Your cool room is not holding temperature
My cool room is sitting warmer than it should be. What is actually wrong and do I have to shut down?
Published 15/09/2026. Written by the Pristine Cooling team, Kalgoorlie.
A cool room that's drifted warm is usually an airflow problem, not an empty system. The gear is normally still running and still has gas in it. What's gone wrong is that it can't move heat any more. So no, you don't have to shut down the moment you notice. You've got hours rather than minutes to work out whether this is a service call or a skip bin full of stock.
Here's what's worth doing before you ring anyone and what it usually turns out to be.
First, stop making it worse
Leave the door shut. Every time someone opens it to have another look, warm air goes in and the system has to pull it back out. If the unit is already struggling it won't get there.
Write down the temperature and the time, then check it again in twenty minutes and write that down too. A room that's climbing fast is a different problem from one that's sitting a couple of degrees high and holding. The technician who attends will ask you this. Having two readings instead of one honestly saves a chunk of diagnosis.
If it's a chiller room and the product is still cold to the touch, you have time. If it's a freezer room and things are going soft at the edges, move what you can into another room or a truck now rather than after the call.
The three things it usually is
The condenser can't breathe
The condenser is the part that dumps the heat. Out here it's usually the outdoor half of the system. It works by pulling air across a set of fins. Block those fins and the heat has nowhere to go, so the room warms up even though everything is running exactly as designed.
Kalgoorlie is hard on condensers. Red dust gets into the fins and it packs in behind grease near a kitchen extract. A season of it will choke a coil that looked fine in April. Go and look at yours. If you can't see light through the fins, that's your answer. It's also the easiest of them to put right.
Same goes for what's around it. A pallet stacked against the unit, a bin, a delivery left in front of it or a new bit of shade cloth over the top will all do the same thing as dust. Plant needs clear air on every side of it.
The evaporator is iced up
The evaporator is the indoor half, the bit inside the room with the fans. It runs below freezing, so moisture in the air freezes onto it. Every system has a defrost cycle to melt that off on a schedule.
When the defrost isn't clearing properly, the ice builds instead of melting. Ice is an insulator, so the colder that coil gets on the outside, the less it can actually cool the room. It's a spiral. It looks exactly like a system that's lost its cooling capacity when really it's a system that's smothered in ice.
You can see this one. Open the door and look at the coil. A light frost is normal. A white slab you could carve your initials into is not.
The door isn't sealing
Seals go hard, get run into by a pallet jack or get torn and taped up and left. Strip curtains get cut short or pushed aside permanently. A door catch gets adjusted so it's easier for staff and stops pulling the door up tight.
Any of those and the room is quietly fighting the kitchen all day. It usually shows up as a system that runs constantly without ever getting there and often as ice on the evaporator too, because all that warm moist air has to go somewhere.
What it is usually not
It's usually not out of gas.
Refrigerant isn't fuel. It isn't used up, it doesn't wear out and a sealed system that was charged properly on day one should still hold that charge years later. So if a system genuinely is low on gas, that isn't a thing that just happened. It means there's a leak. The gas that's gone is somewhere in your plant room or your roof space.
That matters because putting gas into a leaking system without finding the leak is money you'll spend again and again after that. Anyone who tops a system up and doesn't talk to you about where it went hasn't fixed anything. Finding a leak takes longer than adding gas. It's also the part that's actually worth paying for.
What to have ready when you ring
The difference between a fast call and a slow one is almost always information. What helps:
- The two temperature readings and the times you took them
- Whether the fans inside the room are still running
- Whether the outdoor unit is running and whether it sounds normal
- What the coil inside the room looks like, iced or clear
- Roughly how long it's been drifting and whether anything changed recently, like a delivery stacked somewhere new or a hot water unit installed nearby
- What's in the room and how much of it matters
That last one decides the order of the day more than anything else. A room of packaged drinks and a room of vaccines are not the same call. We'd rather know which one we're coming to.
What happens when you ring us
Our after hours line is for commercial sites. You don't need an account with us to use it. A pub that's never dealt with Pristine Cooling can ring at 2am with a failing cool room and get a response. Refrigeration gets priority over air conditioning after hours, because a warm office is uncomfortable and a warm cool room is a loss.
The after hours call out is a flat fee and the first four hours of same day labour are inside it. Parts are quoted before anything gets fitted and gas is charged separately. If your site is more than 20km from our Boulder Road workshop the travel is quoted before we book it rather than turning up on the invoice afterwards. All of that is set out on the 24/7 Breakdown and Repairs page.
You get a written report either way, which is the thing facility managers actually need, because it's what gets passed up the line.
The honest last word
Most of what goes wrong with a cool room is preventable. Most of it gets found on a scheduled visit rather than at midnight. A blocked condenser and a defrost that's drifted out are both things you look at four times a year and never think about again, which is the whole argument for preventative maintenance over waiting for the call.
If yours is warm right now, check the door and look at the coil, write your two readings down and ring us. If it's holding fine and you've read this far, go and look at your condenser anyway. It takes a minute. A blocked condenser is the most common cause we find.
See what we install and service on the commercial refrigeration page.
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.