cold room

corelokttikka

does anyone know, are cold rooms expensive to run. is there maintenance in keeping them.

cookimonster

As with everything age is against you. We have one in work and after 10 / 15 years the moter itself needed replacing, over the years various jobs such as thermostats, fan motors etc were needed but the regular one needed (every few years) was to be regassed. I can't tell you the cost as it was not paid for by myself.

The biggest running cost of a refrigeration is the cooling of hot items, remember we don't put cold into an item rather remove heat. So if you practice basic precautions you will ensure longer life and better quality / safer meat.
Allow the carcuss to cool as much as possible in the ambient temperature- not easy in the milder months this prevents possibility of cold shortening but more on topic reduces the pressure or working time of the motor during the heat exchange process.
An obvious one is to keep the door closed as much as possible to ensure the temperature is kept at the ser range. If your compressor or motor is continuously running or tripping on every few minutes there may be an issue.
The argument on whether to leave it on or off?.... well as I implied the most energy therefore cost is required to get the unit down to temperature, maintaining the temperature is buttons compared to that. So if it was me and during the season I would certainly run it for the duration and if not in use then think about turning it off.
But, if you can use it as a duel purpose, ie storage of food items (as with commercial walk ins use food grade boxes to separate out food items, alcohol etc) or the storage of other wild food, rabbits, pigeons, fish etc it would be a benefit. A trick with all cold units whether a large domestic fridge or freezer is to use up space in it. So a large chill area can be reduced by using blocks of polystyrene or boxes of packing chips wrapped in plastic to reduce the volume. Do this with chest freezers and up right fridges.

Rows Grower

The regassing has become a much bigger expense lately because of red tape.

It's no longer a case of re filling the refrigerated unit with new gas when it's needed but a full inspection must now be carried out to determine how and why the gas escaped and a certificate signed to verify this was because it was due to be re filled.

This is all well and good if the service records show it is a relatively new unit and was not due a regassing (which every trained service person would know) but it's across the board and will lead to a load of perfectly good machines being dumped well before their end of life because of some pea brain who signed it off the new rules.