A cold storage warehouse is the cold room on a large scale and as a whole: a facility with insulated wall, ceiling and floor panels, cold room doors, a refrigeration system (evaporators, condensing units or a central system), racking or pallet layout, a loading dock and control and monitoring equipment. In commercial warehouses several rooms run at different temperatures: a 0 °C fruit and vegetable room, a −20 °C frozen room, a −35 °C blast freezer, a +10 °C banana ripening room, and so on.
Planning goes in this order: what will be stored and how much (the food storage conditions guide for the product’s temperature and humidity requirement), daily intake and entry temperature, number and size of rooms, panel thickness (80–100 mm for 0 °C, 120–150 mm for −20 °C, 150–200 mm for −35 °C), door type and traffic, floor insulation and heating (against ground frost under frozen rooms), heat load and cooling capacity calculation, equipment selection.
The items that determine the cost are panel area, refrigeration system capacity and type, number of doors, floor works and automation; a "price per square metre" gives only a rough first idea, because for the same area a −20 °C warehouse is noticeably more expensive than a 0 °C one. In Sonkar cold storage warehouse projects the panels, doors, evaporators and condensing units are supplied turnkey from our own production; the cooling load calculator is the first step for a preliminary capacity.