The store manager gets the alert at 7 AM: dairy case reading 8°C. It should be sitting between 2°C and 4°C. By the time they reach the shop floor, the temperature is still climbing. Product is at risk. Food safety regs say they need to act now — log the breach, start pulling stock, and...

The chef opens the cold room first thing in the morning and the evaporator coil is a solid block of ice. Airflow is blocked. The room temperature has climbed overnight — the probe says 8°C and climbing. Product is at risk. This is a refrigeration emergency, and it’s one of the most common cold room...

The beer’s pouring warm. The glycol chiller is running but the temperature on the tank or at the font keeps climbing. In a brewery, the fermenter won’t hold temperature. In a process cooling application, the production line is out of spec. The chiller sounds like it’s working — compressor running, pump on — but the...

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...