Enjay – Recovering heat and saving money

Enjay addresses a need that probably few people would be pondering about - the heat in the outgoing air from restaurant kitchen ventilation. Jesper and Nils at Enjay have both been working with odor reduction in outgoing air from restaurants and thereby are well aware of the challenges and possibilities with the heat wasted in these air flows. One and a half year ago they decided it was time to address this problem and started Enjay.

Currently there is no possible way to recover the heat from large-scale kitchens ventilation. This is because of the cooking grease that comes with the air. This grease will quickly congest any conventional heat exchanger or heat pump. Previous efforts have unsuccessfully tried to filter this grease out before connecting to conventional heat pumps. With Enjay´s patent pending technology the heat pump instead is an integrated part of the filter with a clever function to flush grease out of the filter before it gets congested. The flushing is done with water recovered from the ventilation air, heated with recovered warmth recovered from the same flow.

Jesper and Nils are very optimistic about the future of the company, the customers are already lining up, interested in buying the first pilot installations. An installation on a typical restaurant ventilation system would recover around 400 000 Kwh a year. This gives a payback time for the customer of 2-4 years. If the restaurants were the customers this would perhaps not be so interesting as they are neither very keen on investing nor very interested in heat. However, the real-estate owners are and they are the ones that would be buying. Generally real-estate owners are a much smaller and easier group to target compared to restaurants.

With 25 000 restaurants in Sweden, 20 000 each in Norway and Denmark and 250 000 in Germany, just to mention a few of the closest countries, there is a very large addressable market for the solution. Enjay plans to set up production where they have their homes and office, in Stävie just outside Lund. “It will be a purely Swedish product” Says Nils.
 

Enjay has joined the Climate-KIC Accelerator program stage 1 and 2 through the administration of LU-Innovation and the funding provided by Climate-KIC. This money consists a major share of the capital inflow to the company so far. Nils and Jesper are now considering if they should engage more external funders or instead aim for organic growth of the company. The latter option is possible as there are already paying customers lining up.