Refrigeration Solutions: What’s the Big Chill?

Finding the Right System for Your Cold Storage Facility

ARTICLE SOURCE: Sam Hausler, Preconstruction Manager

Atlanta, GA – August 15, 2025 —From vaccine storage to frozen food logistics, “cold” environments are mission-critical across industries. Designing them well isn’t just important, it’s essential. But the challenge goes beyond keeping it cold. Today’s refrigeration systems must balance regulatory compliance, sustainability goals, carbon reduction mandates, energy efficiency, and long-term operational costs.

When considering these systems, selecting the right partner is key. Evans General Contractors helps you navigate the complex considerations related to refrigerant strategies, system types and site strategies to engineer long-term success.

Ground Rules: The Foundation of Cold Room Design

Before selecting a refrigeration system, you must first ask three key questions:

The answers to these questions provide the foundation for the refrigeration design and help narrow down the appropriate types of refrigeration systems. Some projects, particularly those involving coolers or freezers connected to processing facilities, include an additional step not typically found in standard distribution facilities: chilling or freezing the product. While it is true that there’s an almost infinite list of questions one could ask to fully define a client’s cold storage needs, starting with these key questions will quickly establish the basic parameters.

Once the product, temperature, and volume requirements are considered, you can then move forward to evaluating the type of refrigerant system that fits your exact needs. Refrigeration systems can range from simple, turnkey off-the-shelf units to complex, industrial-scale centralized systems that are far from effortless to implement.

Specifically, industrial cold storage projects lean toward natural refrigerants due to environmental regulations and performance characteristics:

• Ammonia (NH₃ / R-717): High efficiency, low GWP, but subject to PSM (Process Safety Management) regulations.
  
• Carbon Dioxide (CO₂ / R-744): Excellent for low-temperature applications, viewed as a safe alternative to ammonia, often used in cascade systems, many versatile applications, relatively new to the Cold Storage market.
  
• Freon / Synthetic Refrigerants (R-22 and others): Still used in Modular/Packaged units, increasingly less common due to environmental restrictions, still seen in older systems.
  
• Cascade Systems (NH₃/CO₂): A hybrid solution that combines efficiency with improved safety by separating high-and low-stage refrigerants.

Packaged/Modular Refrigeration: Efficiency Meets Simplicity

Modular, factory-built refrigeration units are transforming cold storage. These rooftop or adjacent plug-and-play systems consolidate mechanical, electrical, and control components into a single, self-contained structure. What once required a large noisy engine room, hundreds if not thousands of feet of piping and a full-time mechanic, now is condensed into one modular unit able to be set on the roof—streamlining construction and commissioning.

Benefits of self-contained system:

• Off-site fabrication allows for rapid delivery and parallel construction timelines
• Plug-and-play design reduces on-site labor and startup time
• Easy maintenance and serviceability over the system’s lifecycle
• Operational continuity during upgrades or replacements

Evans has worked extensively with Alta Refrigeration’s EXPERT system—a self-contained, air-cooled cascade solution that avoids water treatment, condenser replacement, and PSM/RMP requirements. It also offers flexible temperature setpoints for multi-purpose use.

Best For:

• Facilities with tight schedules
• Retrofit or expansion projects
• Low-to-mid capacity cold storage (typically <10,000 tons)

Traditional Central Refrigeration: The Backbone of Large-Scale Facilities

For large refrigeration loads in operations such as distribution hubs or food processing or bottling plants, an industrial central ammonia system provides unmatched reliability and efficiency at scale. Often branching out from a dedicated engine room, these systems deliver powerful performance and ease of serviceability through consolidated operations.

Best-fit scenarios for traditional systems:

• Facilities > 10,000 tons of refrigeration
• High-density storage campuses
• Facilities prioritizing long-term serviceability

Key Advantages:

• Proven and familiar design methodology
• Efficient operation at large scale
• Strategic equipment layout for optimized servicing

Custom Refrigeration Systems: Tailored Solutions for Demanding Environments

From high-volume protein production to precision pharmaceutical packaging, some operations demand more than an off-the-shelf solution. In many cases, the more complex the process within a facility, the more creative the solution to refrigeration needs to be. Not every client needs the power of a central ammonia system, but many require more than a standard packaged unit, this is where custom refrigeration solutions come in. Our experience in the food and pharmaceutical industries, combined with the expertise of our trusted trade partners, enables us to deliver cost-effective solutions tailored to any facility or client need.

At the end of the day, custom solutions offer adaptability and precision that packaged or traditional systems can’t match—ensuring optimal performance, compliance, and efficiency.

Key Advantages:

• Precision temperature and humidity control – Maintain exact environmental conditions critical to product integrity and safety.
• Adaptability to unique building constraints – Custom configurations fit seamlessly into challenging or space-limited facilities.
• Optimized total cost of ownership (TCO) through targeted design – Purpose-built systems reduce long-term energy, maintenance, and operational costs.
• Regulatory Compliance by Design – Engineered to meet stringent industry standards such as FDA, USDA, cGMP, and more.

Specialized Use Cases:

Cold rooms in hazardous environments – Engineered for ATEX zones or volatile material handling areas with safety-first designs.t our client’s expansion is both smooth and cost-effective. Committed to delivering solutions that mitigate cross-border challenges, manage logistics, and maximize efficiency, we provide businesses with the confidence and guidance they need to succeed.

High-volume protein blast freezing – Rapid freezing systems designed to preserve product quality and throughput efficiency.

Mixed-use food and pharma facilities – Custom zoning and controls ensure safe segregation and storage of diverse products.

Cooling with Confidence

In summary, refrigeration isn’t just equipment, it’s the heartbeat of any cold storage facility. Whether you’re storing fresh produce, chicken patties, biologics, or vaccines, performance matters. A misaligned refrigeration strategy can lead to enormous energy costs, downtime, compliance issues, or product loss.

At Evans, we serve as a strategic partner, bringing industry knowledge to every cold storage challenge. Our role is to partner with clients, guiding them through system selection and design, scalability, budgeting, timelines, and regulatory and safety compliance, while ensuring each solution is precisely engineered to meet their performance, sustainability, and growth goals.

From packaged rooftop units to fully customized state-of-the-art refrigeration systems, we help design and deliver the best solution for your facility, on time and under budget.