White Paper 2/5: The Heat Recovery Paradox

Heat recovery from exhaust air is one of the most cost-effective energy measures a property owner can make. In a typical office building, it's a given. In a commercial kitchen, it's a different story, and often skipped entirely.

The reason isn't that the technology doesn't exist. It's fear of what happens when grease-laden air reaches the heat exchanger. RISE built a test rig to find out whether today's cleaning technologies, ozone and UV, actually solve that problem, simulating a realistic, heavily loaded kitchen exhaust. The result: neither technology meaningfully reduced the mass buildup on the protective filter ahead of the exchanger, a finding RISE itself judged too marginal to recommend as an industry standard.

In the second part of this five-part series, we look at why heat recovery is so often left out of commercial kitchen ventilation, what happens when the leading cleaning technologies are tested under real operating conditions, and the trade-off property owners are left making between energy efficiency and system robustness.

Read White Paper 2/5 →