Foul territory: EET targets TRU inefficiency
Oil fouling is a well-known issue in all refrigeration equipment, including transport refrigeration units (TRUs). This gradual buildup of compressor lubricating oil inside the walls of refrigerant tubing forces pumps to work harder and hinders heat transfer, reducing the efficiency and lifespan of essential cooling equipment.
Energy Efficient Technologies (EET) offers a compelling solution—but reefer carriers have been cautiously pessimistic.
“The biggest problem we face every time is people saying, “This sounds too good to be true,’” lamented Joe Mearman, EET president and CEO. “But it is realistic. And once people finally install this product in a few of their refrigeration systems, they tend to incorporate it throughout their portfolios.”
The product in question is CryoGenX4, a patented liquid nanotechnology that is designed to eliminate and prevent this pervasive problem the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers first documented in 2005. And thousands of hours of validation across diverse industries, including restaurants, hotels, data centers, cold chain distribution, and temperature-controlled transportation, indicates it delivers considerable savings in fuel, maintenance, and equipment-replacement expenses, while also helping carriers meet shippers’ goals to curtail Scope 3 GHG emissions.
“The savings are more than just ‘significant,’” maintained Chris Bramble, EET national sales director.
“It’s almost like, ‘How do you not do this?’”
‘Like Teflon in a frying pan’
Mearman spent 20 years with the Navy identifying more efficient equipment technologies in submarines, warships, and facilities as a civilian research and development engineer. He and a partner founded EET in 2007 to pursue that passion on a grand scale. “Our goal was to find known and repeatable technology we could put into larger footprints to make a global difference in climate change,” Mearman said. “We firmly believe CryoGenX4 is the answer.
“So we’ve been moving up the chain, deploying it in larger and larger installations.”
Mearman met the inventor of CryoGenX4, Tri-S Technologies CEO Tony Sgarbi, in 2008 at a conference in Baltimore, where EET is based. Sgarbi worked with Mobil 1 and Dura Lube early in his career. He perfected polarized refrigerant oil additive (PROA) technology with PolarShield before patenting his unique solution in the early 2000s. CryoGenX4, the product’s fourth evolution, utilizes electromagnetically charged particles to penetrate the invasive oil and embed itself on the interior surfaces of refrigeration systems, removing and preventing oil buildup. “It has a stronger attraction and smaller particles than the oil that sticks to the walls inside the machine, so it pushes past the oil and adheres to the metal’s lattice structure.
“It acts like Teflon in a frying pan—and attaches like a magnet.”
EET, which boasts 11,000 installers under contract, now is the largest global distributor of CryoGenX4, which is inside 158,000 machines in 100 countries across six continents, Mearman said. The company also offers 200 other technologies and processes for improving energy efficiency.
‘Transformative’ potential
Mearman’s team started with HVACR systems in restaurants, grocery stores, and data centers. Those efforts led to hotels, assisted living centers, convenience stores, beer distribution facilities, and more. EET now features 70 case studies across 18 industries on its website, esquaredt.com. Marriott International is one of its largest customers, along with Omega Healthcare, Cogent Communications, a McDonald’s food distributor, Anheuser-Busch Companies, and Molson Coors Beverage Company.
Reefer transport is a newer target—and CryoGenX4 boasts “transformative” potential.
EET estimates cold chain transporters use 4 million refrigerated trucks and trailers, 500,000 refrigerated railcars, and 1.5 million reefer containers globally. And by adopting CryoGenX4, they could realize “billions” of dollars in fuel savings and eliminate “millions” of metric tons of CO2 emissions each year.
Starbucks distributor DPI tested CryoGenX4 in a 4-year-old Carrier Transicold Vector 8600MT TRU on a 53-ft. reefer trailer at its Mid-Atlantic distribution center in Capitol Heights, Maryland. The study showed a 20% increase in fuel efficiency—compared to the same delivery route over a two-month period without CryoGenX4—and corresponding 20% average fuel savings. DPI also realized a 24% increase in freezer efficiency and 42% boost in cooler efficiency, helping it reduce food spoilage by better maintaining setpoints during transport and decreasing “pull-down” times after reefer doors open.
“Twenty-percent average fuel savings in refrigerated trucking is very significant,” Mearman said. “Fuel costs more than electricity, so it’s a faster payback. It’s more challenging to deploy, because if you have 1,000 trucks, we need to track them all down.
“But it’s an incredibly powerful opportunity for cold chain transportation.”
Fast, simple savings
The return on a fleet’s investment in CryoGenX4 will depend on the age of the equipment—performance improves more dramatically in older units, but with less run time remaining—how often it operates, and the price of fuel. “A one- to two-year payback across the board is easy,” Mearman said. “Some will be faster. If TRUs are running 20 hours a day in areas with high fuel rates, it’s probably less than a year.”
The DPI evaluation suggested the company could save $343,000 every year for the next seven years—or $2.1 million total—by deploying CryoGenX4 in all of its 256 reefer trailers, assuming $3 a gallon for diesel.
“We’re going to get savings every time that reefer runs,” Mearman said.
Installation is fast and simple.
CryoGenX4 is injected into the system through the refrigerant port at a rate of 1 oz. per ton of refrigeration in a process that takes only a few minutes, Mearman said. “And the beauty of this is, it’s a one-time application for the life of the equipment,” Bramble added.
Every deployment is insured for $1 million, though no one has ever used the policy, and using CryoGenX4 will not void the manufacturer’s warranty, Mearman said. “It is illegal for a company to void a warranty for using a technology they haven’t tested,” he explained. “That’s the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act—and we have seen zero voided warranties in over 158,000 global installations to date.”
EET also makes adoption affordable with low-interest financing options.
“We’re a national contractor with the National Energy Improvement Fund,” Mearman said. “They’re the largest financier of projects across the country. So there’s no money out of pocket, and the financing costs are 1.5-2% of the lifetime savings you can extract out of these projects. It’s nothing. You get to keep the other 98% of the savings—and you get to start saving money and increasing profit right away.
“It’s cash-positive immediately.”
