24/7 Emergency Refrigeration Repair
Refrigeration down? Armus Refrigeration offers same-day emergency dispatch across New Bedford, Southeastern MA & Rhode Island.
Symptoms We Fix
Tap any symptom for the causes and how we fix it. We don’t just treat the symptom — we find the root cause.
Not cooling / won’t hold temp
Likely cause: Failed compressor · refrigerant leak · bad thermostat · dirty condenser
What we do: We diagnose to the root cause, leak-test the sealed system, replace the failed part with OEM, and verify pulldown to setpoint.
See causes & fixes →Ice / frost buildup
Likely cause: Poor airflow · failed evaporator fan · faulty defrost cycle
What we do: We test the defrost circuit and fans, restore airflow, and replace the failed defrost component.
See causes & fixes →Water pooling / leaking
Likely cause: Clogged condensate drain · evaporator issue
What we do: We clear and flush the drain line and service the evaporator before it becomes a slip hazard.
See causes & fixes →Strange noises
Likely cause: Failing fan motor · compressor or bearing wear
What we do: We locate the noisy motor or fan and repair it early — before it escalates to a full breakdown.
See causes & fixes →High energy bills
Likely cause: Worn door gaskets · dirty condenser coils · worn parts
What we do: We replace seals, realign doors, and clean condenser coils to restore efficiency and cut running cost.
See causes & fixes →Temperature swings
Likely cause: Sensor out of calibration · control board failure
What we do: We recalibrate or replace the sensor and repair the control board to protect your product.
See causes & fixes →Short-cycling
Likely cause: Worn components · wiring fault · control issue
What we do: We diagnose to the root cause and repair with OEM parts to stop the on/off and reduce wear.
See causes & fixes →
When it can’t wait, we move.
A dead cooler or freezer is product on the clock. We prioritize emergency calls to protect your inventory and your bottom line.
Frequently asked questions
How fast can you respond to a refrigeration emergency?
Is my product still safe while I wait?
Do you offer after-hours and weekend service?
What’s the fastest way to reach you?
Where We Work
Every highlighted town is one we service — hover to see it, click to open its page. All of Southeastern Massachusetts & Rhode Island.
53 towns served
19 towns served
Areas We Serve
Commercial refrigeration service across Southeastern MA & Rhode Island
South Coast18 towns▸
- Acushnet, MA
- Berkley, MA
- Dartmouth, MA
- Fairhaven, MA
- Fall River, MA
- Freetown, MA
- Lakeville, MA
- Marion, MA
- Mattapoisett, MA
- Middleborough, MA
- New Bedford, MA
- Rehoboth, MA
- Rochester, MA
- Seekonk, MA
- Somerset, MA
- Swansea, MA
- Wareham, MA
- Westport, MA
South Shore10 towns▸
- Bridgewater, MA
- Brockton, MA
- Carver, MA
- Cohasset, MA
- Hingham, MA
- Mansfield, MA
- Norton, MA
- Plymouth, MA
- Raynham, MA
- Taunton, MA
Cape Cod & Islands11 towns▸
- Barnstable, MA
- Bourne, MA
- Brewster, MA
- Chatham, MA
- Dennis, MA
- Falmouth, MA
- Hyannis, MA
- Mashpee, MA
- Provincetown, MA
- Sandwich, MA
- Yarmouth, MA
Greater Boston11 towns▸
- Boston, MA
- Brookline, MA
- Cambridge, MA
- Chelsea, MA
- Everett, MA
- Malden, MA
- Medford, MA
- Quincy, MA
- Revere, MA
- Salem, MA
- Somerville, MA
Central & Western MA3 towns▸
Rhode Island19 towns▸
- Bristol, RI
- Coventry, RI
- Cranston, RI
- Cumberland, RI
- East Providence, RI
- Johnston, RI
- Lincoln, RI
- Little Compton, RI
- Middletown, RI
- Newport, RI
- North Kingstown, RI
- North Providence, RI
- Pawtucket, RI
- Providence, RI
- Smithfield, RI
- Tiverton, RI
- Warwick, RI
- Westerly, RI
- Woonsocket, RI
Brands We Service
We repair and maintain every major commercial refrigeration & ice brand.
What Happens When You Call Us With a Refrigeration Emergency
The first two minutes of your call decide how fast your equipment gets saved. Tell us three things: what the unit is (walk-in cooler, walk-in freezer, reach-in, or ice machine), what it is doing right now (current box temperature, any alarms, any visible ice or water), and whether the box is loaded with product. From that we triage on the spot — a walk-in freezer at 20°F loaded with inventory is dispatched ahead of an empty prep cooler drifting a few degrees, and we tell you honestly which one you are.
While the truck is on the way, a few simple moves protect your product and often shorten the repair. Keep the doors closed — a loaded walk-in holds safe temperature for hours if it stays shut. Clear anything stacked against the evaporator fans inside the box so air can move. If you see ice building on the evaporator coil, do not chip at it; that is diagnostic evidence, and a punctured coil turns a service call into a replacement. If the unit is short-cycling or the breaker has tripped more than once, leave it off — repeated restarts against a failing compressor do real damage.
Our emergency coverage runs across southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island from our New Bedford shop, with priority response through New Bedford, Fall River, Dartmouth, and the surrounding towns, and scheduled same-day windows for the South Shore, Cape Cod, and Providence metro. Every emergency visit starts with a written diagnostic finding — what failed, why it failed, and the repair price — before any repair work begins, so the decision to proceed is always yours and always on paper.
Why Refrigeration Fails at Night — and What It Costs by Morning
Most catastrophic refrigeration failures are discovered at opening, not at closing, because night is when the odds stack against a weak unit: ambient kitchen heat is gone, defrost cycles run unwatched, and a compressor that limps through a staffed shift gets eight uninterrupted hours to fail quietly. A loaded walk-in freezer that dies at 10 PM can ride out several sealed hours on its own thermal mass — but by the breakfast rush it is drifting through the danger zone, which is why the overnight discovery is so often a product-loss event instead of a service call.
This is the argument for treating the small daytime symptoms as urgent: a unit that trips a breaker once, frost creeping past the evaporator onto the ceiling, or a box running two degrees warm at close are all failures that have already started. Called in during business hours, each is a scheduled repair. Ignored at close, each is a candidate for the 6 AM phone call every owner dreads. When in doubt at closing time, call — describing the symptom costs nothing, and we will tell you honestly whether it can wait until morning.
The First 30 Minutes: What To Do Before the Truck Arrives
The half hour between discovering a failure and a technician arriving is where most of the recoverable product is either saved or lost, and almost none of it depends on refrigeration knowledge. Stop opening the door. A closed walk-in that has lost cooling holds temperature far longer than most operators assume; a box being opened every few minutes to check on it warms dramatically faster. Check the temperature through the existing thermometer or a probe at the door rather than walking product in and out. See how to fix a commercial refrigerator that’s not cooling before the truck arrives.
Write down the time and the temperature. Not for us — for you. If this becomes a product-loss claim, an insurer or a health inspector will want to know when the failure started and what temperature the box actually reached, and reconstructing that from memory a week later is where claims fall apart. A photo of the thermometer with a timestamp costs nothing and is the single most useful thing anyone on site can do in the first five minutes.
Move the highest-value product first, not the nearest. If you have a second box with capacity, prioritize by what is both expensive and temperature-sensitive. Raw protein and dairy outrank almost everything; sealed and shelf-stable items can wait. If you have no second box and the failure is a freezer, product packed tightly together holds far better than product spread across open shelving — consolidating is genuinely useful, and takes two minutes.
Do not attempt a fix that involves the refrigerant side. Clearing a drain, replacing a blown fuse, resetting a tripped breaker once, or pulling obvious debris off a condenser are all fair game and occasionally solve it. Repeatedly resetting a breaker that keeps tripping, adding refrigerant, or running a system that is short-cycling loudly are how a repairable failure becomes a compressor replacement. If the breaker trips twice, leave it off.
Have three things ready when you call 508-521-9477: what equipment it is and roughly how old, what it is doing now versus what it was doing yesterday, and whether it is still running or completely dead. Those three answers determine which parts ride out on the truck, and they are the difference between a same-visit repair and a return trip. We run 24/7, our techs are EPA-certified, and the common failure parts are already on board — the information is what routes them correctly.
Emergency Repair by Equipment: Walk-In Coolers, Freezers, Ice Machines and Rack Systems
How urgent a failure is depends on the equipment, because each type loses product at a different speed. A walk-in cooler holding dairy, produce and prepped food has the least margin: it runs only a few degrees below the 41°F limit, so an hour or two without cooling during service can put it over. Emergency walk-in cooler repair usually comes down to a failed fan motor, a burned contactor, an iced coil or a condenser that can no longer reject heat. A walk-in freezer has more thermal mass and further to climb, but the product in it is worth more and cannot be refrozen once it thaws, which makes a warming freezer just as urgent a call. The walk-in freezer repair page covers the defrost, door and drain failures behind most of them.
Reach-in and undercounter freezers on a cooking line fail faster than walk-ins because they hold less product and open more often. If a reach-in or a display freezer is soft at the door shelves, move the product into the walk-in before anything else; the cabinet can be repaired after the food is safe. Our commercial freezer repair page explains the failures behind these calls, and the reach-in freezer repair page covers the problems specific to cabinets.
An ice machine that stops is an operations emergency more than a product-loss one, and bagged ice in a clean bin will carry most kitchens and bars through a shift. Supermarkets and cold storage are the opposite case: one rack or one large condensing unit serves many cases or rooms, so a single fault spreads fast. For those systems see supermarket refrigeration repair and industrial refrigeration repair, which also spells out the systems we do not service.
Recent emergency calls
What an emergency call actually looks like, from jobs our technicians completed recently, with customer details removed.
- Boston, MA: walk-in cooler sitting at 70°F. Condenser and evaporator were running but the system had lost its refrigerant. We leak-checked and recharged it.
- Walpole, MA: retail store freezer temperatures climbing. Technician on site the same day. Both freezer doors had been propped open; we corrected it and verified recovery.
- Cumberland, RI: walk-in cooler frozen solid, frost back to the condenser. Controlled defrost, full operational evaluation, back in service.
- Fall River, MA: open-air cooler found overheated with the compressor shut down. We let the compressor cool, found the condenser coil and evaporator trays heavily soiled, cleaned them, and restarted the unit.
When product is at risk, the first job is to keep it cold: bypass, temporary fixes, and a straight answer on whether the unit can be saved today.
Frequently Asked Questions
How fast can you respond to a refrigeration emergency?
Armus Refrigeration runs same-day and 24/7 emergency dispatch across New Bedford, Southeastern MA, and Rhode Island — nights, weekends, and holidays included. Call 508-521-9477 and we’ll route the nearest technician and walk you through protecting product in the meantime.
Is my product still safe while I wait?
Cold food is generally safe for about four hours above 40°F, but that clock starts the moment the box drifts up. Keep doors shut, move the most perishable items to a working unit, and note when temps climbed — we’ll prioritize the call.
Do you offer after-hours and weekend service?
Yes — 24/7 emergency dispatch including nights and weekends across MA & RI.
What’s the fastest way to reach you?
Call 508-521-9477 — it’s the quickest way to get an emergency call routed.
Should I turn the unit off while I wait for the technician?
It depends on what the unit is doing. If the compressor is short-cycling, tripping the breaker, or making a loud knocking or grinding noise, turn it off and leave it off, because every restart does damage. If the evaporator coil is a block of ice, switch off cooling but leave the evaporator fans running if your controls allow it, which starts the thaw. If the system is running quietly and simply not keeping up, leave it on: some cooling is better than none while product is moved. In every case keep the door closed.
Do you take emergency calls for ice machines, or only walk-ins and freezers?
Yes, we take them. An ice machine is not a product-loss emergency the way a freezer is, but a bar, a seafood display or a healthcare kitchen cannot run without ice. Tell us whether the machine is dead, running without making ice, or leaking, and whether water is reaching it. In the meantime bagged ice in a clean bin covers most operations for a shift. If a walk-in and an ice machine are down at the same time, the box holding product comes first.
What will the technician need from us on arrival?
Access and information. Clear a path to the unit and to the condensing unit, which may be on the roof, in the basement or behind the building, and have someone on site who can unlock doors and the electrical panel. Know where the breaker for the equipment is. Have the temperature log, or the times and readings you wrote down, and tell us what was done before we arrived: breakers reset, thermostat changed, ice removed. Knowing what was already tried saves diagnostic time.
Do you handle emergency repairs for supermarkets, cold storage and industrial freezers?
Yes, for systems that run on HFC and HFO refrigerants: supermarket racks and display case lineups, cold storage rooms, blast freezers and process coolers. On these systems one fault can warm many cases or rooms at once, so tell us on the call how many are affected and whether the rack or condensing unit is in alarm. We do not service anhydrous ammonia plants, which require their own certification and safety program, and we will say so on the first call instead of sending a truck that cannot help.
Related reading: the restaurant owner’s walk-in freezer and cooler survival guide.