Commercial Refrigeration and Air Conditioning for Businesses: Sectors We Serve

Climate Flow Limited installs, repairs and maintains commercial refrigeration and air conditioning for businesses across London and surrounding areas. That covers restaurants and commercial kitchens, pubs and bars, shops and petrol stations, schools and colleges, and gyms. Each sector below has its own page, setting out the equipment those sites run, the rules behind it and how work is planned around opening hours.

Which sectors does Climate Flow work in?

We work across five kinds of commercial site. The equipment overlaps, but the pressure on it does not: a kitchen fridge is holding food, a pub cellar is holding stock, and a gym is holding a room full of people working hard.

Restaurants and commercial kitchens

Kitchens run walk-in cold rooms, upright fridges and freezers, blast chillers and ice machines, with air conditioning in the dining room. A blast chiller is a fridge built to bring cooked food down to a chilled temperature quickly. Chilled food in a food business must be kept at 8°C or below in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, as GOV.UK's food hygiene guidance sets out, so a fridge that drifts is a food safety problem as well as a repair. Our page on refrigeration and air conditioning for restaurants and commercial kitchens covers the kit and the faults we see most.

Pubs and bars

Pubs depend on cellar coolers and keg coolers. A cellar cooler is a refrigeration unit that keeps the beer cellar cold. When it stops, stock and trade are both at risk. The pubs and bars page explains what goes wrong in a cellar and how repairs are fitted around service.

Retail, convenience stores and petrol stations

Shops run display chillers, glass-door multideck chillers, upright fridges and freezers, and often a cold room behind the shop floor. A multideck is a display chiller with several shelves, open or with glass doors, that customers take stock from directly. The Food Standards Agency advises setting a fridge to 5°C or below, which leaves a margin under the legal limit (Food Standards Agency). See refrigeration for retail, convenience stores and petrol stations.

Schools and colleges

Schools have kitchens with fridges, freezers and cold rooms, and air conditioning where a building needs it. The Department for Education publishes a building bulletin that sets design and performance standards for ventilation, thermal comfort and indoor air quality in school buildings (GOV.UK). The schools and education page covers refrigeration and air conditioning on school sites and work planned around the school day.

Gyms and leisure

Gyms rely on air conditioning, often a VRF system. VRF (variable refrigerant flow) is one outdoor unit serving many indoor units. Employers must keep the workplace at a comfortable temperature and provide clean, fresh air, and HSE guidance says the minimum indoor temperature should normally be at least 16°C, or 13°C where much of the work involves rigorous physical effort (Health and Safety Executive). Our work at Energie Fitness Gym, maintenance of a multi-unit VRF system, is one example. The gyms and leisure page has the detail.

What rules apply to commercial refrigeration and air conditioning?

The same F gas rules apply in every sector. F gas is the family of fluorinated refrigerants used in refrigeration and air conditioning systems. It is against the law to work on equipment containing F gas, including installing, servicing, leak checking and recovering the gas, without the correct qualifications (GOV.UK). A company servicing that equipment for others must also be certified by an approved body (GOV.UK). Climate Flow is F-Gas certified.

Leak checks depend on how much refrigerant a system holds, measured in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. Equipment holding 5 to less than 50 tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent is checked at least once every 12 months, with shorter intervals for larger charges (GOV.UK).

Refrigeration or air conditioning: where to start

If your question is about a piece of equipment rather than your sector, go to the service hubs. Commercial refrigeration services covers cold rooms, cellar coolers, display chillers, ice machines and repairs. Air conditioning covers split, multi-split, ducted, cassette and VRF systems. Commercial air conditioning installation can be planned outside trading hours, in the evenings and at weekends. Finished jobs across these sectors are on Our Projects.

Getting in touch

Climate Flow Limited provides commercial refrigeration and air conditioning for businesses across London and surrounding areas, with 24/7 emergency callouts. Climate Flow Limited, 2 Engineers Way, Wembley, London HA9 0JS. Call 020 3488 5452 or request a quote.

This guide is general information, not a survey or a quote for your site; every system is different, so an engineer needs to see yours before any work is priced.