As well as installing cold rooms, Polarcool is a leading provider of emergency repairs, maintenance and servicing for all types of cold rooms in East Anglia and the South East of England. We offer comprehensive services to keep your cold rooms and refrigerators running smoothly and efficiently ensuring your food, chemicals and other sensitive materials remain safely preserved.
Thousands of satisfied business owners rely on Polarcool for their cold room needs. Call us for a competitive quote today.
Polarcool is proud to offer cold room services in Southend-on-Sea, Colchester, Chelmsford, Basildon, Rayleigh, South Benfleet, Thundersley, Harlow, Grays, Brentwood, Clacton-on-Sea, Braintree, Canvey Island, Billericay, Wickford, Loughton, Tiptree, Maldon, and Witham. Having served hundreds of homes across Essex, we know how to keep your system in good shape.
A cold room is a walk-in refrigerated space built from insulated panels, designed to hold large volumes of stock at a steady temperature. You’ll also hear them called coldrooms, cool rooms, walk-in fridges or cold stores depending on the trade. Unlike a standard commercial fridge, a cold room is built to fit your space and your stock, and it can be sized anywhere from a small unit tucked into a store room up to an industrial cold store with forklift access.
It depends what you’re storing. Chiller rooms usually sit between 0°C and +8°C, which suits fresh meat, dairy, produce and prepared food. Freezer rooms typically run between -18°C and -25°C. Some businesses need both, and we can build a dual compartment room with separate temperature zones rather than two separate structures. We’ll confirm the right range during the survey based on your product and how often the door will be opened.
As a rough guide, a small walk-in chiller starts from around £4,000, a mid-sized commercial room usually falls between £8,000 and £20,000, and a large industrial cold store or freezer can run higher. Groundwork, drainage and power supply are often extra. The honest answer is that the specification matters far more than the label, so we’d always rather survey the site and give you a real figure than quote from a price list.
Most modular cold rooms are built on site in two to five days once the panels arrive. Larger industrial cold stores and rooms needing structural work, new power or floor preparation take longer. We’ll give you a timeline with the quote so you can plan around any disruption, and we work around trading hours where we can.
Internal cold rooms fitted inside an existing building rarely need planning permission, because you’re effectively building a structure within a structure. External cold stores, anything visible from a public highway, and installations on listed buildings or in conservation areas are a different matter and usually do. If you’re unsure, speak to your local authority before ordering, and we can supply drawings and specifications to support an application.
In practice, very little. Walk-in fridge tends to describe the smaller end of the range, often a single chilled room in a kitchen, pub cellar or domestic setting. Cold room is the broader term and covers everything from those small units up to industrial cold stores. Both are built the same way, from insulated panels with a dedicated refrigeration unit.
Start with the volume of stock you hold at peak, not on an average week, then allow room for racking and a clear aisle. Most operators underestimate. A room that’s too small gets overloaded, which restricts airflow and pushes the refrigeration plant harder than it should work. We’ll measure the available space and size the room and the plant duty together during the free survey.
The refrigeration unit is the plant that removes heat from the room. Monoblock units are a single self-contained unit that mounts through the wall or ceiling, which makes them quick to install and well suited to smaller rooms. Split systems separate the condensing unit from the evaporator, so the noisy, heat-producing part sits outside the building. Split systems handle larger rooms and lower temperatures better. Sizing the duty correctly matters more than the type, because an undersized unit will run constantly and an oversized one will short cycle.
Twice a year for most commercial installations, and quarterly if the room is running hard or the business is food-critical. Servicing covers coil cleaning, door seals, temperature calibration, defrost cycles and F Gas leak checks. If your system contains fluorinated gases above the relevant threshold, those checks are a legal requirement rather than good practice, and records have to be kept.
Most faults are repairable. Split door seals, damaged panels, broken handles, snapped hinges, failed fans and refrigerant leaks are all routine work for our engineers. We offer emergency cold room repairs across Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire and aim to get to you the same day, because every hour a room is down is stock at risk. If a room is genuinely beyond economic repair, we’ll tell you that straight rather than keep patching it.
