How often should a store unit be serviced?
A unit running ten or more hours a day, seven days a week, is a different servicing case to one in an office that runs business hours. Industry practice for commercial units in long trading hours is a full service roughly twice a year, and more often for units in kitchens, dusty back of house areas, or near the coast where salt attacks the outdoor coil.
| Task | Typical frequency |
|---|---|
| Filters | Every four to six weeks in heavy use |
| Full service: coils, drains, refrigerant, electrical, controls | About every six months |
| Condition and age review | At every service, recorded against the unit |
These are general ranges, not a rule for every site. The right interval for a particular unit comes from its own service history.
What should a commercial service actually check?
- Filters cleaned or replaced
- Indoor and outdoor coils cleaned and inspected
- Condensate drains and trays cleared and tested for flow
- Refrigerant pressures and signs of a leak
- Electrical connections, fans and motors
- Controls, thermostats and time schedules
In a store the drain line deserves more attention than it gets. Indoor units often sit above the sales floor or stockroom, and a blocked condensate drain shows up as water on stock or a wet floor under a ceiling tile.
Rooftop and packaged units add a second question: whether the roof access is safe for the technician. If anchors or walkways are missing, that has to be fixed before the service schedule can be kept.
Who can work on the refrigerant side?
In Australia, work on the refrigerant circuit of air conditioning or refrigeration equipment requires a refrigerant handling licence issued by the Australian Refrigeration Council under the ARCtick scheme. A licence can be checked on the scheme's public licence search. Some states also require the business to hold its own contractor licence.
When is a unit not worth repairing?
The service record answers this better than the fault in front of you. A unit with a clean history and one failure is usually worth fixing. A unit with a growing list of call outs, parts that are getting harder to find, or an older refrigerant such as R22, which Australia is phasing out under the Montreal Protocol, is heading for replacement.
Across a fleet, ranking every unit by condition and repair history turns replacement into a staged plan instead of emergency purchases in a heatwave.
Is there an industry schedule to work from?
Yes. AIRAH, the industry body, publishes DA19, a maintenance guideline whose schedules give three levels for each task: A for best practice, B for good practice and C for compliance. Every program has to include the compliance tasks, then picks level A or B on top.
DA19 treats the two kinds of store plant differently. Packaged units and ducted split systems are to be maintained in accordance with AS/NZS 3666.2 and AS/NZS 5149.4. For non ducted split systems in commercial use, DA19 notes that those two standards do not apply and points to the manufacturer's instructions.
That is why this guide gives its intervals as practice, not as a rule. The right schedule depends on which kind of unit is on the roof or the wall, and on the level the contract buys.
Which refrigerant licence covers a store unit?
The Australian Refrigeration Council issues two licences for split systems, and they are not interchangeable. A restricted splits licence covers installing and decommissioning a single head split system of less than 18 kW cooling capacity.
Its holder is not permitted to work on a split system over 18 kW, to install a multi head system, or to carry out any service, repair or maintenance that involves handling refrigerant. That work needs the full refrigeration and air conditioning licence.
Store plant is often multi head or larger than 18 kW, and maintenance is the work a restricted licence excludes. So the question for a maintenance contractor is which licence the technician holds, not whether they hold one.
Running air conditioning maintenance across many stores
- A register per store: unit type, age, location, refrigerant and condition
- One written checklist and interval per unit type
- Licensed technicians for refrigerant work
- Breakdowns logged from report to close out, against the same register
- Replacement ranked by condition and cost, staged to the capital cycle
That is how Nextage runs commercial air conditioning maintenance for retail fleets. It does not cover central plant that a shopping centre landlord maintains, or cooling tower water treatment.
