Refrigeration service for catering and industry

Refrigeration does not fail on a quiet Thursday morning. It fails on a Friday evening with the cold store full for the weekend. That is why it pays to have a service arrangement in place before you need one, and to know what to expect from it.

When to call within 24 hours

• The temperature in the cold room is rising and will not come back to the set point.
• The compressor runs continuously, or cycles on and off in short bursts.
• Water is leaking from the unit, or ice is forming where it did not before.
• A noise appears that was not there before, especially rattling or whistling from the compressor.
• A fault code shows on the controller and comes back after a restart.

With these symptoms the question is not whether the equipment will fail but when. Delay usually means spoiled stock gets added to the repair bill.

What you can check yourself

Four things are worth going through before you call. It shortens the diagnosis and sometimes shows that no service visit is needed.

• Door seals. Close the door on a sheet of paper and pull. If it slides out without resistance the seal is leaking and the unit is fighting warm air.
• Evaporator and condenser. Fins clogged with dust or grease are the most common reason performance drops gradually and nobody notices.
• The set temperature. Somebody may have changed it. On controllers without a lock this happens more often than expected.
• Defrosting. An evaporator covered in ice can mean faulty defrosting rather than a refrigerant shortage.

What to expect from a service visit

A service call should leave you with something you can work from: what was found, what was replaced, what values were measured and what is recommended next. Without a record, six months later there is no way to tell whether a fault is recurring or new.

For equipment with refrigerants covered by the F-gas rules, leak checks are added on top, based on the CO2 equivalent in the circuit. We covered the scope and intervals in the article on F-gases in commercial refrigeration.

Planned maintenance pays for itself in energy

A clogged condenser raises consumption by tens of percent long before any cooling is missing. The same goes for leaking door seals and an iced-up evaporator. A regular inspection catches these while they are minutes of work rather than a weekend call-out. In operations running around the clock, maintenance pays for itself from the difference in energy use alone.

How that consumption is made up is covered under running costs of a freezer room.

What we need to know when you call

• The type of equipment and roughly how old it is, ideally from the rating plate.
• What is happening and since when, including whether it is getting worse.
• The measured temperature and what it should be.
• Whether there is stock inside and how long it will hold.
• The site address and when it is accessible.

From that it is usually possible to judge whether this is an emergency or something that can wait for a planned visit.