In a word: panic. But we prepared for this. Here's the full story:
A couple weeks ago (a week before we were set to leave on vacation) we discovered our walk-in cooler had gone down. Obviously, the walk-in cooler is a critical piece of infrastructure on a produce farm and even more so during a July heatwave. We discovered on a Monday that the cooler hadn't cooled back down to its normal holding temperature after our Saturday market.
Our cooler has sensors and a notification system but because it's normal for the cooler temperature to rise as we are unloading the extra produce from the farmers market back into the cooler we disregarded the notification as normal and continued on with our weekend. We assumed everything would cool back down as it usually does. We're usually in and out of the cooler a couple times a day even on weekends as we grab things for our own kitchen but for whatever reason that weekend we hadn't.
Once we discovered the cooler was down we went into troubleshoot mode. We first determined that the problem was with the air conditioning unit instead of the controller itself. We have a backup air conditioner on hand for this very problem but when we fired it up we noticed a horrible racking noise from the fan. Luckily, both my dad and my uncle were visiting that day and we were able to MacGyver a way to fix the fan noise. We then also discovered that the radiator fins on the exhaust side of the cooler was completely caked with dust, grime, dirt and bugs and likely the cause of the problem overall. After disassembling the cooler and cleaning the exhaust radiator fins out with our pressure washer we fired the air conditioner back up and everything was working as it should.
Luckily, the downtime happened after a busy Saturday Farmers Market so the overall vegetable inventory lost was very, very small. We also were prepared with the backup air conditioner but we unexpectedly ran into the racking fan issue. As a further backup, we have an older, smaller walk-in cooler in our quonset storage building that we used for one season while our current vegetable facility was being built. We haven't used it in years but we decided as another layer of security that we'd clean it up and get it up and running just in case we have a problem in the future.
I'm glad we had the tools, talent, and people on hand and available to get our cooler back up and running in little time with minimal loss of produce.
