Restaurant & Kitchen Air Conditioning
Hospitality is the hardest environment we work in. The heat load swings from nothing to enormous in an hour, the kitchen fights the dining room, grease gets into everything, and the whole thing has to happen without a customer noticing an engineer.
Two rooms with opposite problems
The dining room
A full restaurant is a room full of people, hot plates and lighting, and the load arrives all at once at seven o'clock. Size for the average and it cannot cope at service. Size for the peak and it runs badly the rest of the day. The answer is equipment that can modulate, and controls set to bring it on ahead of service rather than chasing the room once it is already too warm.
Draughts matter as much as temperature. A diner sitting directly under an air stream will complain even when the room is at exactly the right temperature, which is why unit position in a dining room is a seating-plan decision, not just an engineering one.
The kitchen
The kitchen is not a comfort cooling problem, it is a ventilation and extraction problem first. Cooling equipment placed in a grease-laden airstream clogs, loses performance and becomes a cleaning liability. Get the extraction and make-up air right, then cool what is left.
Grease, filters and why maintenance schedules are different here
Filters and coils that would last a year in an office load up in weeks in hospitality. A maintenance interval copied from an office contract will not hold. We set the frequency to the environment, and in kitchens that usually means seeing the equipment considerably more often.
Neglect shows up as reduced cooling first, then as a breakdown in the middle of a busy service, which is the worst possible time and the reason we push planned maintenance harder in this sector than any other.
Working around service
Installation and maintenance in hospitality happens outside trading hours, or in the gap between lunch and dinner, or on a closure day. That is normal and we plan for it. What we will not do is turn up at midday with a core drill.
Noise, neighbours and the outdoor unit
Restaurants are often in mixed buildings with flats above or beside them, and outdoor plant running into the evening is a common source of complaints — sometimes formal ones. Position, mounting and anti-vibration matter, and it is far cheaper to get right at installation than to move afterwards.