A Bassendean cool room tech who does the job himself
Searching for cool room repairs in Bassendean usually means something has already gone wrong. Sam Celesti, the lead technician at Commercial Refrigeration Perth, repairs walk-in cool rooms and freezer rooms for Bassendean's caterers, food makers, cafés and shops. The suburb is about 10 km from the Perth CBD on the Swan River, close to Guildford and Bayswater, and well inside Sam's everyday area.
Sam has worked in commercial refrigeration for over 20 years and is ARCtick licensed (AU55592). There are no subcontractors, so the person who assesses your symptoms on a free phone call is the one who fixes the fault. You get a fixed quote before any work starts.
Hot product going into cold rooms
Bassendean's light industrial area has a share of caterers, small food manufacturers and commercial kitchens that cook on site and then store the product. That creates a specific strain. A standard cool room is built to hold food that is already cold. When trays of freshly cooked rice, sauces, stocks or roasted meat go straight in, the system suddenly has to remove a large amount of heat.
The signs of a cool room being asked to act as a chiller are easy to spot once you know them:
- The room temperature jumps several degrees after each batch and takes hours to come back down.
- The evaporator coil frosts heavily, because steam from hot food turns to ice on it.
- The compressor runs nonstop, and on hot days it trips on high pressure or overheats.
- Product in the middle of a deep tray stays warm long after the edges are cold.
Some of this is about how the food is handled, such as using shallow trays and cooling in stages, and some is about the equipment. Sam can measure how the system behaves under your real production load and tell you whether a repair, a larger condensing unit or a separate chiller is the sensible fix. For production sites, regular refrigeration maintenance catches iced coils and tired fans before they cause a shutdown.
Old Perth Road and the local shops
Bassendean's main street, Old Perth Road, runs past the train station with cafés, a bakery, takeaways, a pub and local grocers. Their refrigeration is smaller but just as critical: a single walk-in cool room for milk, produce and prepared food, glass door drinks fridges, display cabinets for cakes and salads, and under bench prep fridges in the kitchen. A failed door gasket or a dusty condenser behind the shop can be enough to push a small room above safe temperatures on a warm afternoon.
Shops on a main street also tend to have their condensing units on a back wall or a low roof facing a laneway, where they pick up sun all afternoon and collect leaves and litter. A quick look behind the shop now and then, to make sure nothing is stacked against the unit and the fan is turning freely, can save a call out later.
Sam repairs the lot, including display and reach in units covered under commercial fridge repairs.
Protecting stock while the room is down
If your Bassendean cool room is losing temperature:
- Stop adding warm product. Hold any batch still cooling on the bench or in another fridge until the room is fixed.
- Check power and the controller. A tripped circuit or a controller stuck in defrost looks like a breakdown. Note what the display says.
- Log the time and temperature. Potentially hazardous food should be at 5°C or colder. If it has been between 5°C and 60°C for less than 2 hours, refrigerate it; 2 to 4 hours, use it immediately; 4 hours or longer, throw it away.
For a broader look at diagnosis and repair, visit our page on cool room repair throughout Perth.
