Underbar refrigeration

Holds the cold ingredients a barista reaches for on every ticket inside the working envelope, so nobody leaves the station during service.

A compressor raises the pressure of a refrigerant, a condenser rejects that heat to the surrounding air, and an evaporator inside the cabinet absorbs heat from the air circulating over the stock. Nothing in that cycle is special to a bar — the duty is. An underbar cabinet is opened more often per hour than any other refrigerated box in the building, and every opening trades cold dry cabinet air for warm humid room air the evaporator then has to reprocess. So the two things that actually decide whether the cold chain holds are not the compressor rating on the plate: they are how much air is lost per access, and whether the condenser can breathe in the position the joinery puts it in. The limits the cold chain is being held to are set by the site's own food-safety standard, not by this platform — see the temperature and time reference.

• Start from the walk count, not the litre count. The entire purpose of underbar cold is to remove trips away from the station during service. If a barista still has to go to the back for milk in the middle of a rush, the unit is the wrong size or in the wrong place — and no amount of capacity on the spec sheet fixes that.
• Size on the worst hour and on restock rhythm. Decide how many times per service you are prepared to restock from the reach-in, then hold at least that much between trips. For most bars the binding item is milk, and everything else combined is a rounding error against it.
• Match the door format to what actually lives inside. Drawers for the items touched every ticket, hinged doors for bulk and for anything tall. Mixing both formats along one run is normal and usually correct; the mistake is picking one format for the whole bar because it looked tidier on the drawing.
• Decide the condenser's air path BEFORE the joinery is drawn. Front-breathing units can be enclosed, others need clear air at the side or the back, and the cabinet must also be removable through the opening it sits in. Joinery is built once; refrigeration is replaced several times over the life of that joinery.
• In a hot venue, treat every self-contained unit as a heater installed inside the bar. It adds to the room's cooling load, it warms the air the barista is standing in, and it then works harder because it is drawing that warmed air across its own condenser. Where the bar is small, enclosed and busy, remote condensing stops being a luxury.
• Specify readable temperature indication, and logging or an alarm where the value of the prepped dairy justifies it. The limits themselves come from the site's own food-safety standard — this platform does not set them — but you cannot hold a team to a limit they cannot see, and a cabinet whose display is behind a door is a cabinet nobody checks.
• Buy serviceability. Gaskets are consumables and doors get dropped. Ask how a gasket is changed, whether shelves and rails come out for cleaning without tools, and whether the unit is on castors so it can be pulled forward. A cabinet that must be uninstalled to be cleaned behind is a cabinet that never gets cleaned behind.
• Solid doors unless the customer is genuinely meant to be looking. Glass under a bar top loses more heat, shows a shelf of cartons and earns nothing.
• Confirm the supply and the outlet position with a licensed electrician before the bar is built. A refrigeration cabinet set into fitted joinery cannot be shifted later to reach a socket, and the local authority governs what the supply has to be.