Cool room repairs for the Malaga industrial area
Sam Celesti repairs cool rooms and freezer rooms across Malaga, about 11 km from the Perth CBD. Most of that work is in the Malaga industrial area, the large grid of warehouses running from Beach Road and Alexander Drive across to Malaga Drive and Camboon Road, hemmed in by Reid Highway and Tonkin Highway. Sam is ARCtick licensed (AU55592), has more than 20 years in commercial refrigeration, and does every job himself with no subcontractors.
Call with the symptoms and Sam will talk through them for free on the phone, then give you a fixed quote on site before any work starts.
Summer heat is Malaga's biggest cool room risk
Malaga's warehouses are mostly steel-framed and metal-clad, with wide loading docks built for semi-trailers and rows of condensing units on roofs or rear walls. In a Perth summer that combination is hard on refrigeration. The roof sheeting heats the air in the building, the dock aprons bake in the afternoon sun, and the condensing units are rejecting heat into air that is hotter still.
Each of those adds load. Heat leaks through panels and door seals faster when the warehouse around the cool room sits at 35°C. A dirty condenser coil that was only a small inefficiency in spring becomes the reason the compressor trips on high pressure in February. And every time a truck backs onto an open dock while the cool room door is propped for forklifts, the room takes in a blast of hot air.
That is why Sam looks at the whole system on a Malaga callout, not just the part that has stopped. Fixing the failed fan motor is the repair; finding the dirty coil and the torn strip curtain is what stops the next call.
If your cool room fails before Sam arrives
Close the cool room door and, if you can, shut the dock door nearest to it as well. Then check the basics: is the controller display lit, has a breaker tripped on the switchboard, and is the condensing unit outside running or silent? Pass what you find on to Sam when you call.
Next, deal with the stock that carries the most risk. Under the FSANZ 2 hour / 4 hour rule, potentially hazardous food should be held at 5°C or colder, and once it has spent 4 hours or more between 5°C and 60°C it has to be thrown out. If you have space in another cool room or a refrigerated truck, move the meat, seafood and dairy first and note the temperature and time as you do.
Malaga's food trade and its refrigeration
Malaga is one of the places Perth's food supply chain passes through. Businesses Sam works for here include:
- Food importers and grocery wholesalers, including the Asian grocery wholesalers the suburb is known for, with large freezer rooms for frozen seafood, dumplings and imported stock.
- Butchers and meat wholesalers running cool rooms near 0°C plus freezer rooms for bulk product.
- Seafood and produce distributors moving chilled stock in and out all day.
- Commercial kitchen and catering businesses holding prepared food before delivery.
The faults Sam sees most often are compressors and condenser fans worn out by long summer run hours, refrigerant leaks, iced evaporators on freezer rooms with heavy forklift traffic, and door heaters and gaskets damaged by pallets.
Services Malaga businesses book
This page covers Malaga, and Sam's Perth cool room repair page explains the service in full. With so much riding on summer, many Malaga wholesalers book refrigeration servicing in late winter or spring, when coils, fans and charges can be checked before the heat arrives. When a freezer room goes down on a Saturday, emergency refrigeration repairs are available 7 days, with breakdowns that put stock at risk prioritised. Neighbouring Morley is covered as well.
