effective system by FWP UK Ltd and Oceanair granted this project first place in the 2015 Panasonic PRO Awards under the category “best restaurant project”.

Installers, FWP Air Conditioning, together with distributor Oceanair were asked to install a system which would provide the desired volume of hot water, at the correct temperature while at the same time reducing energy costs. 

The attraction of super energy-efficient heat pump technology continues to grow and with the Government continuing to demand that businesses make big cuts to their carbon emissions, heat pump technology can help them to do so in an efficient way.  

Following a consultation with Carluccio’s, it was decided that their new site in the Meadowhall shopping centre in Sheffield would be the ideal location as it had the correct attributes for the installation of an air to water heat pump system.  Previous restaurants in the chain had been fitted with a more traditional 12kW boiler system.  

FWP installed a 12kW Aquarea T-CAP mono bloc unit which would allow  for the free air from the kitchen roof space to be transferred through condensing unit providing hot water at the optimum temperature.  With a high coefficient of performance (COP), for every kW of electricity the system uses, it provides 4kW of energy. This makes the Aquarea far more cost effective than a conventional heating system.

The Panasonic Aquarea air source heat pump converts the latent thermal energy found in fresh air into clean, efficient and sustainable heating and hot water. The conversion process (transferring heat from one place to another) is made possible by advanced inverter-driven technology that is similar to a domestic refrigerator.  

Meters were installed on the units to monitor energy use of the heat pump and immersion heaters since it was installed.  Commenting on the savings achieved, Tony Evanson from Oceanair said: “When Carluccio’s compared the Sheffield site to one of their existing restaurants of a similar size, the energy savings were considerable.  To heat the water for their Leeds restaurant cost £3782 whilst at the Meadowhall site the comparable cost was just £951. These sizable savings mean the site will see a return on investment in about 2 years and has achieved a COP of about 3.91.”

The T CAP (Total Capacity) line-up from Panasonic is able to maintain the same nominal capacity even at -15°C without the help of an electrical booster heater. T-CAP is also able to provide extremely high efficiency, whatever the outside temperature.

Compact mono-bloc air-to-water heat pumps are perfect for where space is at a premium as it was in the restaurant. Panasonic’s Aquarea 12kW mono-blocs combine the outdoor and indoor units into one package that is simple to install and easy to operate.  

Alison Stanton, Development Director from Carluccio’s said: “We strive for sustainability wherever possible right across our business and were keen to trial air to water heat pumps at our new Sheffield restaurant.  The results of the trial show us that we can achieve significant savings on our energy costs as well as reducing our carbon footprint.  We hope to now install Aquarea units at all of our new developments and potentially retro fit ASHPs to our existing 50 restaurants.”