Cold rooms and freezer rooms

A cold room is not just a box with cooling in it. It is a structure built from sandwich panels with its own floor, doors and refrigeration unit, sized for a specific operation. The difference between a cold room that lasts ten years and one that never quite keeps up is in the design, not the price of the unit.

Cold room, freezer room, or monoblock

• A cold room is built to measure from panels, usually inside a building. The volume follows stock turnover, not the space that happens to be free.
• A freezer room is the same for sub-zero temperatures, with thicker panels, heated door frames against freezing shut and a different defrost arrangement.
• A monoblock is a single unit fitted onto the wall of the room. Installation is quick and servicing simple, but capacity has a ceiling.
• A split unit puts the condenser outside. It is quieter inside and handles more, but costs more to install.

Where savings cost the most

Three items get cut from quotes first, and all three come back as running costs.

• Panel thickness. A thinner panel is cheaper once and then you pay the difference in electricity for its whole life. In freezer applications it shows most.
• The floor. A room without an insulated floor is cheaper, but in freezer applications the slab beneath freezes through, and that is an expensive repair.
• Spare capacity. A unit sized exactly to the calculation has nothing left for summer, for a full restock or for frequent door openings.

How a cold room is sized

Stock turnover decides, not volume alone. A room taking in warm goods daily needs different capacity from one used only for storage. The calculation takes the volume, the target temperature, how much stock arrives and at what temperature, how often the doors open and the ambient temperature. In a cramped kitchen without ventilation the condenser has a harder job than in a warehouse.

The specific approach for a catering operation is covered under a cold room for a restaurant.

Industrial refrigeration and food processing

In production and processing, hygiene, cleanability and traceable temperatures are added to ordinary cooling requirements. Panels have to be washable, joints must not trap soil and temperatures are logged. All of it can be retrofitted, but at considerably more expense than designing it in from the start.

For meat and other short shelf-life goods there is also a difference between storage and blast chilling. Blast chilling needs far higher capacity for a shorter time, so it cannot be solved by oversizing the storage room.

What we supply

• A design based on the operation: volume, temperature, stock turnover, where the unit goes.
• Panels, doors, floor and complete installation on site.
• The refrigeration unit, controls, temperature logging and connection to monitoring.
• Commissioning, operator training and handover documentation.
• Follow-up service and planned maintenance, including F-gas leak checks.