Houno awaits Energy Star results to back up energy efficiency claims

15 Feb 23

Houno is confident that its new range of Invoq combi ovens – unveiled to UK dealers for the first time last week – will stack up favourably against the competition when it comes to energy consumption.

The Denmark-based outfit, which is part of the Middleby Group, has spent six years developing the Invoq range, allowing it to take significant steps forward on the previous range of ovens that it sold in the market.

Better air flow and intake, as well as a triple layer door and energy efficient insulation, means it consumes 19% less energy an hour than its predecessor on convection mode, while it uses 70% less energy on steam mode thanks to improved steam saturation based on a lambda sensor, a closed drain system and the introduction of a steam injection feature.

Houno’s product development team claims the ovens offer cost savings of more than €1,600 (£1,400) a year based on a user scenario of eight hours a day (six hours convection, two hours steaming, one medium cleaning), five days a week for 48 weeks a year.

While in-house comparisons are all well and good, Houno knows that independent verification is much more meaningful, which is why vice-president of sales Vincent van Delft is eagerly awaiting the results of its Energy Star application.

Energy Star is the government-backed symbol for energy efficiency in the USA and is held in high regard by manufacturers around the world.

Speaking to dealers last week, Mr van Delft said: “Energy Star compliance is, for us, key to deliver the figures that all of you are looking for. The first question I will get asked after this presentation is where are you guys on energy consumption compared to all the competition? The figures I will show you are against our predecessor [models] so it’s basically the same as me saying my kids are the best looking kids in the world.

“We are using Energy Star because we want to have a third party evaluation which proves that those figures are better than the competition. The internal tests look good – they look very good – but we use Energy Star, and those figures are published on its website.”

Changes to the Energy Star programme mean that manufacturers are having to go through a process of recertification, but Mr van Delft said the Invoq ovens were in the system and the results would become evident soon.

“We believe that we’ll be ready next month to publish those figures,” he said.

One of the developments to get dealers excited last week was Houno’s HybridSteam concept, which the brand describes as a unique method of creating humidity.

Intelligent sensors instruct the oven to deploy either injected steam or steam created from water in the boiler – or both, in tandem sequence.

This choice of intervention allows a spectrum of possibilities because steam can be added with finer and more comprehensive control, according to the brand.

“In the market you’ll usually find direct injection systems or boiler based systems,” said Mr van Delft. “What we have done with Invoq is provide two different solutions. So we have the Combi, which is the direct injection steaming system – basically we push in water directly on the elements, create steam, and divide it into the oven. The other one is the boiler, where you have a kettle of boiling water, heating up and pushing steam inside of the oven.

“We don’t call our system a boiler – we call it a Hybrid because we only use full steaming in the boiler when we go into 100% steaming for vegetables, rice and pasta. If we go into combi mode, we switch to direct injection, because the direct injection system saves a lot of water and energy. That’s why we have two models: Combi and Hybrid.”