Websites for refrigeration mechanics.

Move the most perishable product into another cooler or a rented reefer and keep the door shut on the warm box — every opening adds heat and moisture the system then has to pull back out. Note the temperature you are actually reading and whether the fans are running, because a unit that is iced solid tells us something very different from one that is silent.

Not as a plan. A sealed system does not consume refrigerant, so a low charge means there is a leak, and adding gas without finding it is both against the refrigerant handling rules and a way to spend the same money every season. We pressure test, find it, quote the repair, and then recharge by weight.

It is if you have no ductwork, a hot addition or a top floor the furnace fan never satisfies. A cold-climate heat pump also heats down to well below freezing, so many customers use it as their shoulder-season heat and let the furnace handle the deep cold. Where you already have good ducts and an aging condenser, a conventional system is usually the cheaper answer.

Twice a year for most kitchens, quarterly if the condensers sit somewhere greasy or dusty. Condenser coils are the single biggest cause of failures we see — a coil packed with lint or kitchen grease makes the compressor run hot and long until it does not run at all. Cleaning is cheap; a compressor is not.

Yes. Refrigeration fails when it is busiest and hottest, and a restaurant cannot wait until Monday. After-hours calls carry a stated surcharge that we tell you before dispatch, never after the invoice.

We tell you the age, the refrigerant it runs on and what the repair costs against a replacement. Equipment running a phased-out refrigerant is the usual tipping point, because the gas gets expensive and scarce long before the machine dies. If the repair buys you three good years for a fraction of the replacement, we will say so.