A site manager rang a 24/7 number at half past eleven on a Saturday night. Someone answered immediately, took the details, and was extremely helpful. An engineer attended on Monday morning. Technically nothing was mis-sold. The number was answered around the clock, exactly as advertised. What was available around the clock was a person to take a message.
That is not a scam, it is a different product, and the trouble is that both products are described with the same three characters. If you are buying refrigeration cover across an estate, this is the clause worth the most scrutiny, because it is the one you will only test when it matters.
The four things "24/7" can mean
| Model | What happens at 2am | Realistic use case |
|---|---|---|
| Answered line | A call handler logs the fault. Engineer allocated next working day. | Low stock value, non-trading hours failure is tolerable |
| On-call triage | An engineer calls you back and talks you through checks by phone. Attendance if needed. | Sites with competent staff who can check the obvious |
| On-call attendance | A duty engineer is rostered and will attend out of hours. | Trade-critical refrigeration, high stock value |
| Rostered cover with parts access | Duty engineer attends and can get at stores or a parts source out of hours. | Estates where a same-night fix is genuinely worth paying for |
All four are legitimate and they are priced very differently, as they should be. Having an engineer rostered and awake on a Sunday night costs real money whether or not anyone rings. The mistake is buying the first and believing you bought the third.
The question that cuts through it: "If I call at 2am on a Sunday, who picks up, and are they an engineer?" Ask it exactly like that. The answer takes ten seconds and tells you which row of the table you are in.
Response, attendance, rectification
Three different clocks, routinely used as if they were one. I wrote about this in more detail in our piece on weighing repair against replacement, but for out-of-hours cover it is worth restating.
- Response is time to acknowledge. Sometimes just a call back.
- Attendance is time until someone is physically on site.
- Rectification is time until the equipment works again.
A contract offering a four-hour response and a contract offering four-hour attendance are not comparable, and the first is considerably cheaper to provide. When you normalise tenders, convert everything to attendance before you look at price.
On rectification, be sceptical of anyone guaranteeing it. Parts availability is outside any contractor's control, particularly at 3am on a bank holiday, and particularly on older kit where the original controller has been discontinued. What a contractor can honestly commit to is turning up and making the situation safe and stable. When we agree emergency cover with a customer, we talk through a realistic arrival window based on the site and the equipment rather than putting a number in a document that nobody can hit in traffic.
What actually happens on an out-of-hours call
Worth understanding, because it explains why some fixes are quick and others are not.
The engineer arrives to a system that is off, or running and not holding temperature. First job is diagnosis, and refrigeration diagnosis is not fast by nature. Pressures and temperatures have to be read while the system is running, which sometimes means restarting it and waiting. A compressor that has tripped on overload may run happily for twenty minutes before doing it again.
Then there is a decision, and this is the part worth knowing about in advance. Roughly speaking the engineer will land on one of four outcomes:
- Fixed on the night. A control fault, a tripped protection device, a blocked drain, a fan motor they happen to be carrying. Best case and reasonably common.
- Stabilised, not fixed. The system is running well enough to hold temperature until a proper repair. This is often the right answer at 3am and it needs a follow-up booked before the engineer leaves.
- Not fixable tonight, stock at risk. Now the priority is the stock rather than the fridge. Where can it go, and how fast.
- Safety issue, isolate. Electrical fault or refrigerant leak in an occupied space. The system goes off and stays off.
Outcome two is the one that gets mishandled. A stabilised system feels fixed, everyone relaxes, the follow-up slips, and it fails again on the next busy night. If an engineer tells you something is stable rather than repaired, get the return visit in the diary before they drive away.
The first hour, before anyone arrives
What your site team does in the first hour has more effect on the total cost than almost anything the engineer does later. This is worth laminating and putting inside the plant cupboard door.
- Keep the doors shut. The instinct is to open up and check. Every opening dumps the remaining cold. A closed, well-insulated cold room holds temperature for a surprisingly long time.
- Record the temperature now, and the time. This becomes your food safety evidence later, and without it you are guessing about how long product was warm.
- Check the obvious three. Is the isolator on, has an RCD tripped, is the condenser blocked. A meaningful share of out-of-hours calls are one of these, and finding it yourself saves a callout.
- Do not defrost with anything sharp. Ice on an evaporator is a symptom. Puncturing a coil turns a repair into a replacement.
- Start planning where stock goes before you need to move it, not after.
- Ring it in with detail. Make, model, location, what it is doing, current temperature, what changed recently. An engineer who knows the fault code before leaving can bring the right part.
That third point is worth training into site teams. Our list of common reasons a commercial fridge stops cooling works well as a site-level checklist, and our manufacturer fault code guides let a manager report a code rather than a symptom.
The food safety clock running alongside
While the engineering is happening, a separate clock is running on the stock, and it is not a judgement call. Under Schedule 4 of the Food Safety and Hygiene (England) Regulations 2013, any person who keeps food likely to support the growth of pathogenic micro-organisms above 8°C commits an offence.
The Food Standards Agency guidance on chilling sets the practical target lower, at 5°C or below, precisely so there is headroom for events like this one.
Which is why the temperature log matters so much. If you recorded 4°C at 23:15 and 7°C at 01:30, you have a defensible record and a clear decision. If nobody wrote anything down, you are making a judgement in the morning with no evidence, and the safe call is usually the expensive one. If you have continuous temperature monitoring with alarms, this is handled for you, and the alarm may well have woken someone before the stock was ever at risk.
What to specify in an out-of-hours clause
If you are writing or reviewing cover for an estate, these are the lines that matter:
- Who answers, and whether they are an engineer or a call handler
- Attendance window, stated as attendance rather than response
- Whether the window differs by site, and if so which sites are which
- The out-of-hours labour rate, and when it starts and ends
- Whether the callout charge is included in the contract fee or billed on top
- What the engineer is authorised to spend without a further approval call at 3am
- Escalation route if nobody attends within the window
- Whether a stabilise-and-return visit is charged as one job or two
The authorisation limit is the underrated one. If your engineer needs sign-off for a two-hundred-pound part and the only person who can authorise it is asleep, you have built a delay into your own process. Set a standing limit and the problem disappears.
Which sites actually need the expensive version
Not all of them, and paying for rostered attendance across an entire estate is usually poor value. Rank sites on two axes: stock value at risk, and whether the equipment is trade-critical. High on both, buy the real thing. Low on both, an answered line and a next-day visit is a perfectly sensible purchase.
Most estates find that a small minority of sites justify full out-of-hours attendance, and knowing which ones is worth more than uniform cover. A cellar cooler at a high-volume pub and a back-of-house prep fridge at a quiet unit are not the same risk, and there is no reason to pay for them as if they were. Our cellar cooling work is a good example of the first category.
The uncomfortable truth about emergencies
Most out-of-hours callouts I attend were avoidable, and not because anyone was careless. They were condensers that had not been cleaned, seals that had been marginal for a year, a system that had been topped up twice and never leak-tested properly. The fault did not arrive at midnight. It arrived months earlier and waited for the hottest night of the year, when every other system in London was also under strain and every refrigeration company was fully booked.
Good out-of-hours cover is worth having and it is the second line of defence. The first is a planned regime that finds those faults on a Tuesday afternoon at daytime rates. If your estate is generating a lot of emergency calls, the answer is usually not better emergency cover, it is a service frequency that matches what the equipment is actually doing.
It is also worth knowing what a callout genuinely costs you once stock, lost trade and management time are counted, because that number decides which sites deserve the expensive tier. We have set out a way to calculate it on your own figures.
We provide 24/7 emergency callouts across London and the South East alongside planned refrigeration maintenance, and we will tell you honestly which of your sites we think justify the higher level of cover. Talk to us about cover if you are reviewing it.
About the author: Ali Elm runs Be Cool Refrigeration & Air Conditioning, a family-run London firm that has been installing, servicing and repairing commercial refrigeration and air conditioning since 2004. His F-Gas certified team has delivered more than 2,000 projects across London and the South East.
Written by
Ali Elm
Ali is the Head of Operations at Be Cool Refrigeration with over a decade of hands-on experience in HVAC and commercial refrigeration. He oversees every installation, repair, and maintenance project, making sure the work meets the highest standards. Ali holds full F-Gas certification and has worked across residential, commercial, and industrial refrigeration systems throughout London and the South East. When he is not on site, he writes these guides to help business owners and homeowners understand their cooling systems better.