Your customers will tell you before your thermometer does. Pints start pouring foamy. The lager’s not cold enough. Cask ale loses its condition halfway through the cask. By the time someone actually goes down to the cellar and checks the temperature, the damage to stock quality has been underway for hours. Cellar cooling is one...

It’s 7pm on a Friday in July. The bar’s three-deep and your Hoshizaki IM-240 has stopped dropping ice. The bin’s half empty. You’ve got maybe an hour before you’re serving warm gin and tonics and the bar manager is losing his mind. We’ve had this exact call more times than we can count. Ice machines...

We walked into a restaurant kitchen in Soho last summer. It was 46°C. The head chef was working in shorts and a soaked t-shirt. The extraction canopy above the charcoal grill was running flat out and achieving nothing. The make-up air system? Didn’t have one. They were trying to cool the kitchen by propping the...

A commercial freezer is never silent. Compressors hum, fans whirr, and you’ll hear the occasional gurgle of refrigerant moving through the system. After a while, you stop noticing it. It becomes background noise. But when that background noise changes — gets louder, takes on a new character, starts happening at intervals — pay attention. A...

There’s a particular moment in every facilities manager’s week when they get a call from reception: “The AC unit’s got a funny code on the display and it’s stopped working.” The code is a string of letters and numbers that means nothing to anyone except the people who fix these things for a living. Here’s...

We got called to a solicitor’s office on High Holborn last September. Water was dripping from a ceiling cassette directly onto a partner’s desk — onto his laptop, his papers, and his patience. The ceiling tile above had gone from white to brown over a few weeks, and nobody had flagged it until it started...

There’s a simple test we do on every cold room service visit: close the door, slide a piece of paper between the gasket and the frame, and try to pull it out. If it slides free without resistance, the seal’s gone. And if the seal’s gone, you’re paying to refrigerate your kitchen. It sounds like...

You walk into the cold room first thing in the morning and something’s off. The air doesn’t hit you like it should. You check the controller — 11°C. Should be 2°C. The dairy’s warm, the meat’s soft, and you’ve got a full day of service ahead. We get this call two or three times a...

Every summer, around mid-June, our phones start ringing with the same call: “The AC’s running but the office is roasting.” It happened 40-odd times last July alone. The thing is, when a single wall-mounted split stops cooling, it’s usually a simple fix. But when you’re managing an office building with a Daikin VRV system running...