About a week ago, I stopped in at a Local restaurant for dinner. The food was great. The dining room? Hot.
I had looked at this space about two years earlier and recommended adding a 3-ton mini split to help cool the dining area. The owners decided not to move forward at the time and later called a much larger HVAC company for another opinion.
That company recommended replacing the existing 6-ton rooftop package unit. The replacement was completed, but the dining room was still hovering around 85°F.
When comfort starts costing reservations
An 85° dining room quickly becomes a business problem.
The owner told me people were calling to ask whether the AC had been fixed yet. When they heard the restaurant was still struggling with the heat, some of them canceled their reservations.
That is a tough spot to be in. The kitchen is working, the staff is ready, and the tables are set. But customers still do not want to stay because the room is too hot.
Building a clean path for the new system and mounting the indoor unit high on the dining-room wall.
Adding cooling where it was needed
We came back to the idea from two years ago and installed a 36,000 BTU mini-split system to handle roughly half of the dining room.
This is a big mini split, and it was exactly what this part of the building needed. It now runs alongside the existing rooftop package units, adding targeted cooling directly to the dining area. The existing package-unit airflow also helps mix and distribute that cooler air through the space.
Restaurants are especially tough to cool in the desert. The doors open constantly, the dining room fills with people, the lighting adds heat, and the kitchen is always working against you. This job needed more cooling in the part of the room that was falling behind.
The completed outdoor condenser adds 36,000 BTU of targeted cooling for the dining area.
The first-night report
The owners used the new system for the first full night and reported that the dining room stayed around 76–77°F.
First-night result: About 76–77°F inside while it was 112°F outside, with restaurant doors opening throughout the evening.
For a busy restaurant, that is a pretty great first result. The dining room finally felt like a place where customers could relax, enjoy dinner, and keep their reservation.
We will keep checking in as the system gets more run time, but after years of fighting an overheated dining room, this Local restaurant is finally feeling a whole lot cooler.