One failed freezer overnight — spoiled product, an emergency call at overtime rates, a lost service day — routinely costs more than a full year of planned maintenance on that box. The maths is not close. What maintenance actually buys you is that the failure happens on a Tuesday morning with a technician present, instead of on a Saturday night with a full walk-in.
What a visit actually includes
Not a look and a sticker. Every planned visit on every box covers the same twelve checks, and you get the readings in writing:
- Condenser coil chemically cleaned — in a kitchen this is the single highest-value task on the list
- Evaporator coil inspected and cleaned
- Drain line flushed, and the drain heater amp-checked
- Defrost cycle run and watched end to end, with termination verified on temperature
- Fan motors checked, run capacitors tested rather than guessed at
- Door gasket dollar-bill tested on all four sides
- Closer, hinges and sweep adjusted or flagged
- Frame and threshold heaters amp-checked on freezers
- Superheat and subcool measured and recorded
- Electrical connections torqued, contactor contacts inspected under load
- Controller calibrated against a reference thermometer — a drifted probe is invisible otherwise
- Refrigerant leak check, with a documented leak-rate calculation whenever refrigerant is added
How often
Quarterly is the standard for food service. A condenser in a fryer-heavy kitchen genuinely needs cleaning every 30 to 90 days; twice a year is the minimum that makes sense anywhere, and it should land in April before the summer head-pressure season and September before the winter low-ambient season.
The compliance angle nobody is telling you about
Since 1 January 2026 the leak-repair threshold for walk-in systems dropped from 50 pounds of refrigerant to 15 pounds. A large share of walk-in freezer systems sit between those two numbers, which means they went from unregulated to regulated overnight. What that involves: a leak-rate calculation every time refrigerant is added, an annual leak inspection, 30 days to repair once the threshold is exceeded, and a forced retrofit or retirement plan if it is not.
Our planned maintenance produces that documentation as a by-product. You are not paying extra for compliance — you are getting the record because the work generates it.
An honest way to judge any maintenance quote
Including ours. Take the annual contract price, divide it by the hourly labour rate to get the total service hours. Divide that by the number of visits, then by the number of units. If the answer is eleven minutes per box, nothing meaningful is happening in those eleven minutes. Cheap contracts are cheap because they allocate minutes.
What it costs
Planned maintenance starts at around $350 per unit per year for two visits, and runs higher for quarterly service, multi-unit sites and after-hours scheduling. Full-coverage arrangements that fold in repair labour and parts are set out on the service contracts page.
Questions we get asked
Is planned maintenance actually worth it on one walk-in?
On a single cooler in a quiet operation, twice a year is usually enough and the payback is mostly energy and avoided emergencies. On a freezer, or on any box holding high-value product, quarterly pays for itself the first time it prevents a failure. A medium walk-in freezer costs roughly $5,300 a year to run; a neglected one with a dirty condenser and worn gaskets costs meaningfully more than that.
Will you service a box you did not install?
Yes, that is most of our work. The first visit includes a full condition report so you know what you actually have — charge size, refrigerant type, age, and what is going to need attention in the next year.
Can maintenance be done outside trading hours?
Yes. Most of our planned work in restaurants happens before service or late evening. It is scheduled, so there is no emergency premium on it.
What if you find something serious on a maintenance visit?
You get told, in writing, with a price and a judgement about whether it can wait. We do not do the thing where a routine visit turns into an invoice you did not approve.
Does maintenance cover the refrigerant itself?
Not on the basic tier — refrigerant is billed. On full-coverage contracts it is included. Either way you get the leak-rate record, because that is now a document you are expected to hold.