Historically, reach-in commercial refrigerators and walk-in coolers have been highly inefficient. Cooling energy is lost to the ground and adjoining areas, raising energy consumption.

You can’t eliminate that cooling loss, but you can keep energy consumption down, by taking cold air from the outdoors and using it inside. That was the brainchild of Richard Travers, the founder of Freeaire Refrigeration. “It didn’t make any sense to be using electricity to cool when there was limitless cold air on the other side of the door,” he says.

Freeaire’s energy solution revolves around the notion that the best energy saving comes from not using it in the first place.

With that idea in mind, cold winter months provide a great natural resource for mountain resorts. Freeaire’s Polar Package moves filtered cold air from outside to inside, rather than relying on a compressor system to produce cold air in the manner of conventional systems. The package uses far less energy and achieves up to a 50 percent increase in efficiency. When the weather warms up, a compressor operates as a conventional system. It is controlled by a patented electronic Cooler Controller, a low-power computer that maximizes efficiency by operating each component of a conventional refrigeration system only as much as necessary, to reduce energy use.

Since 2007, Killington Resort and Pico Mountain in Vermont have converted 12 walk-in coolers to the Freeaire system. On average, the Freeaire Refrigeration systems save Killington/Pico $3,000 a year in operational costs and reduce the areas’ CO2 emissions by 13.2 tons each year.


For more information, visit www.freeaire.com.