Hi All:

With the current energy prices going through the roof due to the war on Ukraine, there is new found interest among our senior management on energy savings in our property.
Proposals that in the past were hitting deaf ears with the remarks of :"This is not the way to that we do things around here" or " We are a luxury high end 5 star property and this is not our service standard" are now met with: "Why did it take so much time for us to implement this?" and "What other proposals does Engineering have?"

One of the measures that I was considering was to drop the setpoint temperature on our commercial kitchens loop from the usual 65C to around 50~55C, like our other plumbing water loops.
As per my understanding, kitchen hot water loop is kept at higher temperature for cleaning and sterilizing purposes:
1. General cleaning- it helps with degreasing and makes washing more effective
2. Sterilizing- assuring that dishwashers' final rinse is kept around 80C

I was looking if there was any standard or guideline that specifically points out for this 65C setpoint and I couldn't find any. I found some guidelines regarding Legionella control, but we can run lower hot temperatures as we have chlorine dioxide injection on hot and cold water for this purpose.

So basically my reasoning is that is 65C is an old industry standard and doesn't take into consideration development on detergents' chemistry or if the booster heaters at dishwashers are capable to raise the temperature to the required 80C.

If I cover these 2 bases, I believe it would be safe and it wouldn't go against any code or guideline to drop the temperature of the hot water loop by at least 10C.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks for your help