Commercial refrigeration, fixed properly and kept running.
I fix and look after commercial refrigeration — cold rooms, display cabinets, fridges and freezers — for kitchens, shops, pubs, care homes and hotels around Luton and the surrounding area. I’m F-Gas registered, and I always work out what’s actually wrong before swapping any parts. Most of the time the kit itself isn’t broken — it just hasn’t been cleaned or looked after, and that quietly pushes the electricity bill up long before anything packs in. I’ll repair home fridges and freezers too, including the fiddly ones that take real time to get right.
Usually it’s the upkeep, not the kit.
Commercial fridges and freezers are mostly reliable bits of kit. What lets them down is upkeep — and when that gets neglected, you don’t usually get a breakdown first. You get a unit working twice as hard for the same result, on a bill that climbs until something finally trips or gives up.
So most of my commercial refrigeration work is servicing, repairs and upkeep: keeping units running properly, and catching a problem while it’s still cheap to sort. I work out what’s actually wrong before I replace anything — that’s the difference between fixing the fault and selling you a new fridge.
A fridge doesn’t make cold. It moves the heat out.
A fridge or freezer doesn’t really make cold — it takes the heat out of the box and dumps it into the air through a part called the condenser. Block that condenser — with grease, dust, or a box shoved in front of it — and the heat has nowhere to go. The compressor runs flat out, the unit cuts out on high pressure, the food warms up, and the bill goes up. It’s the most common fault I see, and the fix is often a five-minute clean rather than a new part.
The everyday refrigeration a business runs on.
Especially the built-in ones
Walk-in cold rooms and freezers in kitchens — especially the common setup where the condenser is built into the unit indoors instead of outside. Those are the ones that block up fastest.
Display, upright, undercounter, chest
Display cabinets, upright and undercounter fridges and freezers, and chest freezers — including the cheaper ones, where a unit just out of warranty quietly loses its gas.
Kitchens, shops, pubs
The mix of fridges and freezers a busy kitchen, shop or bar gets through day to day, cellar cooling included — the stuff you can’t really afford to lose for long.
The fiddly repairs
Home fridges and freezers worth keeping rather than replacing — including the awkward ones that take real time to get right (more on that below).
I’ll be straight about this
Refrigerated vans and specialist kit — ice-cream machines, blast chillers, wine and champagne cabinets — I’ll take on now and then, but I won’t pretend they’re my bread and butter. In real life they’re rare: the kit’s reliable, most of it’s still under warranty, and the bigger operators usually have a maintenance contract already. My day-to-day is everyday commercial and home refrigeration.
The faults I see most — in the order I see them.
After years of this, the same handful of faults keep coming up. This is the real order, most common first:
- Blocked condensers — by a mile the most common. Nearly always missed cleaning. In commercial kitchens where the condenser sits inside the cold-room unit rather than outside, it clogs up with dust and greasy vapour until the fins are under a thick, sticky blanket. Clean it and the unit comes straight back. I’ve also found them blocked by stuff in the way — a cardboard box had fallen off a shelf in front of one and cut off the air; I moved the box and it ran fine. Busy kitchens have supplies stacked everywhere, and the air getting to the fridge is the thing nobody thinks about.
- Faulty controllers. On commercial fridges and freezers that have run for years, the relays in the controller eventually fail — the coil goes and the relay sticks closed (I’ve never once seen one stick open). That leaves a fridge freezing everything in it, or keeps tripping the high- and low-pressure switches.
- Lost refrigerant. Common on the cheaper commercial fridges and chest freezers, and usually on fairly new ones — a few years old, just out of warranty.
- Faulty fans. On fridges and freezers, mostly older units, from age and worn bearings.
- Defrost faults. Nearly always one of two things — the defrost heater, or the defrost relay.
- Compressor winding breakdown — the newer one. More and more on home fridges: the coating that insulates the copper windings in the compressor breaks down, gets into the oil, and gets carried round the system until it blocks the capillary tube or the expansion valve. What that takes to fix is below.
The Dunstable shop where nothing would stay cold.
A corner shop in Dunstable had a display-fridge condenser and two freezer condensers — plus an air-conditioning unit — all sitting in what used to be an open back yard, until the tenant boxed it in for storage. The fridges and freezers couldn’t be switched off, and they kept cutting out. With four condensers all breathing each other’s hot air in a closed-in space, none of them could get rid of their heat: the fridges ran on permanent high pressure, kept tripping, and the electricity bill was brutal.
The fix wasn’t a new compressor — it was air. Open the space back up, give each condenser a route to proper outside air, and it’s run fine ever since. That’s the reality more often than people think: the kit’s fine, it’s the setup that’s choking it. (The air-conditioning side of the same job is on my air conditioning page.)
Home fridges — including the awkward ones.
I’ll repair home fridges and freezers too, including the awkward ones. The catch is that most home fridges aren’t built to be repaired: no service valves fitted at the factory, very little room to work, and no technical info to go on. So they take longer, and getting one right means proper testing, not a quick swap. I won’t pretend it’s always cheaper than buying new — but if you’d rather keep the one you’ve got, or there’s nothing the same to replace it with, it’s usually doable.
On a recent eighteen-year-old fridge, the capillary tube was blocked — most likely with that broken-down winding insulation carried through the oil — and there was no published figure anywhere for how long the capillary tube should be. I replaced the filter drier, fitted service valves so the system could actually be worked on, then fitted a longer capillary tube and spent hours trimming and testing it until the temperatures were right. There was nothing the same to swap it for, and the owner wanted to keep their kitchen as it was — so I fixed it. If you want it kept and it can be saved, I’ll save it.
Which refrigerant you’ve got — and why it matters.
For your F-Gas paperwork, and just to know what your engineer’s dealing with, here’s a plain run-down of the refrigerants you’ll find in commercial and home fridges and freezers. Anything on a gas that’s being phased out has a limited life — at some point it gets hard to find or too dear to bother with, and replacing the unit becomes the sensible call. I’ll tell you where you stand as part of the servicing.
- R404A — the old commercial standard for fridge and freezer temperatures. A high-impact gas that’s being phased out, with R448A and R449A now the usual lower-impact replacements.
- R134a — chillers, some display fridges and a lot of older units. Also being phased out.
- R290 (propane) and R600a (isobutane) — small amounts of these flammable gases run most modern commercial display and chest freezers and nearly every home fridge. Efficient and easy on the environment, but with strict rules for handling them.
- R407 blends (R407A / R407F / R407C) — used across a range of commercial fridges and freezers.
The paperwork side, sorted.
I’m on the F-Gas Register (ID FGAS2002910), with the company qualification that covers installing, repairing, servicing, maintaining and decommissioning fixed refrigeration, air conditioning and heat pumps — with no limit on system size or gas charge. If you run fridges or freezers with this kind of gas in them, the law puts duties on you: leak checks at set times, keeping records, and recovering the gas properly during repairs and when kit is scrapped. I take care of that as part of the servicing, so it’s one less thing for you to worry about.
One engineer for the cooling — and the rest of the building.
Plenty of businesses run fridges and air conditioning side by side (the Dunstable shop had both). They’re covered by the same F-Gas ticket, so I can sort them on the same visit — and the kitchen’s electrics, hot water and heating too, instead of you ringing round separate firms.
Same ticket, same visit
Servicing, repairs and planned maintenance on air conditioning of any size — on my air conditioning page.
Boilers, cylinders, controls
Gas-safe boiler servicing and repairs, hot water, and the gas-safety side — on my heating page.
Faults found and tested
Fault-finding, inspection and testing (EICR) and wiring by a qualified electrician — on my electrical page.
Leaks, pressure, hot & cold
Leaks, low pressure, hot and cold water and everything in between — on my plumbing page.
Running a business or letting a property out? I also cover commercial maintenance and landlord checks — see my Commercial & Regulated Properties, Legionella risk assessments and M&E design pages.
Clear, and based on the job.
What it costs.
Phone advice is free — with fridges, a lot can be narrowed down before I even set off, and now and then I can tell you it’s a blocked condenser you can clean yourself. Repairs and one-off jobs are priced on the work. For bigger commercial jobs or planned maintenance I cap my labour at £500 a day, so you can budget for it. I’m not the cheapest, and I don’t try to be — what you get is the fault actually found and fixed, by the engineer who turns up.
Talk to the engineer.
A fridge or freezer that won’t hold temperature, a cold room cutting out, a unit running your electricity bill up, or a home fridge you’d rather keep — give me a call. Phone advice is free, and I can often tell you what’s going on without coming out.
Call 07864 757929
Email office@bson247.co.uk
Building Services ON 247 — Luton. Commercial and home refrigeration, found and fixed by the engineer who does the work. Monday to Saturday, 7am–7pm.