Commercial Walk-In Fridges for UK Industries
MTCSS designs, supplies and installs walk-in fridges, also known as walk-in chillers or chiller cold rooms, for commercial kitchens, food producers, retailers, pharmaceutical businesses and warehouses across the UK. We build everything from modular cold rooms that go up in a day or two to bespoke rooms designed around the shape of your site.
What is a Walk-In Fridge?
A walk-in fridge is a room your staff can walk into and stock like a storeroom, held at a set temperature between 0 and +8°C. It’s built from insulated cold room panels and an insulated door, with a refrigeration system that keeps the temperature steady. Unlike an upright commercial fridge, you can shelve every wall, wheel stock in on trolleys or pallets, and keep everything at one temperature with a single log to check, rather than monitoring several separate units.
Walk-In Fridge Sizes: Modular and Bespoke
Walk-in fridges come in two forms, and the right one mostly depends on how much space you need and how much disruption your site can take while the room goes in.
Our modular walk-in fridges use MTH cam-locked panels in set sizes from 1020mm up to 3620mm internally, with a choice of 80mm, 100mm or 120mm panel thickness depending on the level of insulation you need. The same rooms can run as chillers or freezers anywhere between -20 and +10°C, and you can have them floorless or with an insulated anti-slip floor. The panels are PUR with a B-s3, d0 fire rating and come in antibacterial plasticised steel or stainless steel. Because nothing needs cutting or sealing on site, a modular room is usually assembled in a day or two, and some customers choose to install their own modular cold room. Full dimensions are in our modular cold room spec sheet.
Bespoke walk-in fridges are built to whatever footprint and shape your building allows, from around 2m by 2m up to and beyond, with the cold room doors, flooring and refrigeration system specified around what you store and how often the room is opened. This is the route for larger rooms, awkward layouts, rooms built into the structure of the building, and dual-compartment rooms that put a walk-in fridge alongside a walk-in freezer.
When you’re working out the size you need, work out how many upright fridges the room is replacing, how much shelving you require, and whether stock arrives on pallets or by hand.
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Where are Walk-In Chillers Used?
Walk-in fridges or modular cold rooms are used for a wide range of applications and industries, including but not limited to:
- Food and drink retail, manufacturing, and storage
- Larger catering businesses
- Food preparation
- Fruit and vegetable produce, including farm shops and markets
- Pharmaceutical manufacture, storage, or transport
- IT hubs and storage facilities
- Commercial settings with commercial kitchens, including hotels, restaurants, and pubs
- Undertakers and funeral homes
Anywhere that relies on commercial fridges and struggles with stock and temperature control could benefit from a chiller cold room.
How Much is a Walk-In Cold Room?
As a rough guide across the UK market, a small off-the-shelf walk-in fridge with a plug-in refrigeration unit costs between about £3,000 and £7,000 plus VAT, and heavy-duty 3m by 3m integral rooms reach around £10,000 plus VAT before installation. Installed bespoke chiller rooms usually start at around £4,000 for a small room and run from £8,000 to £20,000 for a medium commercial room, with a further £1,000 to £5,000 if the site needs groundwork, drainage or new power.
Where your room falls within that range comes down to a few things:
- The size of the room and the panel thickness, since thicker panels cost more but hold temperature better and cost less to run.
- The refrigeration system, where a monoblock unit fitted through the wall suits smaller rooms and a split system, with the evaporator inside and the condensing unit elsewhere, suits larger rooms or poorly ventilated spaces.
- Doors, flooring, shelving, lighting and alarms, each of which is specified to suit your use.
- Access and timing, including tight routes into the building, upper-floor installs and work that has to happen outside your opening hours.
We price every room after a free site survey, and you can spread the cost through finance and leasing.
Cold Room Walk-In Chiller Installation
As with the price, the expected timeline for a walk-in fridge chiller installation also depends on:
- The type and size of the refrigerated space you are looking to create
- Any factors that could negatively affect the build time, including limited access or uninterrupted business operations
- The specifications of your walk-in chiller
In most cases, installation starts with a site survey and quote generation. Once planned, our team of experienced cold storage contractors will come to your site to install your bespoke cold room fridge, freezer, or dual-compartment solution.
Once installation is complete, we’ll show you around, explain how to use and maintain it, and complete the official sign-off. We’ll also tell you about our continued aftercare and maintenance services, should you need them.
We’re here to help!
We will work with you to understand your business and its processes, so we can help design your perfect cold storage solution.
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Is a Walk-in Fridge More Energy-Efficient?
Compared to commercial or “reach-in” fridges, walk-in fridges are generally more energy-efficient per cubic foot. Thanks to their construction, while they may use more electricity, they can store much more, bringing down the overall cost.
This means you can store much larger quantities with much tighter control over the accuracy of the temperature, making a single cold room fridge equivalent to 3 to 5 upright fridges on average.
There is also more you can do to increase their energy efficiency, including regular maintenance, using LED lighting, and closing doors during use, which can all help to improve the return on walk-in fridges.
Let MTCSS Help With Your Walk-In Fridge
Every walk-in fridge project starts with a site survey, where we measure the space, check access, power and ventilation, and talk through what you store and how the room will be used, before we send you a quote. Once the room is built, we commission it, show your team how to run and look after it, and hand over the F-gas details for the refrigeration system, and our cold room maintenance team can keep it running from there. You can see how this has worked for florists, bakeries and pharmaceutical businesses in our case studies, and you can request a quote or call us on 01886 833381.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Your walk-in fridge must maintain a temperature range between +0 and +8°C for it to be classified as a fridge. If its temperature doesn’t fall within these parameters, you’re moving towards frozen or ambient temperatures, which could cause product spoilage.
The exact temperature of your walk-in fridge will depend on your specifications and product requirements. For example, you may want to store fresh poultry at +3°C or pharmaceuticals at +6°C. No matter your requirements, a cold room fridge from MTCSS can be built to meet your needs.
Generally speaking, you can maintain your walk-in chiller by:
- Ensuring that the temperature range remains correct
- Checking that all elements are fully functioning and replacing faulty parts as soon as issues occur
- Cleaning your walk-in fridge or freezer rooms regularly
This ongoing maintenance will improve the efficiency and overall safety of your cold room – but if you don’t have an in-house team to help you, you could invest in regular cold room maintenance services from MTCSS.
If you aren’t sure, our team can also generate a cold room condition report to help you identify where in your walk-in fridge could benefit from cold room maintenance – so you can make an informed decision.
Essentially, you can have a walk-in fridge installed wherever suits you best. However, there are a few anomalies.
While the majority of walk-in cold rooms are installed inside, if the most ideal place for your walk-in fridge is outside, then we can add an external weatherproof roof and use different cold room panels to make this possible.
Likewise, if you require your cold room to be installed on a second floor instead of the ground floor, we’ll factor in a specialist cold room floor type, regardless of whether it’s a walk-in chiller, freezer, or ambient area.
MTCSS can adhere to most size and shape requirements for cold rooms, depending on what you’re looking for. If you require a walk-in fridge that isn’t a typical square or rectangle, MTCSS can design a bespoke walk-in chiller or fridge for you to suit your design!
The size parameters for a walk-in fridge can span from 2m by 2m all the way up to 20m and beyond – whatever you need to keep your goods stored safely.
You should note, however, that if you require a large walk-in fridge, you may require ceiling suspension to support this, which will incur an additional cost.
Yes! A walk-in fridge combined with a walk-in freezer can be achieved through a dual (or multi) compartment room! A dual-compartment room is one cold room unit that is divided into two (or more) compartments by partition walls made from insulated cold room panels.
A dual-compartment room is one cold room unit that is divided into two (or more) compartments with partition walls made from insulated cold room panels, allowing for various temperature ranges within each compartment.
Allowing you to have a walk-in fridge on one side and a walk-in freezer on the other!
Most commercial walk-in fridges run on fluorinated (F-gas) refrigerants, although some smaller integral units now use natural refrigerants such as R290. We choose refrigerants in line with UK F-gas regulations, which are steadily phasing down the gases with the highest environmental impact, and we give you the F-gas details for every system we install at handover. Depending on the size of the refrigerant charge, your system may legally need regular leak checks, and any work on the refrigeration circuit has to be carried out by an F-gas certified engineer, which our maintenance service covers.
A modular walk-in fridge is usually assembled in a day or two, because the panels lock together without any cutting or sealing on site. A bespoke room takes longer, and most of that time goes on manufacturing the panels and refrigeration rather than work on your premises. Tight access, upper-floor installs or work fitted around your opening hours can add time, and we set out the programme when we quote.
It can happen, usually when the door is closed or locked from outside while someone is still in the room, and even at fridge temperatures, a long wait in the cold is dangerous. A walk-in fridge door should have an internal safety release so it can always be opened from inside, and an entrapment alarm gives anyone inside a lit push button that triggers an audible and visual alarm outside, with battery backup in case the power fails. Our article on what happens if you’re locked in a walk-in freezer explains what to do if it does happen.
Case Studies
Bespoke Chiller Cold Room for Flower Storage
Walk-In Chiller Cold Room at Q Flowers Ltd When it comes to chiller cold rooms, most people associate them with...
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Chiller & Freezer Cold Rooms with Ambient Room
Cold Rooms at Forge Bakehouse Forge Bakehouse first opened its doors in 2012 as a micro-bakery, when Martha Brown wanted...
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Chiller Cold Room & Ambient Room for Pharmaceutical Storage
Dual Compartment Temperature-Controlled Rooms for Pharmaceuticals Pharmaceutical products must be stored at specific temperatures to protect their integrity. Therefore, choosing...
Read MoreFrom coming into contact with MTCSS to the finished product, has been a great and easy process.
The members of the team listened to our wishes and offered us exactly what we needed. From picking the type of cooler machines, the doors, the lights – everything was exactly adjusted to our wishes.
Even though through the COVID period where availability of materials were challenging, the cold room was finished on the date as was planned when signing for the order.
Very professional company from start to finish.