A catering manager at a hotel in Kensington checked the walk-in freezer at 6am and found it sitting at -10°C. It should have been at -18°C. The HACCP temperature logger had been alarming since 2am but the overnight duty manager had silenced the alert thinking it was a glitch. Four hours of rising temperature with...

A deli owner in Islington sent us a photo of his serve-over display counter. The glass was completely misted up from the inside — customers couldn’t see a thing. He’d been wiping it down every twenty minutes during the lunch rush, but the condensation came back within five. His staff were opening the sliding doors...

A pub landlord in Bermondsey came down to the cellar on a Monday morning and found the beer lines frozen solid. The cellar thermometer read -2°C. Two casks of real ale had been ruined — frozen, expanded, and pushed the shives out. The keg lager was borderline. He’d lost a weekend’s worth of cask stock...

A restaurant chain asked us to investigate why their energy bills had increased by 25% across three London sites. No obvious faults — all the systems were running, all the temperatures were roughly where they should be. But “roughly” was the key word. Every system across the three sites was running 1-2°C warmer than set...

A hotel kitchen manager in Kensington called us worried about his electricity bill. It had jumped 40% over three months and he couldn’t figure out why. We found the answer in the basement — his walk-in cold room compressor hadn’t cycled off in weeks. It was running 24/7, pulling the temperature down to 1°C, then...

We get called to high-pressure trips more than almost any other refrigeration fault. A pub in Clapham, a restaurant in Soho, a cold store in Barking — the story is always similar. The condensing unit has been running fine for months or years, then one day it trips on the high-pressure safety switch and won’t...