An operations director once described his problem to me like this. His hard FM provider was competent, responsive and reasonably priced, and every time a fridge went down they sent someone who could not fix it. Two visits, sometimes three, before a refrigeration engineer appeared. Nobody was doing anything wrong. It was simply that refrigeration had been bundled into a contract written for buildings, and buildings do not have compressors in them.
That is the most common failure I see in multi-site estates, and it has nothing to do with price. This is how to work out whether a contractor can genuinely carry your refrigeration, before you find out during a heatwave.
Why refrigeration sits awkwardly inside general FM
Most hard FM work is fault-finding on systems that are, in engineering terms, fairly forgiving. A lighting circuit either works or it does not. A door closer is mechanical. You can be a very good building engineer and be genuinely out of your depth on a refrigeration system, because refrigeration failures are usually not binary.
A cabinet holding two degrees warm is not broken. It is telling you something about superheat, or airflow across the evaporator, or a condenser that has not been cleaned since it was installed, or a charge that is slightly low because it has been leaking for eight months. Reading that correctly takes someone who does it every day. Send a generalist and you get the most visible fix, which is often a gas top-up, and the fault returns in six weeks. Our piece on why a commercial fridge stops holding temperature goes through how many separate causes present as the same symptom.
There is a legal dimension too. Working on refrigerant circuits is a certificated activity, which is not true of most building maintenance tasks. That single fact changes who is allowed to touch your equipment.
The things you should verify, not take on trust
Company F-Gas certification, not just engineer certification
This is the one most buyers get half right. Under Article 10 of the retained F-Gas Regulation, certification requirements apply to individual engineers and to the undertakings employing them. Plenty of firms will tell you their engineers are F-Gas certified. Ask separately whether the company holds certification, because both are required for stationary refrigeration and air conditioning work.
You can check company certification against the register held by the certification body rather than relying on a logo on a quote. It takes about two minutes and it is the single highest-value check in the whole process.
The subcontracting clause you should know exists
Article 10 also says that any undertaking assigning this work to another undertaking "shall take reasonable steps to ascertain that the latter holds the necessary certificates for the required tasks". That matters if you are buying through a national FM provider, because it means the obligation to verify follows the chain. Ask your provider directly who actually attends refrigeration calls at your sites, and whether that firm is certified. If the answer is vague, that is worth pursuing.
Insurance that matches the risk
Public liability is standard. What is worth checking on a refrigeration contract is the level, because the exposure is not the value of the fridge. It is the ceiling below it, the stock inside it, and the trading day it interrupts. Ask for the certificate rather than a statement.
Genuine out-of-hours capability
Everyone advertises 24/7. The useful question is different: what happens at 11pm on a Saturday, who picks up, and is that person an engineer or a call handling service that will pass a message on Monday. Both models exist and both are legitimate. You just need to know which one you are buying.
Specialist or national provider
There is no universally right answer here and anyone telling you otherwise is selling. The trade-off is real and it depends on what your estate looks like.
| National FM provider | Refrigeration specialist | |
|---|---|---|
| Geographic reach | Wide, usually nationwide | Regional, deeper in that region |
| Single point of contact | Yes, one contract for everything | No, refrigeration sits alongside other trades |
| Refrigeration depth | Variable, often subcontracted | The entire business |
| First-visit fix rate | Depends heavily on who is dispatched | Generally higher on refrigeration |
| Escalation | Through account management | Usually straight to someone technical |
| Best suited to | Estates spread across the whole country | Estates concentrated in one region, or refrigeration-critical sites |
A common and sensible structure is a national provider for general building maintenance with refrigeration carved out to a specialist in each region. It costs slightly more to manage and it usually costs less to run, because the number of wasted visits falls sharply.
Questions that separate the two
In a tender, most questions get the answer the bidder thinks you want. These ones are harder to answer generically, which is why they are useful.
- How many of your engineers are refrigeration engineers rather than AC engineers? The qualifications overlap and the daily work does not. A firm that is honest about the split is telling you something good about itself.
- What proportion of refrigeration calls do you close on the first visit, and how do you measure it? The measurement method matters more than the number.
- Do you subcontract any part of my estate, and to whom? Ask for the answer by region.
- Show me an anonymised F-Gas record for a site of similar size. You will learn immediately whether their record keeping is a system or a folder.
- Who calculates the CO₂e charge for my assets, you or me? If neither party has, nobody knows the correct leak check frequency.
- What is your process when a site has three callouts in a quarter? A good contractor should have an answer that involves recommending replacement rather than continuing to invoice.
- Can you work around our trading hours, and is that in the base price?
The red flags
None of these are automatically disqualifying. All of them are worth a follow-up question.
- A guaranteed rectification time on equipment they have not surveyed. Nobody can promise a fifteen-year-old cabinet with a discontinued controller will run again by lunchtime. Attendance windows can be committed to. Repairs depend on parts.
- Refrigerant included with no cap and no leak repair obligation. That combination pays a contractor to keep topping up rather than to find the leak.
- A quote with no asset list attached. If they have not asked what you have, they are pricing an average, and you will find out where you differ from average later.
- Pressure to sign before a site survey. A survey costs a contractor real money, which is exactly why willingness to do one first is a signal.
- Vagueness about who holds the compliance records. The duty is yours. The records need to be accessible to you.
What a good survey looks like
Before pricing an estate, a contractor who knows what they are doing will want to see a representative sample of sites rather than all of them. On each one they should be recording make, model, serial number, refrigerant type and charge, age, condition, and anything already failing. They should be photographing plant, checking condenser condition, and looking at how accessible the equipment actually is, because a unit on a roof with no safe access is a different job from the same unit at ground level.
If a survey produces a document you can use independently of that contractor, you have gained something real even if you award the work elsewhere. That document is the beginning of the asset register, and an estate without one is negotiating blind. It also feeds directly into deciding which units to replace rather than keep repairing.
The maintenance standard to benchmark against
Ask each bidder to map their planned visit content against the relevant SFG20 schedules published by BESA. The standard carries over eighty air conditioning and refrigeration schedules covering chillers, cold rooms and food storage, compressors, condensers and control panels, and each one specifies the task, the frequency, the skill level and the criticality.
You are not obliged to contract on SFG20. The value is in the comparison. Two bidders quoting the same price whose planned visits map to very different levels of task content are not offering the same thing, and this is how you see it.
Where we sit in this
We are the specialist end of that table. Be Cool has been a family-run London firm since 2004, our engineers are F-Gas certified, and we have delivered more than 2,000 projects across London, Essex, Kent, Surrey and Hertfordshire. We are not a national provider and we do not pretend to be. What we do is refrigeration and air conditioning, in this region, properly.
If you are running refrigeration across several sites and the current arrangement is producing more repeat visits than it should, we are happy to survey a sample of them and tell you what we find, including the parts you will not enjoy hearing. You can look at projects we have delivered, read how we structure commercial refrigeration maintenance, or talk to us about cover.
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.