A very important year is 1997. In the summer of that year the
construction of the company's new combined factory and office
on a striking location in Tilburg was started.
The appearance of the building is representative for the
quality material the company itself works with. The outside
of the office is mainly made of stainless steel, a durable
and attractive material. Because of the continuous efforts
in making energy-efficient products, Dijko felt obligated
to have a number of innovative energy-saving provisions installed.
The first Van Dijk oven was built for a company in The Hague called Van der Heem and was designed by the founder of the company, the late Gerrit van Dijk. The oven was used for the so called enameling (drying and hardening) of lacquer on vacuum cleaner casings. The oven made use of racks, which were pulled through the oven at a certain interval. These racks formed the bottom, the beginning and the end of the oven. It was a revolutionary oven, because it made use of circulating hot air, which went between the products. This way energy costs and time needed for the enameling were halved. During the entire history of this oven building company we will see progressive and energy-saving designs.
As one of the first in the region Dijko made use of the saving credit of the power company Pnem. Every user has to pay a charge added to the price of energy. These charges go to users who have taken sufficient measures to save energy.
Via these measures the environment is spared and in the future entrepreneurs can even save money. This "green" attitude of Dijko translates in a positive appearance towards the customer. Dijko has succeeded in almost halving the energy use. With that CO2 and other emissions are also reduced.
The first step in saving energy is good insulation. Insulation is always a compromise between thickness of the insulation (and the costs of it) and the amount of energy which is saved. For Dijko the ideal thickness was 18 cm for the roof and 15 cm for the walls. The extra cost for this insulation is earned back in less than 7 years. For the windows so called HR+ glass is used, fitted with a reflecting layer and a special gas between the panes.
In the production hall special lamps are used, the so called Fusion lamps. It is the first application of this lighting system in the Netherlands. Instead of many fluorescent strip lights only 8 lamp-units are used in the hall.
The lamp consists of a little glass ball filled with sulfur and argon gas. This ball is situated in front of a microwave power supply which heats the contents of the ball powerfully, causing it to emit a bright white light. The life of the lamp is calculated at 20,000 hours. By placing a reflector behind the lamp, the light can be sent in a certain direction. Attached to the lamp is a special tube which has a reflecting film with a prism-shaped structure on the inside. Because of this structure the light is reflected internally and is equally distributed over the entire tube. Part of the light can exit the tube at the bottom, lighting the hall. All in all a spectacular form of energy-saving lighting.
In a production company there should be ample ventilation. By sending the warm air that is transported out of the building through a heat-exchanger, the cold air that is transported into the building can be heated. This investment produces a saving of ± 11,000 m3 of gas per year.
An investment which will not earn itself back for the time being, but is in accordance with the company's ideas, is the recycling of rainwater when it is not necessary to use the valuable tap-water. For flushing the toilets, spraying the plants and so on, rainwater is used which is stored in an underground tank with a volume of 3,000 liters. This tank is big enough to bridge over a dry period of 2 weeks. If by that time it still has not rained, the system switches to tap-water.
