It's too hot :(

Bedroom still a roasting 28c, same as last nights sweat fest, so looks like another great sleep ahead, last 4 days here, seriously God give us a cold day
 
When I left work - about 3/4 of the chillers were stocked. I put two rollers of delivery out (should have been done at 4-6am of non dairy milk/smoothies and cooked meats. Freezers - a fifth full.

Customers came in their droves today expecting everything to be fine. They have no idea that chillers and freezers take longer to get to the desired temperature compared to their fridges and freezers at home. No point in putting contents into chillers/freezers before this as wasting time
 
Stu999 said:
@cheesefest - why do the chillers stop working, do you know? I wouldn’t have thought the outside temperature would matter as much since most stores are air conditioned?
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From what one of my friends who worked at Tesco for around 20 years said, probably poor maintenance/putting off repairs/upgrades because they're "coping" (barely) in normal weather, then when the heat hits the extra work kills them.
IIRC supermarket coolers/freezers tend to work from "common" large scale heat exchangers similar to building AC as it's far more economical than having each unit running from it's own, and can mean you say have a spare in the circuit so that if you suffer a failure it can fall over to that (think raid 5 vs raid 0 or 1) without losing the contents of the coolers.. The problem is it's costly to maintain them, especially preventative work so if the store manager is trying to be "efficient" and "save overheads" he/she may decide to risk putting it off, especially if doing the work requires shutting down a section of the freezers.

Even if the store is airconditioned, the heat exchangers for the chillers are usually a large unit outside of the cooled store (why would you pump the heat from them into the store), so still have to cope with the outside temperature which if that's ~5-10c more than usual means it's going to have to work harder to dump the heat, and if your unit is already near the maximum output *under normal conditions it's going to start to fail.

My friend was telling me a while back about how his store ended up with several freezer trailers parked up blocking a large part of the warehouse/loading parking area for months because his management had put off doing work on the aging chillers for the warehouse, and when they failed they were stuck waiting for the parts to be available (I got the impression the failure required a lot more work to put right, than what would have been needed to prevent it, as is usually the way).
I suspect the use of the freezer trailers probably cost the store a small fortune.

*Due either to lack or maintainance, or you've increased the number of "cooled" units and eaten up the exccess capacity that might have been built into the system to allow for really hot days.
 
Stu999 said:
@cheesefest - why do the chillers stop working, do you know? I wouldn’t have thought the outside temperature would matter as much since most stores are air conditioned?
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I don’t know exactly the reason why. One theory that every time the doors to entrances, exits and in my store’s case, lifts open, a little bit of hot air comes in.

Someone said to me 99% of the equipment in British supermarkets can’t cope with external temperatures above 35c.

We seriously need the same chillers and freezers that mainland south Europe has. Been to Seville early Sept with temps on average 38c. A supermarket was located a few doors down from the hotel - where I bought water etc from. Their chillers and freezers worked fine!

Seeing empty chillers and freezers is imo very embarrassing.
 
Werewolf said:
Even if the store is airconditioned, the heat exchangers for the chillers are usually a large unit outside of the cooled store (why would you pump the heat from them into the store), so still have to cope with the outside temperature which if that's ~5-10c more than usual means it's going to have to work harder to dump the heat, and if your unit is already near the maximum output *under normal conditions it's going to start to fail.
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This.
Werewolf said:
The problem is it's costly to maintain them, especially preventative work so if the store manager is trying to be "efficient" and "save overheads" he/she may decide to risk putting it off, especially if doing the work requires shutting down a section of the freezers.
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I think this sort of decision is usually made by someone in head office with a budget to stick to. I think the problem is, they don't see the extra work it creates in a store when they break down, which tbh happens a lot even in cold weather if they are old chillers.
 
Problem with replacing chillers in supermarkets is that they need the power off. Meaning everything in chillers and freezers needs to be removed and the store needs to close! Supermarkets are scared of losing customers for good if they have to close for 2 days whilst the chillers and freezers swapped round.

It’s like supermarkets don’t close during refits. My store had a partial one. Installation of new kiosk, changes to shelving in produce, bakery etc plus new flooring and painting throughout. Got an asthma attack from the dust from sawn MDF and solvents used.

My colleagues were disgusted by this. If the store closes fully, they would have done all the work in a week - not in 3.5 weeks. Profit over safety.

If supermarkets maintain their chillers properly, then they would get more money from sales of food which was sitting in warehouse chillers. Then a in a couple of days, there will be loads of reduced food due to dates.
 
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