What to do with your plant over the Christmas shutdown
We close for three weeks over Christmas. What should we do with the cool rooms and the air conditioning?
Published 26/10/2026. Written by the Pristine Cooling team, Kalgoorlie.
Some of it should be turned off. Some of it should not. Getting that wrong is expensive in both directions. The bigger question is the one most sites skip: what happens if something fails while the building is empty. Three weeks is a long time for a cool room full of stock to be looking after itself.
Cool rooms you are emptying
Turn it off. Clean it out properly while it is empty, which is the easiest it will ever be.
Then prop the door open. A sealed cool room with no airflow and a bit of moisture left in it grows mould and comes back smelling, which is a worse job in January than a wedge under the door in December.
Cool rooms that stay loaded
These keep running, which is fine. The risk is not the running. It is that nobody is there.
A room that drifts up on the 27th does not announce itself. It gets found when somebody comes back, by which time the stock is a write off rather than a call out.
Two things make that survivable. Temperature monitoring with an alarm that reaches somebody who is actually in town. Then a plan for access, which matters more than people expect. An after hours number is no use if nobody can let a technician through the door at the front.
So before you lock up, work out who holds keys, who is reachable, who is authorised to approve a repair, then make sure whoever answers the phone on your side knows they are on that list.
Freezer rooms are their own case
One being emptied wants a proper defrost before it goes off, rather than being left to thaw into a lake on its own schedule.
One that stays loaded takes far longer to pull back down if it ever does drift, so it is the first thing worth putting monitoring on rather than the last.
Air conditioning
Most of it goes off. That is the easy part.
What should not go off is anything cooling equipment rather than people. Comms cupboards, server racks, anything with electronics sitting in it. A sealed building in a Goldfields January gets extremely hot. The gear in that cupboard does not know the business is shut.
Worth walking the building once with that question in mind, because these get missed. The cupboard nobody thinks of is usually the one holding the phone system.
Ice machines
Empty, clean, off, door open.
A machine left running for three weeks is making ice nobody uses, paying for the privilege, then holding that ice in a bin for a month. There is no version of that which ends well.
The restart is the part people forget
Plant that has sat idle does not always come back the way it went off.
Compressors that have sat in a hot plant room, fan motors that have not turned in a month, drive belts, seized bearings, controls that have lost their settings. None of that is dramatic. It is simply that equipment reveals its problems when it is asked to start, rather than while it is standing still.
Which means the restart day is the day you discover things. It is also, usually, the day before you open.
Plan to fire everything up a day or two ahead rather than on the morning. A cool room needs time to pull down before product goes in anyway, so there is no version of a good restart that happens an hour before service.
The visit worth booking is the one before
A service in the weeks before a shutdown finds anything marginal while there is still somebody around to deal with it.
The same fault found in January is found by a skeleton crew, in the hottest part of the year, when every contractor in town is working through a backlog. The work is identical. The circumstances are not.
If your site is shutting down and you have not had anybody look at the refrigeration since winter, that is the thing worth doing in the next few weeks. More on how that fits a schedule is on preventative maintenance.
A short list for the file
What gets turned off. What stays on. Who decided.
Who holds keys and who is reachable, written down rather than assumed.
Whether anything loaded has monitoring on it.
What date the restart happens, which is not the same date you open.
Who you ring if it goes wrong, which is what 24/7 breakdown and repairs is for.
Ring us and we'll tell you when we can be there
Same number either way. Ring it if something is down right now or if you want a quote, a service or a maintenance contract set up.