Booragoon cool room repairs, start to finish
Sam Celesti handles cool room repairs in Booragoon personally. He is the lead technician at Commercial Refrigeration Perth, licensed by ARCtick under AU55592, with over 20 years spent on commercial refrigeration. Booragoon is about 10 km from the Perth CBD, south of the river in the City of Melville, and its shopping centre, offices and clinics are all part of his regular patch. Every job starts with a free phone assessment and a fixed quote, and the company never passes work to subcontractors.
Taking over a tenancy, and its cool room
Booragoon's particular refrigeration problem comes with the lease. A large centre turns over food tenancies regularly: a café becomes a dessert bar, a takeaway is sold to a new owner, a fresh food stall changes hands. The cool room, freezer room and condensing unit usually stay put, so the incoming operator inherits equipment they did not choose, often with no service history and no idea how old the compressor is.
What Sam commonly finds in an inherited system:
- Settings that suited the last menu. A room tuned for drinks and cakes may run too warm for raw meat or seafood.
- Equipment that is the wrong size. A walk-in sized for light use may struggle once the door is opened every few minutes in a busy kitchen.
- Older refrigerants. Some systems still run gases that are getting expensive or hard to source, which changes whether a repair is worth doing.
- Deferred maintenance. Dirty coils, split door seals and a slow refrigerant leak that nobody chased because the previous owner was on the way out.
A pre-purchase or move-in inspection gives you a clear picture, and a fixed quote for anything that needs attention, before the equipment becomes your problem at the worst moment.
Steps to take when the room warms up
- Find the plant. If you are new to the tenancy, work out where your condensing unit actually is. In a centre it may be on a roof or in a shared plant area, so ask centre management early and pass on any access details to Sam.
- Stop opening the door. Put a note on it and pull what the counter needs for the next hour in one go.
- Probe and record. Check meat, dairy, cooked rice and prepared salads. Under FSANZ guidance, potentially hazardous food should sit at 5°C or below. If it has been warmer for less than 2 hours it can go back into a working fridge; from 2 to 4 hours, use it now; at 4 hours or more, bin it. Note each reading with the time.
Booragoon's food, retail and health mix
Westfield Booragoon is the suburb's centre of gravity. Its fresh food area has butchers, bakeries, delis and fruit shops, each with its own cool room or display cabinets, while the supermarkets rely on large walk-in rooms behind the shop floor. The food court and cafés run under-bench fridges, prep fridges, display chillers and ice machines that work hard through lunch and late night trading.
Around the centre, the offices, the City of Melville civic buildings, medical centres and pharmacies add a different kind of load. Staff kitchens, cafés serving office workers, pharmacy fridges and clinic fridges all need to hold steady temperatures, and a failed fridge in a pharmacy can mean a large write-off of stock.
Typical faults in this mix include fans clogged with kitchen grease, evaporators icing from heavy door use, controllers with failed probes, and drain lines that block and leak onto the floor.
Other services for Booragoon businesses
Display and prep fridges are covered under commercial fridge repairs, and food court venues can book ice machine repairs through the same call. A regular maintenance plan is the best way to stop inherited equipment surprising you. To see how faults are diagnosed and fixed in more detail, visit our page on cool room repair across Perth.
