Shari's of Roseburg

Background

Shari's Café and Pies provides high quality, reasonably-priced meals 24-hours a day in a comfortable setting. Shari’s may be best known for its pies and home-style cooking, but behind the scenes the company has been instrumental in developing and implementing initiatives to drive energy and resource management strategy in its portfolio of 100% corporate-owned buildings. Shari’s created a holistic sustainability program called SWEEP (Shari’s Water/Energy Efficiency Program) with the support of its Executive team and utility management company in order to identify projects geared towards energy efficiency. Each year during an internal Strategic Energy Management meeting, the team reviews the results of an annual restaurant-wide energy survey, discusses progress on energy goals, and proposes $100,000 in projects for SWEEP. The energy team identified the Roseburg, OR restaurant as one of the top energy users in in the chain’s portfolio. A major remodeling was slated for 2016, making it the right time to install a suite of energy and water saving measures that the company had piloted at other locations.

Solutions

Through SWEEP, the energy team at Shari’s identified energy and water efficiency measures that would complement each other and maximize energy reductions. As a standard rule, only projects with less than a 2-year ROI were selected. The plan for Roseburg featured a substantial investment in lighting initiatives, including changing out back-of-house light fixtures from T-12s to T-8s, upgrading front-of-house lighting to LED, and replacing 14-400 metal halide bulbs in aging outdoor neon signage to LED. These lighting upgrades produced electricity savings of 18% over the previous year. The improvements also included replacing old style dipperwells, which are perpetual-flow sinks, that used 45 gallons of water per day per well. The new heated dipperwells use 30 cups of water per day per well and were projected to reduce water consumption by 35% and gas consumption by 15% over the prior year.

Energy efficiency measures:

An energy management system
Demand control ventilation in the kitchen
Rooftop unit retrofits, including variable frequency drives (VFD)
Interior and exterior LED lighting
Tankless water heaters
Electronically Commutated Motors (ECMs) in walk-in freezers and coolers, replacing inefficient shade pole motors on evaporator fans
Occupancy sensors in bathrooms
Auto door closers on walk-in cooler & freezer
Relay switches for oven and dish machines
Insulation on all pipes

Water efficiency measures:

Low-flow aerators on kitchen and bathroom faucets
Heated dipperwells (perpetual-flow sinks) that eliminate the need for constant water flow
Low-flow pre-rinse sprayers