We supply and install pallet racking inside cold rooms, chillers and freezers. The uprights, beams and connectors are the same families we install in ambient warehouses. What changes is the finish, the floor the frames stand on, the airflow around them and how the room is worked.
The same racking, in a room that is far harder on it.
Anyone who has bought selective racking will recognise every part of a cold store system. The difference is the room: the environment the steel has to survive, the floor it stands on, and how long anyone can work in there at a stretch. Those three things account for the difference in design, programme and price, and they catch people out in roughly that order.
We supply and install the racking inside the room. Our project archive covers F&B cold-chain among other sectors, and drive-in racking is common for cold-chain and bulk FMCG, where one product is held in quantity.
Operators say "cold room" for both. For racking, they behave very differently.
A chiller is wet. It runs above freezing, and every time the door opens, warm humid air comes in and condenses on the cold steel, where it stays. Corrosion is the main risk, and it starts at cut edges, welds, connector holes and anywhere a pallet has chipped the finish.
A freezer is dry once it is down to temperature, because the water freezes out of the air instead of settling on the steel. The concerns there are frost build-up, what the slab is doing underneath, and the fact that steel and people both behave differently in that cold.
Designing a freezer as if it were a colder chiller, or the other way round, is the most common way to get cold room racking wrong.
None of these should be a site improvisation. Each one is settled in the design, before the first frame goes in.
Standard powder coat is made for a dry, ambient warehouse. In a chiller the practical choices are a more durable protective finish or galvanised components, depending on the temperature, the humidity, whether it is a food environment and how the room is cleaned. It is the one choice you cannot revisit: beam levels can move in an afternoon, but an installed frame cannot be re-finished. The bottom metre of every upright matters most, since it sits in whatever is on the floor and is also where forklifts hit.
Freezer floors are built up with insulation, and often with a heating arrangement under the slab that stops the ground freezing and heaving. So the first thing we ask for on a cold storage enquiry is the drawings, before the layout: what the slab is, what is in it and what it is allowed to carry. Drilling blind puts the floor, the frost protection and the warranty on both at risk.
Where anchoring is constrained, the design works with it: a different base arrangement, spreading the load, or a frame configuration that needs fewer fixing points. Floor flatness matters too, because a tall frame magnifies whatever the floor is doing at its base.
A cold room cools by moving air. A solid block of racking and pallets can leave dead zones several degrees off the rest of the room, which matters wherever a documented cold chain is required. Gaps behind back-to-back runs, clearance under the bottom beam and a clear path for the evaporator's air are working space, not wasted space. Mesh decking is generally better than solid boards: air passes through it, it does not hold water, and it is easier to keep clean.
Drive-in racking gives the highest density per square metre of any pallet racking type, and it is common for cold-chain and bulk same-SKU storage. It runs last-in-first-out, with slower access to individual pallets. In a cold room the densest layout is not automatically the best one, so density is weighed against the airflow clearances.
Nobody installs steel at freezer temperature for a full shift. Crews rotate, breaks are frequent, and less gets done per hour than in an ambient warehouse. A room that has to keep running is done section by section; a room that can be brought up to temperature needs its defrost, dry-out and pull-down time in the programme from the start, not discovered at the end.
Inspection needs a routine. Racking in a cold store still needs regular inspection, and it is harder there: frost hides impact damage, the light is usually poor and nobody lingers. That makes a defined inspection routine more important than in an ambient warehouse, not less. Rack inspection covers what we check.
The doorway takes the hits. The first bays inside a cold room door take a disproportionate share of the damage: poor visibility through strip curtains, forklifts turning in a tight space, and drivers hurrying to keep the cold in. Column guards and end-of-run protection at the entry bays are worth more there than anywhere else in the building.
Sprinklers are settled with the layout. Sprinkler arrangements in cold storage differ from an ambient warehouse, and clearances, flue spaces and where the runs sit all interact with them. If the building has an approved arrangement, the racking layout has to respect it, and that is agreed while the layout is drawn, not after installation.
Our published range for ordinary selective racking is S$380 to S$1,200 per bay, depending on height, beam length and class: indicative, confirmed after a site survey. Cold storage is quoted only once we have the answers above, because the finish, the fixing arrangement and the installation conditions move the figure far more than the steel does.
The longer version is in the journal: cold room and chiller racking, what actually changes. For food stores, see racking in a food warehouse.
Tell us the temperature, the room's dimensions, whether you have the slab drawing and whether the room has to keep running. We will tell you what needs establishing before a layout is worth drawing.
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