Most commercial refrigeration should be serviced every three to six months. Which end of that range you sit at depends far less on the calendar than on what the equipment has to put up with: a fryer-side prep fridge in a busy kitchen needs attention several times more often than a drinks cabinet in an air-conditioned retail space.
What actually drives the interval
Servicing intervals exist because condenser coils get dirty, and a dirty condenser cannot reject heat. Everything else follows from how quickly yours gets dirty and how hard the system is working in the meantime.
- Grease: anything sharing air with a cooking line will coat its condenser in an oily film that traps dust. These are the shortest intervals, often every three months or less.
- Flour and dry dust: bakeries, pizza kitchens and dry stores clog coils quickly and the build-up is easy to overlook because it looks like nothing much.
- Salt air: coastal positions corrode fins and fixings rather than just coating them, which is damage rather than dirt and does not wash off.
- Run hours: equipment that never gets a quiet period accumulates wear faster, regardless of how clean it is kept.
- Consequence of failure: a cool room holding a week of stock justifies a shorter interval than a backup fridge, simply because of what it costs when it stops.
A reasonable starting point
As a rule of thumb: kitchen refrigeration near cooking equipment every three months; general hospitality and cool rooms every four to six months; lightly used or well-isolated display refrigeration every six months. Beer and glycol systems usually warrant their own schedule tied to trading patterns rather than being lumped in with the food equipment.
Those are starting points, not rules. The right interval for your venue is the one where the technician consistently finds the equipment in reasonable condition. If every visit turns up a heavily fouled condenser, the interval is too long. If three visits running find nothing to do, it can probably be stretched.
What a service should actually cover
- Condenser and evaporator cleaning, and a look at fin condition rather than just surface dirt
- Operating temperatures and pressures checked against what the system should be doing
- Fan motors, defrost operation and drainage, including whether the drain actually drains
- Door seals, closers and hinges, which quietly cost more than most people assume
- Electrical connections and contactors, where heat damage tends to show up first
- Controller settings, and whether they still match what the equipment is being used for
The honest case for planned servicing
Planned maintenance does not stop equipment failing. What it does is change when you find out. A fan motor drawing high current, a seal starting to perish or a coil losing efficiency are all visible at a scheduled visit on a quiet Tuesday, and all invisible right up until they take a cool room out on a Saturday night.
The cost comparison is rarely close. A routine visit sits in a different order of magnitude to emergency attendance plus lost stock plus disrupted service, and the disruption is usually the expensive part.