Walk-in coolers and freezers, reach-ins, prep tables, display cases and ice machines — installed, serviced and kept cold.
Refrigeration is in our name because it is genuinely part of the business, not a line item we added to a website. Most of our work is residential HVAC — but commercial refrigeration is something very few residential contractors in this county will touch, and it is why restaurants, taverns, clubs and grocery operations end up calling us.
What we service and install:
Commercial HVAC too: rooftop units, make-up air, and the split systems that keep a dining room comfortable while the kitchen is running at full tilt.
The brands on this equipment are not the residential ones. We work on Trenton, Heatcraft, Copeland and True — condensing units, evaporators, compressors and reach-ins — alongside whatever else is already on the roof or in the back. Parts availability on older commercial equipment is a real constraint and we will tell you where you stand before the bill, not after.
A walk-in that is drifting warm is usually one of a handful of things, and the order they get checked in matters because the cheap causes are also the common ones.
Cooler boxes typically run in the mid-to-high 30s Fahrenheit and freezers around zero or below. When a box is out of range, the clock you are on is a health-department clock and an inventory clock at the same time, which is why refrigeration is the work we take emergency calls for most often.
Almost every refrigeration emergency we get called to was preventable, and usually by coil cleaning and a gasket. That is the whole argument for a scheduled contract: condenser and evaporator coils cleaned, defrost cycle verified, temperatures and superheat checked, drains cleared, door hardware adjusted, and a written record of what the equipment is doing over time.
Businesses we look after include Buzz Inn locations across Monroe, Lake Stevens, Everett, Marysville, Granite Falls and Arlington — commercial refrigeration and commercial HVAC both — along with Everett Country Club and Monroe Shopping Center. They are customers of ours, named with permission; make of that what you like, but a multi-site operator that keeps calling the same contractor is the review that is hardest to fake.
Serving Monroe, Snohomish, Lake Stevens, Everett, Duvall and the US-2 corridor, plus most of Snohomish and King County.
Usually the condenser coil or the door, before it is ever the refrigerant. A condenser packed with kitchen grease and dust cannot reject heat, so the unit runs continuously and still drifts warm. A torn door gasket or a closer that no longer pulls the door shut lets in warm humid air all day and ices the evaporator, which then looks like a refrigerant fault. After that: a failed defrost timer or heater, a blocked drain line, low refrigerant from an actual leak, or simply a big delivery of warm product that needs recovery time. Cooler boxes normally sit in the mid-to-high 30s Fahrenheit.
Moisture getting in and defrost not getting it back out. The usual sources are a door left propped during prep, worn gaskets, or a failed door closer; the usual failure is in the defrost cycle itself — a dead defrost heater, a stuck timer or a defrost termination thermostat that ends the cycle early. A blocked condensate drain does it too, backing water into the box where it refreezes. The counterintuitive part is that a heavily iced evaporator makes the box go warm, because ice blocks the airflow across the coil.
Temperature, and everything that follows from it. A cooler holds in the mid-to-high 30s Fahrenheit; a freezer runs at or below zero. The freezer therefore needs thicker insulated panels, a more aggressive defrost strategy, heated door frames and gaskets so the door does not freeze shut, and usually a floor that is insulated rather than sitting on the slab. It is why a freezer is not simply a cooler turned down, and why converting one to the other is rarely as cheap as it sounds.
Quarterly for a working kitchen, and twice a year at the absolute minimum for lighter-duty equipment. Kitchen air is greasy, and a condenser coil in a restaurant loads up several times faster than the same coil in a retail back room. A service visit should include cleaning condenser and evaporator coils, verifying the defrost cycle actually runs and terminates, checking box temperatures and superheat, clearing drains, and adjusting door hardware and gaskets. Almost every emergency call we take on refrigeration was preventable at one of those visits.
Repairs, maintenance, or a new-system walkthrough — schedule in a few taps or give us a call.