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Air conditioning for a restaurant or café
Treat the kitchen and the dining room as two separate problems. The kitchen needs extraction rather than cooling; the dining room needs cooling sized for people, food heat and a door that never stops. Trying to air-condition a kitchen instead of extracting from it is the classic and expensive mistake.
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Extract the kitchen, cool the dining room
A commercial kitchen generates far more heat than any split unit will remove, and an AC in that environment clogs with grease within weeks. The answer is extraction sized to the cooking line, plus make-up air. Cooling belongs on the other side of the wall, and the wall itself matters — an open pass-through pours kitchen heat into the dining room continuously.
People are a real heat load
A full dining room of covers is a substantial load in its own right, and unlike an office it arrives all at once at peak service and disappears afterwards. Sizing to an empty room means the unit is behind from the moment the room fills, which is exactly the hour it needed to be ahead.
Grease is why filters matter more here
Even in the dining room, airborne cooking oil reaches the indoor coil and binds dust to it far faster than in any other premises. A restaurant unit needs cleaning more often than the twice-yearly schedule that suits an office, and skipping it shows up as poor cooling within one season rather than three.
Noise, because people are talking
A unit cycling loudly over a table is a complaint even when the temperature is right. Inverter units settle to a low steady hum instead of slamming on and off, which in a dining room is worth as much as the running-cost saving — and outdoor unit placement away from any outdoor seating matters for the same reason.
How do you cool a restaurant with a hot kitchen?
Can I put an AC in the kitchen?
You can, and it will underperform and foul quickly. Kitchen heat is better removed by extraction than fought with cooling, and the grease in that air coats the indoor coil until airflow collapses. Where staff comfort is the concern, a spot-cooling approach and good make-up air do more than a split unit will.
How often should a restaurant service its AC?
More often than the usual twice a year — airborne cooking oil binds dust to the coil far faster than ordinary household dust does. Many kitchens and dining rooms need quarterly attention on the indoor coil. The honest guide is the coil itself: if it looks tacky rather than dusty, the interval is too long.
Does the dining room need more capacity than a shop of the same size?
Usually yes. It has the same door problem, plus a concentrated occupancy load at service time, plus heat arriving from the kitchen. All three peak together at exactly the hours you cannot afford to be uncomfortable, which is why restaurant sizing is one of the cases where a proper survey earns its time.
Rather have it done?
AC installation is a sizing decision followed by a plumbing job: tonnage matched to the room, indoor and outdoor units sited for airflow, pipe run kept short and lagged, and the system vacuumed properly before gas is released. Fitting starts at PKR 8,000, and supply-and-fit for a 1.5 ton inverter unit starts near PKR 140,000.
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