Restaurant Equipment Blog Restaurant Equipment & Restaurant Supplies

Restaurant Equipment | Under Pressure…

Time to save money again!!  Do you own a restaurant?  One thing that you have in your store is an exhaust hood or two. In the summer time down south it gets hot and humid and sometimes cooling your building can seem impossible. Maybe all that cool air is being sucked out with the hot air from your cooking equipment through the exhaust hood.  Here is a test to see if this is happening in your restaurant.  With all of your exhaust hoods running, make up air included, go to the front of the building open the entrance doors and take note of what you feel.  Did you feel a rush of air come past you, or did you feel resistance when opening the door?  If you did then you have negative pressure in the building and all of your high cost AIR CONDITIONING is being sucked up through the exhaust hood.  Do you want to fix this situation?  If so there are companies that will balance test the building and bring this situation under control.  These companies do think a lot of what they do but it may be well worth it in energy savings.  If you have an A/C man or refrigeration guy he may be able to fix the problem with the twist of a pulley or two, the fix could be as simple as tightening a drive belt on one of the fans.  The theory behind how your exhaust works is for every cubic foot per minute (CFM) of air that exhausted has to be replaced with outside return air (make-up air) or by your air conditioning.  Many customers tell me how high there electric bills are and I always go to this problem first.  I had one restaurant that you could not pull the front doors open and when you started inside you better hold the door to keep it from hitting you in the rear. This is an extreme example but just think how much conditioned air was going up the exhaust...no this will not help with global cooling.  We eventually had to put an additional make-up air fan on the roof to solve the problem.   The cost of the fan and labor was small compared to the energy dollars that were literally going through the roof.  If you have this situation you could potentially reduce your power bill by as much as 20-30%.  I know we are all in a hurry trying to make payroll and pay the government but don’t ignore what you have going up the kitchen exhaust... profit dollars. At JES we provide any size commercial exhaust hood, commercial exhaust fans and commercial supply air fans. Hope I saved you some money and explained why this should be important to you. One thing we pride ourselves on at JES is that we don’t just sell equipment we also know how it works and why you may be having a problem. Advice is free and I don’t mind helping, give us a call and see the JES difference for yourself...