I work in a school district that has many many soda vending machines that stay on 24/7. I have heard that there are timers that can turn the machines off for a set number of hours but have been unable to find this product. It could potentially save a ton of money and energy. If anyone knows about this product, please direct me.
I was talking about this with members of our company's "Green Team" a while back. I remember the discussion being that you can't just turn soda machines off because of the need for cooling. Non-cooled machines, on the other hand, could be controlled through the use of a timer with an override feature for school functions. But in that case, each machine would need to be turned on individually and then shut off individually when the event is over. Unless the timer's programming allows it to go back into "auto" mode. If you're school has a building control system - which I suspect it does - you might want to look into tapping into that. My reasoning is that when there's a function, the HVAC needs to be put into, let's call it "exception" mode. For example, Saturdays are usually pretty quite except when there's an event; that's an exception. This will kick on the Air Handling Units and control the building appropriately. If done correctly, the same controls that say "hey there's someone in the building I should turn on the air" could also turn on the vending machines. Of course, it also works the other way: "there's no one in the building, spin down the HVAC system and turn off the non-cooled vending machines." But back to my original point. I do remember something available on the market to control vending machines. If I remember, I'll ask around.
You can get appliance timers that can handle 110v 15A. But I think you may only want to put them on the non refrigerated vending machines. This is kind of like the one I have. Intermatic at Lowe's: Outdoor Heavy Duty Digtal Timer
Building control, eg BACNet, has caveats too. Ideally, you would use a motor control center to stage how heavy demand systems (Chillers, individual cooler, etc) are powered back on Otherwise, to simply send a command "ON" could cause a pretty significant power sag. Depending on the size of the facility, there could also be significant PF excursions from a bunch of inductive loads suddenly powered on
I have an electronic timer on my pool pump which I can program to come on on week days or week ends or odd or even days of the week. It is made by Clipsal I think. If the vending machines turned off at say 5:00PM each weeknight and on at 5:00AM each weekday you would drastically reduce consumption but the drinks would be ice cold by 8:00AM each day. My pool timer can do that and it can remain off over weekends. It has battery back-up so is power failure proof as far as the timer goes, (it isn't a UPS). The shame is it would most likely not be the same model in the USA if Clipsal fittings are available there.
Or do what they did North of your border and remove the soda machines from schools kids don't need all that sugar anyway.
That's the best solution. It's funny how the gov't subsidizes corn products (i.e high fructose corn syrup) and then freaks out about the obesity epidemic and throws money at that. It's a lot like the oil situation in this country.
