Who looks after cool rooms in Ascot
If you need cool room repairs in Ascot, you can call Sam Celesti straight away. Ascot sits on the Swan River about 6 km from the Perth CBD, and Sam works across the suburb for function venues, hotel kitchens, caterers, bars and the smaller food businesses that serve them. He has more than 20 years in commercial refrigeration, holds ARCtick licence AU55592, and carries out every repair himself.
Describe the symptoms over the phone and Sam will give you his read on them at no charge. Once he has looked at the system you get a fixed price, and nothing starts until you say yes. Breakdowns with food at risk move to the front of the queue on any day of the week.
Function days and the full cool room problem
The refrigeration challenge in Ascot is load, not age. A riverside venue might run quietly through the week and then host a wedding of 200 guests on Saturday. On Friday afternoon the cool room fills with trays of canapés, plated desserts, cheese, seafood, cases of sparkling wine and kegs, much of it delivered warm from the supplier's van. Every one of those items carries heat that the system has to remove.
A cool room is designed to hold food that is already cold, not to chill large amounts of warm product quickly. Load it to the ceiling and several things go wrong at once:
- Air can no longer circulate around the evaporator, so the room develops warm pockets near the door and floor.
- The compressor runs without a break, and on a hot day the head pressure climbs until a safety switch trips.
- Constant door traffic during setup pulls in humid air, which freezes on the evaporator coil and blocks it further.
Racing at Ascot Racecourse adds the same pattern on a bigger scale, with caterers and bars stocking up for a single huge day in the middle of summer. Sam can look at whether your plant is matched to your busiest day rather than your average one, and whether a second room, a bigger condensing unit or simply better shelving would solve it. If the answer is a new room, our cool room installation page explains how that works.
What to do before Sam gets there
When the temperature starts rising on an event day, these steps buy you time:
- Pull out anything that does not need refrigeration, such as unopened drinks, and stack them elsewhere. Space around the evaporator fan helps the room recover.
- Nominate one person to go in and out, and only with a list. Each opening lets cold air spill across the floor.
- Write down when the room passed 5°C and what was inside. Under FSANZ guidance, potentially hazardous food that has spent under 2 hours between 5°C and 60°C can go back in the fridge, 2 to 4 hours means serve it now, and 4 hours or more means it is thrown out.
Venues and kitchens across Ascot
Ascot's commercial refrigeration is concentrated in a few kinds of business. The racecourse and its function rooms rely on large cool rooms, bar fridges and ice machines that sit idle between meetings. Along the river, reception venues and hotels run banquet kitchens with walk-in cool rooms and freezer rooms that have to cope with sudden swings in volume. Around the residential streets you will find cafés, takeaways and small caterers with a single walk-in room plus display and under bench units.
Each of these runs into its own faults. Idle bar fridges seize or lose gas between uses. Banquet cool rooms ice up from heavy door traffic. Café rooms suffer when a condensing unit is boxed in behind a back fence with no airflow. For the fridges and freezers outside the cool room, see commercial fridge repairs, and for a pre-season service visit, our maintenance plans.
Sam also covers neighbouring Belmont and the rest of the eastern suburbs. For more on how he finds and fixes walk-in faults, read about cool room repairs across Perth.
