Restaurant & Commercial Kitchen Refrigeration

A commercial kitchen is about the hardest place you can put a fridge. The air beside the cookline runs hot, the doors open every few seconds through service and the condenser breathes in grease and flour all day. Most kitchen refrigeration faults come back to those three things.

Standby looks after commercial kitchen refrigeration from the under-bench fridges on the line to the cool room out the back. Adam Magick’s thirteen-odd years at Shannon Refrigeration, before he started Standby, took in commercial kitchens, fast food outlets and butcher shops, so the kitchen is familiar ground.

Under the national food safety standard that applies in every NSW kitchen, potentially hazardous food has to be stored at 5°C or colder and frozen food has to stay frozen. The business also needs a thermometer that measures food temperature to within 1°C. Food between 5°C and 60°C sits in what the NSW Food Authority calls the temperature danger zone. Its published 2-hour/4-hour rule decides whether that food gets used, chilled or thrown out.

Since 8 December 2023, most NSW restaurants and cafés that cook on site have had to keep records showing food was stored at a safe temperature and hold them for three months. A fridge that creeps above 5°C mid-service turns into a record showing food stored too warm. The standard then expects the business to act on it by throwing out stock and fixing the equipment. A fridge that holds 5°C all service keeps those records boring, which is how you want them.

Temperature control failures also appear on the NSW Food Authority’s public penalty notice register. For the reading a walk-in should hold and the early signs it is struggling, see our cool room temperature guide.

Heat comes first. Commercial storage fridges are tested in a 30°C room. The air beside a fryer or a chargrill on a summer night runs well above that. A fridge in the wrong spot runs flat out, cycles constantly and wears its compressor early. It is worth checking the climate class on the fridge’s data plate before blaming the fridge itself.

Next comes the condenser. Grease, flour and dust coat the coil that sheds the fridge’s heat, the compressor runs longer to make up for it and eventually it trips or fails. In a busy kitchen the coil needs cleaning far more often than the manual suggests. Door seals are the third. A split or flattened seal lets warm, damp air in every time the fridge closes, which frosts the coil and leaves the top shelf warmer than the bottom.

The signs are much the same whatever the cause: a fridge running but not cooling, frost building up inside, food near the door warmer than food at the back or a compressor that starts and stops every few minutes. We handle commercial fridge repairs for all of these, including on units another contractor installed.

A lot of older kitchen refrigeration still runs on R404A. Nothing forces you to pull it out, because existing units can be serviced for as long as they last. The catch is supply. Australia is cutting imports of HFC refrigerants to 15% of the original baseline by 2036 and the government has consulted on restricting R404A further. So when an older unit fails in a big way, we price the repair and a replacement on a lower-impact refrigerant side by side and you choose. Standby is an ARC member with a refrigerant purchasing licence, which any work on the gas requires.

A maintenance visit catches the greasy coil and the tired seal before they turn into a warm fridge in the middle of service. Any system we install comes with two maintenance visits in its first year. After that each visit has a set rate and parts are quoted on top. Between visits, after-hours breakdowns go to our maintenance technician. How the two fit together is on our maintenance and breakdown page.

We work with kitchens across Wollongong and the Illawarra and across Sydney. For the plant side of a city site, see commercial refrigeration in Sydney and commercial refrigeration in Wollongong.