Hot weather in the North East arrives with very little notice and leaves just as quickly. That is exactly what makes it awkward for a business. There is rarely time to react once it lands, and the systems you were relying on tend to announce their problems on the busiest afternoon of the year. Here is a practical checklist for getting your premises ready, and what to do if it goes wrong anyway.
In this guide
Why heatwaves catch businesses out
The pattern repeats every year and it is entirely predictable. A system sits idle from September to June. Dust settles in the filters, leaves and cobwebs build up around the outdoor unit, a slow refrigerant leak quietly develops, and none of it matters because nobody is asking the system to do anything. Then the forecast turns, everyone in Teesside switches on at once, and every fault that has been developing for nine months gets discovered in the same forty eight hours.
The second problem is queueing. When the hot spell hits, every reputable engineer in Middlesbrough, Stockton on Tees and Redcar is already committed. A business that has done nothing since last summer starts from further back than one that had its systems checked in April. That is not a sales point, it is arithmetic.
The checks worth doing before it gets hot
Most of this list is free and takes an hour. Put it in a diary rather than trusting anyone to remember it.
- Run every system before you need it. Put each one into cooling on a mild day and let it run properly for twenty minutes. A fault found in April is an appointment. The same fault found in July is a crisis.
- Clean or check the filters. On most indoor units the panel opens by hand. A clogged filter makes the system work harder and deliver less, and it is the single cheapest thing on this list to fix.
- Clear around the outdoor units. They need air moving freely around them. Pallets stacked against a condenser, bins pushed up close, weeds grown through the grille and a summer of leaves in the base all cost you capacity on the day you need it most.
- Look for the obvious. Water pooling indoors, ice on pipework, new rattles or grinding, a musty smell on start up, or a system that trips the electrics. All of these are small and cheap early, and expensive late.
- Find the systems nobody uses. Almost every site we survey has at least one unit in a back office or a stock room that everyone has forgotten about. It still holds refrigerant and it is still your responsibility.
One thing not to do. Do not let anyone without F-Gas certification take covers off or touch the refrigerant pipework. Handling refrigerant without certification is illegal, and a well meaning maintenance person having a go is how a modest fault becomes a compressor replacement.
The building does half the work
Air conditioning is fighting whatever the building lets in. The cheapest cooling you will ever buy is the heat you keep out in the first place, and a surprising number of businesses spend money on the system while ignoring the fabric around it.
- Shade the glass. Blinds on the south and west facing side, closed during the day, do more than most people expect. Solar film is worth a conversation if the glazing is the real problem.
- Keep the doors shut. A shop propping the front door open on a hot day is cooling the pavement. If the door has to stay open for customers, that has to be part of the system design, not an afterthought.
- Get ahead of the heat. Timers matter. Pulling a building down from 28 degrees at 2pm is hard work. Holding it steady from 7am is not.
Know your weak points before they find you
Every building has one area that goes first, and it is worth knowing which one yours is while the weather is still mild.
In offices it is usually the sunny side of an open plan floor, particularly where one thermostat is trying to serve a hot elevation and a shaded one. In retail it is near the entrance and under the display lighting. In hospitality it is the kitchen and the tables nearest it. In warehouses it is a mezzanine office sitting up in the warmest air in the building. If you already know where yours is, that is genuinely useful information for a survey, and it usually points at a zoning issue rather than a capacity one.
Server rooms and stock rooms
These deserve separate thought, because comfort cooling and critical cooling are not the same job. A comms room does not care whether anyone is comfortable. It cares whether the temperature stays inside a band, all day, every day, including the days nobody is in the building. A system designed to keep people happy from nine to five is not designed for that.
The same goes for anything you store with a temperature limit on the label. If a heatwave could damage it, the cooling protecting it should not be specified as a comfort system. Our guide on cooling a server room goes into the detail properly.
If a system fails on the worst possible day
Sometimes it just goes. A few minutes of preparation makes that a manageable morning rather than a bad one.
- Know who you ring, before you need to ring them. The number should be on the wall, not in one person’s phone. If that person is on holiday when it fails, you have two problems.
- Know what you have. A list of systems, where they are, what they serve and roughly how old they are turns a diagnostic visit into a repair visit.
- Check the simple things first. Has it tripped a breaker. Is the filter blocked solid. Has somebody stacked deliveries against the outdoor unit. Has someone set it to fan only or, more often than you would think, to heating.
This is what commercial rapid response cover is for. It does not stop things breaking, and nobody who tells you otherwise is being straight with you. What it does is put you in a queue that is already expecting you, with an engineer who has the details of your site in front of them.
Looking after the people in the building
You know your own duties as an employer better than we do, and we are not going to lecture you about them from an air conditioning website. What we would say is that the practical measures cost very little and the goodwill is real. Cold water available and visible. Relaxed dress expectations for the week. Flexibility about hours where the work allows it. Moving anyone who is struggling away from the worst part of the floor. And tell people what is happening, because staff put up with a warm week far better when they know somebody is dealing with it than when they suspect nobody has noticed.
Plan it once, then stop worrying about it
Everything above is a schedule and a folder. The businesses that sail through a hot spell are almost never the ones with the newest kit. They are the ones where checks happen automatically, records exist because they are produced as a by-product of the visits, and somebody has thought about the weak point before the weather found it for them.
That is the argument for planned maintenance over waiting for a failure, whether you have one system above a shop counter in Guisborough or forty across a portfolio. Servicing also keeps your manufacturer warranty valid, which is a large cost quietly protected by a small one.
Rapid response across Teesside
We are a family run business based on North Ormsby Road in Middlesbrough, and we cover roughly twenty miles around it. That takes in Stockton on Tees, Thornaby, Billingham, Norton, Yarm, Eaglescliffe, Ingleby Barwick, Redcar, Marske, Saltburn, Guisborough, Marton, Hartlepool, Peterlee and Darlington. We are F-Gas and Refcom registered, we service all makes and models including systems we did not install, and we offer rapid response cover for commercial customers.
If you would like your systems looked at before the next hot spell, or you want a straight opinion on whether what you have is up to the job, a site survey is free and there is no obligation. Give us a ring on 01642 680 873 and we will get you in the diary while the weather is still on your side.
