Why koolmax

Your Systems Are Either On a Planned Preventive Maintenance or On a Countdown

The businesses that call us after a serious breakdown almost always say the same thing about their maintenance history. Someone came out when it broke. That is reactive maintenance, and it is the most expensive way to run commercial refrigeration and air conditioning. Emergency rates, urgency premiums on parts, lost stock, lost trading time, most of it never shows up on the repair invoice.

CIPFA recommends a 70:30 split of planned to reactive maintenance spend as recognised good practice across UK commercial operations. Most businesses with no structured programme have that ratio entirely inverted.

A Koolmax PPM contract changes that dynamic completely. A team on a fixed schedule, a defined programme across both systems, a written service report, and an updated F-Gas logbook after every visit. Faults resolved when they are still small problems, before they become the kind of failure that costs you money you should never have had to spend, and puts your reputation at risk.

We have been doing this for 14 years, and that is what a properly structured PPM programme actually delivers.

Who are our PPM Services Built For?

Every building type has different demands. We size, install and maintain systems built for yours.

Restaurants and Commercial Kitchen Operations

A restaurant kitchen pushes refrigeration harder than almost any other commercial environment. High ambient temperatures, constant door cycles, heavy stock rotation every service, and a zero margin for temperature failure during a busy weekend. A PPM programme for a kitchen operation accounts for those conditions specifically. The visit frequency, the scope of the checks, and the timing of the work relative to your service schedule are all built around how your kitchen actually runs, not a generic template applied to every customer.

Offices, Commercial Properties, and Managed Estates

The case for AC PPM in a managed commercial building is partly about comfort and partly about money. An air conditioning system that is running below its designed efficiency because nobody has cleaned the coils or calibrated the controls in 18 months is costing whoever pays the energy bill every single day. For building managers and property owners responsible for occupied premises, a PPM contract is also the mechanism that keeps you ahead of TM44, the legal requirement for air conditioning inspections on systems above 12kW combined cooling capacity. Those inspections happen every five years. What they find depends entirely on how well the system has been maintained in the years between them.

Hotels, Hospitality Groups, and Licensed Premises

Hospitality businesses carry refrigeration and air conditioning across multiple departments simultaneously, each with different operating requirements and different failure consequences. Cellar cooling and back-bar refrigeration have different demands from kitchen cold storage. Guest-facing air conditioning has different maintenance needs from plant room equipment. Managing each with a different contractor, or with no structured maintenance programme at all, means the full picture of your building sits with nobody. A Koolmax PPM contract covers both systems, across your entire site, under one agreement and one visit schedule.

Pharmacies and Healthcare Settings

Pharmaceutical refrigeration that logs a temperature excursion is not just a maintenance issue. It is a stock write-off and a patient safety record that has to be documented and explained. A PPM programme for pharmaceutical and medical storage environments is built to a different standard of precision and documentation than standard commercial refrigeration maintenance. The written records produced after every Koolmax visit are designed to satisfy a CQC audit or medicines storage inspection, not just confirm that someone attended the site.

Multi-Site Operators and National Portfolios

If you are managing refrigeration and air conditioning across more than one location and handling the maintenance separately at each site, you are doing what many facilities managers describe as a second job. One PPM agreement with Koolmax covers every site, standardises the maintenance schedule across the portfolio, and gives you a single account contact and a single service history for every piece of equipment across every location. When something needs attention at any site, one call handles it. That is a different operational reality from what most multi-site operators are currently managing.

Our services

Koolmax PPM Services

Air Conditioning PPM

Our AC PPM programme covers filter inspection and replacement, evaporator and condenser coil cleaning, refrigerant pressure checks with F-Gas compliant leak testing and logbook update, thermostat and controls calibration, condensate drainage clearance, fan and belt condition assessment, and a written service report after every visit. The visit frequency is set by the size and usage intensity of your system, and the F-Gas check schedule is built around the legal requirements for your refrigerant charge weight, not a schedule we apply uniformly to every customer. If your air conditioning system needs installation, repair, or full replacement before a maintenance programme makes sense, that conversation starts in a different place.

Commercial Refrigeration PPM

Our refrigeration PPM programme covers condenser and evaporator coil cleaning, door seal condition assessment and replacement where required, temperature verification and defrost cycle testing, refrigerant pressure readings with F-Gas compliant leak checks and logbook update, compressor and electrical component inspection, drainage checks, and full written service reports with temperature logs that go directly into your food safety documentation. For food retail and hospitality operations, the scheduling is built around your trading hours from the outset. If you are still at the stage of sourcing, specifying, or replacing equipment, our refrigeration installation and supply service covers that end of the process.

The Three Things a PPM Contract Is Actually Protecting

Your Legal Position

The F-Gas Regulations place the compliance obligation on the operator, not the contractor. That is the business in control of the equipment, which is you. UK law requires leak checks on refrigeration and air conditioning systems on a schedule determined by the CO₂ equivalent weight of the refrigerant charge. Between 5 and 50 tonnes CO₂ equivalent, that is annually. Between 50 and 500 tonnes, every six months. Above 500 tonnes, every three months. If those checks are not happening on that schedule, the liability sits with your business, and the Environment Agency fine for non-compliance can reach £200,000.

A Koolmax PPM contract is built around that schedule. We track your F-Gas obligations, carry out the legally required checks at the correct intervals, and update your F-Gas logbook after every visit. For commercial air conditioning above 12kW combined cooling capacity, TM44 requires a formal energy inspection every five years. That inspection assesses not just whether the system is working but whether it has been maintained properly. What the assessor finds when they arrive depends almost entirely on what has been happening in the years before they do. Your PPM record is your evidence.

Your Budget Predictability

Reactive maintenance is unpredictable by definition. The repair call arrives when it arrives, at whatever rate the situation demands, for whatever the part costs on the day it is needed urgently. A PPM contract converts that unpredictability into a fixed cost you can plan for. You know what the visits cost, you know when they happen, and the minor faults caught and resolved during routine visits never become the emergency invoices that arrive without warning. For finance teams and building managers who need to forecast maintenance expenditure, that predictability has a value that sits completely separately from the operational protection the programme provides.

The Relationship That Matters When Something Does Go Wrong

Even a well-run PPM programme does not eliminate every fault. Equipment fails sometimes, and when it does, the question is what happens next. With Koolmax, what happens next is that the engineer who attends already knows your systems. They have the service history. They know what was found at the last visit, what was replaced, and what was flagged for monitoring. That context means diagnosis is faster, the right part is more likely to be on the van, and the job gets resolved on the first visit rather than the second. The PPM contract is not just a maintenance schedule. It is the foundation of a working relationship that makes every other interaction with Koolmax more efficient.

Not Sure Which Service You Need?

That is exactly what the first call is for. Tell us what your building is, what you are experiencing, and what you are trying to achieve, and we will point you straight to the right service. No pressure, no upsell, just a straight answer so you can make the right decision.

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Frequently Asked Questions

We have both refrigeration and air conditioning. Do you cover both under one contract?

Yes, and for most businesses with both systems on site, a combined PPM agreement is the more practical arrangement. One visit schedule, one service report covering both systems, one team that understands how the two interact, and one account contact for anything that comes up between visits. Most contractors specialise in one or the other, which means you end up managing two separate maintenance relationships, two separate compliance trails, and two different people showing up at different times. We cover both because that is the sensible way to look after a building where both are running.

How do you decide how often to visit?

The visit frequency is determined by three things: the legal requirements for your refrigerant charge weight under F-Gas regulations, the manufacturer's recommended service intervals for your specific equipment, and how intensively the systems are used in your operating environment. A walk-in cold room running 24 hours a day in a busy restaurant kitchen has different maintenance demands from an office AC system running eight hours a day, five days a week. We set the programme around what your equipment actually needs, not a standard schedule applied to every customer the same way. When we carry out the site survey before the contract is agreed, that conversation is one of the first things we settle.

What does the documentation look like after each visit?

After every PPM visit, you receive a written service report covering the work carried out, the condition of each component checked, any issues identified and how they were resolved, and the results of any F-Gas leak checks. For refrigeration systems, you also receive temperature logs formatted for food safety documentation. Your F-Gas logbook is updated at every visit where refrigerant work or leak testing is carried out. All records are retained and available if the Environment Agency, an EHO, a CQC inspector, or a TM44 assessor requests them. The paperwork is not an afterthought; it is part of what our visit delivers.

Our systems are from multiple manufacturers. How are you going to manage that?

Our engineers work across all major commercial refrigeration and air conditioning manufacturers and hold the F-Gas certification required for UK refrigerant work, regardless of brand. The only time the manufacturer matters is parts availability, and because we stock vans specifically for the equipment types most common across our customer base, the parts needed to resolve most faults found during a PPM visit are already with the engineer. Where a specialist component is required, you get a specific timeline and a temporary resolution where the situation allows, not an open-ended wait for a part to arrive from a distributor.

What is the difference between a PPM visit and a standard service call?

A standard service call is reactive. Something has gone wrong; you call, and someone attends to fix it. A PPM visit is structured, scheduled, and scoped in advance. The engineer arrives knowing what systems are on site, what the service history shows, and what the programme requires at that visit. The work is carried out systematically, documented formally, and built into a compliance record that grows with each visit. A service call closes a fault. A PPM visit protects the system from the next one. They are not substitutes for each other, and a PPM contract does not replace emergency cover; it reduces how often you need it.