For an oven that’s 50 years old and designed a long time ago; it’s going to be more difficult to retrofit new upgrades. We have refurbished ovens that have significantly degraded over the years, these need to be brought back to an acceptable standard first, including all repairs and remedial work necessary to do that. 

It may not be financially viable to convert to electric if the equipment is in a poor state of repair and you’re losing heat everywhere. 

Then there’s also the location and positioning of the equipment. Where bakeries have expanded over the years, you might find an oven right in the middle of a bakery surrounded by other equipment added over the years. Space is a premium in a lot of bakeries – If you want to fit a heat recovery system for example, the heat recovery unit is ideally installed in close proximity to the oven with minimal ducting between it and the oven. The further away the two are, the longer the ducting length, resulting in increased energy losses. 

Bakeries also have to consider regulations. If an efficiency upgrade or retrofit is deemed to be a major modification to the oven, it may be necessary to upgrade the rest of the equipment to meet current regulations. That might include a full rewire of an oven, a new control system, upgraded safety circuit etc. which all add additional cost. By the time you’ve started down this road, you might be looking at considerable additional costs, so it’s important to balance this against a full replacement.