Cool room repairs for Subiaco businesses
Sam Celesti looks after cool rooms and freezer rooms for Subiaco restaurants, cafés, pubs, delis and grocers, about 4 km west of the Perth CBD. He is the lead technician, has over two decades in commercial refrigeration and holds ARCtick licence AU55592. Nobody else is sent in his place, and you have a fixed price in writing before he starts.
Subiaco is one of Perth's older suburbs, and plenty of its food businesses operate out of buildings put up long before walk-in cool rooms existed. That is the main thing to understand about refrigeration here.
Old buildings, tight yards and where the condenser goes
Many of the shops along Rokeby Road and Hay Street sit behind Federation-era and interwar facades. Those buildings were not designed for a cool room, a condensing unit and a run of refrigerant pipe. Over the years owners have squeezed equipment into whatever space was left: a narrow rear yard, a lean-to roof, a gap between two walls.
Those compromises show up as faults. A condenser jammed into an enclosed courtyard recirculates its own hot air, so head pressures climb and the compressor overheats on a warm afternoon. Long pipe runs threaded through old roof spaces lose insulation and pick up condensation. Units bolted to brick walls next to apartments and houses draw noise complaints, which leads some owners to switch them off at night, the worst possible fix.
Where a heritage facade or a residential neighbour limits the options, the repair has to respect that. Sam will tell you whether a unit can stay put with better ventilation, whether a quieter fan or a different mounting solves the noise, or whether relocation makes sense. Changes to the outside of a protected building need sign-off from the City of Subiaco and the owner, so it pays to know the refrigeration requirements before you ask.
While you wait for Sam
- Feel for air movement. Open the door briefly and check whether the evaporator fans inside are spinning. Fans stopped with ice on the coil points to a defrost fault, which is useful for Sam to know.
- Check the unit outside is not blocked. In small rear yards, bins, boxes and stacked chairs often end up against the condenser. Clearing them can sometimes bring a struggling box back down.
- Keep a food safety record. Potentially hazardous food belongs at 5°C or colder. Write down readings and times, because FSANZ guidance lets food spend under 2 hours between 5°C and 60°C and still go back in the fridge, while 2 to 4 hours means use it immediately and 4 hours or longer means discard it.
Subiaco's food and health precinct
The suburb mixes a long-established hospitality strip with one of Perth's main health precincts:
- Rokeby Road: cafés, bakeries and restaurants running small walk-in cool rooms, display cabinets and underbench fridges.
- Hay Street and the Subiaco Hotel corner: pubs and bars with keg rooms, bottle fridges and ice machines.
- Around the Regal Theatre: pre-show dining where a busy evening depends on the cool room holding through service.
- King Edward Memorial Hospital and St John of God Subiaco Hospital: hospital-adjacent cafés, takeaways and pharmacies that need fridges steady all day.
Cafés here tend to call about display fridges fogging up and cool rooms creeping above 5°C on hot days. Pubs see keg room compressors working overtime in summer. Food outlets near the hospitals care most about consistent temperature, so a controller or sensor fault matters as much to them as a total failure. For the smaller units, see commercial fridge repairs.
Planning a replacement instead?
Sometimes an old cool room in an old building is not worth patching. If the panels are tired, the box is the wrong size or the condensing unit has nowhere sensible to live, Sam can talk you through cool room installation designed around the building's limits. Regular maintenance visits keep cramped condensers clean in the meantime. Sam also covers neighbouring Osborne Park and provides cool room repairs throughout Perth.
