Claremont cool room repairs, start to quote to fix
Sam Celesti repairs cool rooms and freezer rooms for Claremont restaurants, cafés, caterers, gourmet food stores, bakeries and bottle shops, about 8 km from the Perth CBD. He has over 20 years of commercial refrigeration behind him, holds ARCtick licence AU55592 and handles every job personally. You will know the price before any work is done.
Ring first and describe what you are seeing. The phone assessment costs nothing, and it often tells Sam which parts to bring.
While you are waiting
- Stop adding warm stock. If a delivery or a batch of freshly cooked food is on its way in, hold it in another working fridge or an esky with ice. A struggling room cannot cope with more heat.
- Clear the air path. Pull boxes away from the evaporator fans inside the room so cold air can circulate. Stock jammed against the coil blocks airflow and leaves warm pockets.
- Start a temperature log. FSANZ guidance is to hold potentially hazardous food at 5°C or colder. Record when the room crossed that line: food that has been above it for under 2 hours can go back into cold storage, 2 to 4 hours means serve or use it now, and 4 hours or more means dispose of it.
Claremont Quarter, Bay View Terrace and the showground
Claremont's food and drink trade is concentrated, upmarket and busy:
- Claremont Quarter: the shopping centre's cafés and food retailers, with display fridges, small cool rooms and freezers behind shared walls.
- Bay View Terrace and St Quentin Avenue: restaurants, wine bars, cafés and specialty food shops with walk-in cool rooms, wine fridges and back-bar units.
- The Claremont Showground: home of the Perth Royal Show and a steady calendar of other events, drawing caterers, food vans and suppliers who need cold storage on site or nearby.
- Stirling Highway: bottle shops, takeaways and larger restaurants with drinks cool rooms and freezer rooms.
Restaurants on the Terrace tend to call about a wine or produce room that will not hold on a warm evening. Retailers in the Quarter notice display cabinets that frost or fog. For those cabinets and back-bar fridges, Sam's commercial fridge repair service covers the faults.
Big days and heavy loads
Claremont's busiest moments arrive all at once. The Royal Show week, functions at the showground, weekend dinner bookings along the Terrace and the Christmas trade at the Quarter all mean cool rooms loaded to capacity in a short space of time. That is when a marginal system gives up.
A cool room is designed mainly to hold product that is already cold. Asking it to bring a room full of fresh deliveries or just-cooked food down to temperature is a much bigger job. If the system is low on refrigerant, the condenser is dusty or a fan motor is weak, it will cope on a quiet Tuesday and fail on the busiest Saturday of the year.
Packing makes it worse. Crates stacked to the ceiling and pushed against the evaporator stop cold air reaching the back of the room. The controller probe, usually near the coil, reads fine while the stock at the far wall warms up. Sam sees this pattern often in rooms that are stocked for an event.
Before a big event, leave a hand's width between stock and the walls, keep the space in front of the evaporator clear, and chill cooked food in a blast chiller or smaller batches before it goes into the cool room.
Sam checks refrigerant charge, coil condition, fan motors and the controller so you know the room has headroom before the rush. If it has been undersized all along, talk to him about cool room installation sized for your peaks. For a failure on the day, his emergency refrigeration repairs run 7 days, and he provides cool room repairs in every part of Perth.
