What goes wrong with truck mounted refrigeration
We run refrigerated trucks out of Kalgoorlie. Who looks after the units?
Published 02/11/2026. Written by the Pristine Cooling team, Kalgoorlie.
We do. The physics inside a transport unit is the same as a cool room, but the life it leads is nothing like one. It is a refrigeration system bolted to something that vibrates, corrugates, bakes in 45 degree air, then opens its door at every stop on the run. Transport units fail in their own particular ways because of that, which is worth knowing whether you run one truck or a yard full.
What the unit actually is
A condensing unit on the front of the body, an evaporator inside it, joined by pipework running through the structure of the truck.
Power comes from the vehicle engine. Sometimes from a small diesel engine on the unit itself. Sometimes from an electric standby connection when the truck is parked up and plugged in. The refrigeration circuit is familiar. Everything around it is not.
Vibration is the headline difference
Static plant sits on a slab and stays there. A transport unit spends its life being shaken.
That changes where faults come from. On a cool room a refrigerant leak is usually corrosion or a joint that was never quite right. On a truck it is far more often fatigue. Pipework work hardens where it is clamped, fittings loosen, lines chafe where they pass through the body, mounting bolts back off.
So a transport unit that keeps going flat is telling you something structural rather than something electrical. Chasing it with gas gets you back to the same place in a month, for the reasons in a split system blowing warm air.
The door opens all day
A cool room door might open a handful of times an hour. A multi drop run opens the body at every delivery, in whatever the outside air is doing, with the unit trying to recover between stops.
Every one of those openings dumps hot air into the load space and puts moisture on the evaporator. That is why transport evaporators ice up more readily than static ones. It is also why defrost settings matter more here than people expect. The principles are the same as a defrost cycle on a cool room.
It holds temperature. It does not fix temperature
This is the misunderstanding that costs the most product.
A transport unit is sized to hold a load at temperature, not to pull a warm load down. Put product on at the wrong temperature and the unit will run flat out all day without ever catching up, because it was never designed to.
Pre-cool the body before loading. Load product that is already at temperature. Then the unit is doing the job it was built for rather than one it cannot win.
The Goldfields part
Two things make it harder out here than it would be on the coast.
Ambient. A condenser on the front of a body, in 45 degree air, is already working outside the conditions it was selected for, which is rated for 35 degrees, working at 45. Add a loading dock with no breeze while the truck stands still and it has nothing left.
Dust. Unsealed roads pack a condenser far faster than a town run does. The same blanket problem applies as it does to any other coil. That is covered in what the Goldfields dust does to a condenser.
What a service covers
The refrigeration side is what you would expect. Pressures, charge, leak check, coil condition, defrost operation, controls.
The parts people forget are the ones vibration created. Mountings and brackets. Pipework clamps and chafe points. Belts and drive components. Electrical connections, which shake loose on a truck in a way they never do on a slab. Then verifying the unit reads true, because a controller showing the right number while the load sits two degrees warmer is worse than no reading at all.
When one stops
We service transport units and we repair them when they break down. They sit on the same 24/7 after hours line as every other piece of refrigeration we look after, because a load going warm at 11pm is the same problem whether it is in a cool room or on a trailer.
If something has stopped, ring it in rather than hoping it recovers on the next leg. Knowing what the unit is, what it is carrying, where the truck is and when it has to move again is what decides how fast somebody can be useful.
More on the service side is on commercial refrigeration. The after hours arrangement is on 24/7 breakdown and repairs.
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.