Hot Weather Affecting Freezers

[Caran]

A friend went to Morrisons in Ross on Wye on Wednesday, all the freezers and chiller cabinets were empty, they said their was virtually nothing in store. Their freezers throughout the store had broken down.
Today we did our usual Lidl shop. No fresh baked bread or cakes. Their freezers had blown, but luckily only for bakery. Talking to a member of staff, told me the local Tesco had also had their freezers blow too.
What causes this, our own in house freezers never blow do they?

[Old_Geezer]

Anything can break down but a hint of summer and all these places get issues ?! Weird. Maybe some low quality freezer firm cornered the retail market on price ?

[ivor4781]

cant be the weather what about all the other more hotter than this countries, they all use freezers

[dannyk13]

No problems at my local Tesco

[chamois]

As an engineer, perhaps i can explain. All major supermarket freezers anfd fridges operate via equipment in a behind-the-scenes "plant room". Huge, noisy compressors work 24 hours per day to supply the refrigerant gases to the freezers and fridges on the shop floor. A large supermarket will have anything up to a couple of dozen of these compressors in the plant room.

The compressors share the work of maintaining the temperature in the cabinets on the shop floor, but despite being sited in well ventilated areas, they still overheat and break down in hot weather. One compressor can cause anything up to six freezer or fridge cabinets to stop working resulting in the stock having to be transferred to back up freezers or fridges in the store warehouse. These compressors in simple terms can be thought of as huge versions of what you have in domestic fridges and freezers. The shop floor cabinets do not contain any compressors at all.

[chamois]

Without going into too much technical detail, maintaining the electrical aspects of these compressors is a nightmare. Due to design considerations, banks of relays are actually responsible for starting up and stopping the fans on these compressors. Loss of power to the relays is often the cause of the compressors stopping, causing every fridge or freezer cabinet in the store to rise to the ambient temperature with catastrophic consequences.

Supermarkets spend millions on getting the best equipment together for this purpose Old_Geezer and don't buy cut-price equipment. They are in the business of maximising sales and buying cheap equipment would hit them hard if their equipment constantly broke down.

If you want to be certain that the freezers work in a supermarket, shop in Lidl or Aldi, where all the freezers and fridges have sel-contained compressors just like you have at home. No remote compressors and pipework to break down.

[rockerbill]

Wrong kind of leaves on the line

[rockerbill]

or even leafs

[Baldric]

Right first time

///leaves plural of leaf///

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