Using a Refrigerated Van as a full time fridge for my business?

[newguy]

Firstly I'm sure these are not the type of posts you are used to here. I am not an Engineer and know nothing about fridges. I am struggling to find any help on the internet for my question so I thought asking here was worth a shot.

I run a butchers company and we are in the process of downsizing, this includes getting rid of our very large chilling room. I am wondering if Refrigerated Vans are designed to be run continually or are they strictly for transporting goods from place to place? Basically I need to know whether I can store all my goods in a refrigerated van and plug it in over night, or whether I should be building a much smaller chilling room that would run continually and just use the van to deliver the goods.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Rob White]

.

A lot of people run the continuously, but I imagine
it does depend on the setup and type of fridge unit.

There are some specialist mobile and transport fridgies
on here and they will be able to confirm one way or the other,
but I would imagine that it would be ok given Tesco's, Morrison's
and Asda's vans run 24 hours (I think).

Regards

Rob

.

[newguy]

.

A lot of people run the continuously, but I imagine
it does depend on the setup and type of fridge unit.

There are some specialist mobile and transport fridgies
on here and they will be able to confirm one way or the other,
but I would imagine that it would be ok given Tesco's, Morrison's
and Asda's vans run 24 hours (I think).

Regards

Rob

.

If it matters this is the type of refrigerated van I was referring to.

[charlie patt]

Don't bother even the better makes ain't as reliable as commercial to much to go wrong that fridge in picture has no stby by the way build a small cold room and van if required the commercial kit is cheaper to run far more reliable and cheaper to fix plus the commercial kit is better built I would not put all ur eggs in one basket ta charlie

[Tayters]

On the good side the van is a Toyota Hiace, should plod on for years. :-)

[cadwaladr]

You could use a box of an old vehicle and put commercial equipment onto it quite cheaply,some have doors that commercial rooms have transport units have too many things to go wrong belts noise fan motors etc.

[IRMechanik]

The downside of using a truck is the insulation is no where near as good as a proper freezer and a reefer is designed to maintain temperature of your product not to change it. So depending on the size of the unit and the temperature of the product you're putting in it may struggle to keep temperature.

I'm not saying it won't work but it is not an ideal solution.

[chemi-cool]

The downside of using a truck is the insulation is no where near as good as a proper freezer and a reefer is designed to maintain temperature of your product not to change it. So depending on the size of the unit and the temperature of the product you're putting in it may struggle to keep temperature.

I'm not saying it won't work but it is not an ideal solution.

Very true. I don't see why not to use a small, well insulated box like cadwaladr has suggested.

[Simontaylor]

Firstly I'm sure these are not the type of posts you are used to here. I am not an Engineer and know nothing about fridges. I am struggling to find any help on the internet for my question so I thought asking here was worth a shot.

I run a butchers company and we are in the process of downsizing, this includes getting rid of our very large chilling room. I am wondering if Refrigerated Vans are designed to be run continually or are they strictly for transporting goods from place to place? Basically I need to know whether I can store all my goods in a refrigerated van and plug it in over night, or whether I should be building a much smaller chilling room that would run continually and just use the van to deliver the goods.

Any help would be appreciated.

Hi, in my honest first thought I would maybe go for having a smaller cold store and a stand by setup for your van for 2 reasons. The first being that the van and any transport fridge is designed to hold the temp and not to pull the load down, also the long running could result in a frosted evap and threshold of the box due to air ingress... Could cause damage to the product as cooling would be lost if the Evap went untreated, The 2nd reason is that I would like to know I have a backup fridge to transship to incase anything happened to either fridge. ( eggs in one basket in all that)

Have you thought about removing the fridge from your cold room and maybe mounting that on an old box body, haha for the other fridges here I fitted a vector 1880 unit to a cut out on a concrete cold room yesterday for crabs and lobsters..

[charlie patt]

To give a idea we rent a load of fridge vans and trailers as well as all the fridge and ac work ....if u send new kit out on transport it will break down a lot more as commercial we run 51 fridge vans and over twenty trailers on rental in 2015 we had one trailer fridge breakdown on transport it was several more standard commercial has your normal parts on top of this on transport on a average transport system u will have extra belts,rectifiers,voltage dropper, rubber pipes resets then the extra clutch idler and the cost of it transport bits usually more expensive than commercial then u have the fact very few have chargers so u end up with flat batteries on van and no fridge as no 12 volt also they use a lot more electric compare a 351 gah drawing eight amps on a sprinter to cold room same size five amps tops unless u have a cheap van on Hubbard or gah I would Defo stick to commercial kit....I can't knock transport spend most of me life on it but costings is a no brainier just need more staff to cope ta charlie

[ozzie35]

What you try to it is possible as we have few customer already run units however van on the picture not the choice.