Restaurant & Commercial Kitchen HVAC

Restaurant HVAC work is different from residential because the kitchen and the dining room fight each other. Exhaust hoods pull large volumes of air out of the building. If make-up air does not replace it, the kitchen goes negative, doors become hard to open, pilot lights blow out, and the dining room pulls cooking smells forward instead of sending them up the flue.

That imbalance is the first thing we measure. We check hood capture at the cooking line, confirm the make-up air unit is actually running and tempered, and look at whether the dining-room system is being asked to compensate for a ventilation problem it cannot solve. A dining room that is never comfortable is often a make-up air fault, not an undersized air conditioner.

Kitchen refrigeration sits in the hottest room in the building, which shortens the life of everything in it. Walk-in condensers mounted in a hot ceiling space, reach-ins pushed tight against a range, and prep tables under a salamander all run at the edge of their design envelope. We check ambient temperature around each condenser, not just the box temperature, because a unit holding temperature today in an 95-degree kitchen is the one that fails on the hottest service of the year.

Grease is the other constant. It coats condenser coils, blocks exhaust fans, loads make-up air filters and eventually reaches the roof. A coil with a grease film cannot reject heat, so the compressor runs longer and hotter. Cleaning schedules for a kitchen are not the same as an office, and we set them against how the line actually cooks rather than a generic interval.

Service timing matters as much as the repair. We schedule non-urgent work around service hours, and for urgent failures we work out what keeps you open: moving product to a working box, running a temporary line, or getting one side of a split system back before dinner while the permanent parts are on order.

Our independent, EPA-certified technicians are experienced with Mitsubishi Electric, Daikin, and Carrier premium systems, the brands most commonly found in NYC's premium residential market. We also carry the controls and contactors that fail most often on commercial rooftop units, so a common failure does not become a two-day outage.