Planned maintenance for pubs, cafés and guesthouses

Hospitality in the ranges runs on a calendar. Quiet weeks in winter, a rush every long weekend, weddings and functions through spring, and a summer where the cool room, the bar fridges and the dining room air conditioning all have to work at once. Equipment rarely fails in the quiet weeks. It fails when it is under the most load, which is exactly when you can least afford to lose it.

Planned maintenance turns that around. Instead of waiting for a fault, we come out on a day that suits you, look over everything that keeps the place cold or comfortable, and fix the small things before they become big ones. Here is how it works with us.

What we look after

A typical venue we service has more refrigeration than people expect:

• a walk-in cool room, sometimes a second one for frozen stock
• underbench and upright fridges on the line
• glass door display fridges out front
• bottle fridges behind the bar
• a beer system
• split systems or ducted air conditioning in the dining room, bar and accommodation

We look after all of it, so one visit can cover the lot. Our commercial and refrigeration pages have more on the equipment we work on.

What a visit covers

Every site is different, but a maintenance visit on refrigeration usually includes:

1. Cleaning condenser coils and checking condenser fans, so the system can get rid of heat properly.
2. Checking evaporator coils, fans and defrost operation, and looking for early signs of icing.
3. Checking door seals, hinges, closers and strip curtains.
4. Clearing and checking drain lines.
5. Checking the system for signs of a refrigerant leak.
6. Checking controller settings and comparing the unit's display against a reading in the room.
7. Listening for bearings, fans and compressors that are starting to wear.

For air conditioning, we clean filters and coils, check the outdoor units are clear, and make sure the system is heating and cooling the way it should.

At the end we tell you what we found, what we fixed and anything we think will need attention soon, in plain words. If something is worth replacing, we say so and explain why, and a replacement is measured up and quoted before anything is ordered.

Why it matters beyond the breakdown

Not every reason for servicing is about avoiding a failure.

Running costs. The federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water makes the point that refrigeration and air conditioning systems can be expensive to run if they are not properly installed or maintained. A clogged condenser or a leaking seal makes a system run longer for the same result.

Refrigerant. DCCEEW's guidance to technicians is to fix leaks before recharging a system, and it is illegal to release regulated refrigerants into the air. Regular checks find slow leaks while they are small. We have written more about the gas side in refrigerant changes for cool room owners.

Labels and records. DCCEEW also says every system must be labelled with the refrigerant it uses, its charge and whether it is flammable. Old labels fade and fall off. We check them on a visit.

Food safety. Food Standards Australia New Zealand requires potentially hazardous food to be kept at 5°C or colder, and requires a business handling it to have a probe thermometer that is accurate to within 1°C either way. A service visit is a good time to check your cool room display agrees with what your thermometer says about the food.

When to book

We will suggest a schedule that suits each site, based on how hard the equipment works, how old it is and where it sits. A busy kitchen with a cool room behind the fryers needs more attention than a guesthouse breakfast fridge.

A few rules of thumb apply almost everywhere:

• Before summer. Late spring is the most useful visit of the year. Our pre-summer checklist covers what to look at yourself in between.
• Before your busy periods. If your venue is flat out at Easter or over a festival weekend, book the visit a couple of weeks before, not the week of.
• Around service. We book you into a window on a set day and tell you who is coming, so we can arrange visits for the morning before you open or a quieter weekday.

What it doesn't do

Planned maintenance does not mean nothing will ever fail. Fans wear out, compressors age and controllers can fail without warning. What it does is cut down the surprises and means that when something does go wrong, we already know the equipment and have a history to work from. Repairs found between visits are charged as a service call: the call-out, the time on site and any parts.

If you run a venue anywhere from Daylesford to Castlemaine, Kyneton or Trentham and would like to set up a maintenance plan, get in touch or ring 0417 734 206, Monday to Friday, 8:00am to 4:30pm.