What Kind Of Fridge Do You Need For Flowers?

When you are setting up your flower shop business from home or a commercial floristry shop and would like to keep your main product lasting a lot longer, you need to get a flower fridge for your business, this will allow for your flowers to stay fresh and vibrant for a long time. Here are the top 10 points from us being experts in the refrigeration industry.

1. What Should the Temperature Be on a Flower Fridge?

The most important part in storing flowers is its ability to hold and maintain a stable temperature for these delicate products. The perfect temperature we found is around 6°C to 10°C and for our Fahrenheit friends, this would be 42.8°F to 50°F.

Make sure your floral display fridge does have an adjustable temperature controller so you can adjust the temperature warmer or colder as needed. Again, every customer we have always has a different factor to account for. Hotter areas of the country like Queensland or Perth, Australia, Unlike your cooler areas like Victoria or Tasmania.

2. What Should the Humidity Levels be in a Flower Fridge?

You'll have specially designed fridges for flowers that will have built in higher humidity levels, the levels you'll want to be looking for is around 80% to 95%. This will prevent flowers from drying out and staying fresher for a longer period of time.

In our research we found the Crusader range of flower display fridges have a special humidity control and fan speed controls fitted to these cabinets to allow for higher humidity levels to be reached.

Proper humidity levels are essential for preserving flower freshness. Aim for a fridge that allows humidity adjustments or maintains a humidity level around 90%. This prevents flowers from drying out or wilting prematurely.

3. How Long Do Flowers Last In a Florist Cooler Fridge?

We have found that flowers can normally last up to a good week in your fridge if they are stored correctly. This will come back to the 2 points above if you follow these rules.

4. Check the Size and Capacity You'll Need.

It's ideal to consider how much space you'll need for storing and displaying your flower range. A larger fridge will allow for more storage and organisation of different flower varieties but you also don't want to go overboard and waste all your space.

We have seen it all, brand new home business going all in on a NovaChill SM2000GFF 3 door flower fridge, the largest you can get on the market but also customers going with a Crusader CCE605Flower due to its single glass door compact design.

We find it's better to go larger than you'll need incase you have a bigger order for a wedding event, this way, you dont ever need to worry about finding that extra space. It's cheaper to get a larger capacity fridge then it is to buy two or three smaller units.

5. Check They Have Adjustable Shelving.

You'll find pretty much all fridges on the market have adjustable shelving in 2024. This will allow you to fit in your beautiful floral display so much easier, from a compact display to a much larger display for an event you might have come in.

Adjustable shelving super simple to do, removing clips from the bracket and popping it back in and moving the shelf around as needed. Our range comes with 5 rows of display as standard and super easy to take out as you go.

6. How Energy Efficiency Can Flower Fridges Be?

Your modern commercial fridge is so much more energy efficient in 2024 then it was a few years ago or even in the 90’s. Technology has changed so much in the refrigeration industry and power costs are one of the huge factors in every business today.

Try to look for a fridge that is running on the brand new refrigeration gas R290 (Propane), in other terms for us Australians, this is LPG (Liquefied petroleum gas), crazy hey. This is so much more environmentally friendly over the old refrigeration gases back in the day.

Use the cart below of your approx. running costs on our range of flower fridges

* Our power costs have been taken from Finder.com.au report on What is the average (kWh) cost of electricity in Australia?

7. Common Refrigeration Parts Used On Your Flower Cooler.

Have you ever wondered where do your refrigeration parts come from? You'll find some manufacturers make their own parts, others will use cheap chinese parts and some will use well known brands in the industry. Let me break this down for you more below.

• The bigger brands in the industry.

You'll find these guys manufacture their own parts, so if you have a breakdown after the warranty period, your refrigeration tech will need to purchase the part from them as they are the exclusive owner of this part and you can guess what happens there, they set it at super high prices. Could be buying a fan motor for $400 plus when a standard fan in the industry is a cost of $50 or so and every technician should have one of these in his service van or refrigeration parts supplier would have it.

• The cheaper brands in the industry.

Do you wonder how the cheaper brands become cheaper in the first place, you'll find they are cheap because they use cheap, no brand chinese parts. Sounds good for your pocket in dollar savings but could cost you so much more in the long run and hours of mindless headaches and downtime.

They use cheap undersized compressors, as this is the heart of the refrigeration system. You need to make sure this is a 100% good brand compressor in your system. I have seen it time and time again where a customer will purchase a cheap fridge and a technician comes to fix it and is unable to get parts due to no supplier in Australia having parts as they are no name brand.

8. Can You Use a Regular Refrigerator for Flowers?

This is a great question we get asked a lot and the short answer is really, no you can't use a regular commercial fridge to store flowers. While you can for a short term it's not ideal at all. It really is the best for a long-term solution to invest in a floral refrigerator as these have been designed specifically for flowers.

All comes back to the humility levels and temperatures from our earlier points above. Your regular fridge will dry out and damage your dedicate fresh flowers.

9. When Should Maintenance Be Done To Your Floral Cooler?

Maintenance of commercial refrigeration is very important and overlooked so much from a business point of view, it plays a super important role in keeping your business running. We always recommend a customer as a fully qualified refrigeration technician check your fridges at least once every 12 months.

From a business owner's perspective for maintenance with them, you should always check your condenser once every month and clean this from dust and dirt. This will not only save you money in power bills but will maintain the life of your fridge in the long run.

How to clean your condenser you should always check your manual on the brand of fridge you have purchased to view how to do this. As every commercial fridge will be different for maintenance.

10. The Life Span Of Your Commercial Fridge?

You'll find the lifespan of a commercial refrigerators is different to every model, every brand and every environment they are in and how they are used. We find the average life expectancy of a commercial fridge is around 10 to 15 years.

Conclusion

We hope the above information has helped you understand some points when picking out a flower fridge for your business. You are more than welcome to always contact us if you ever need a hand or more information.

Just need to make sure when choosing the right fridge for storing flowers is essential for maintaining freshness and extending their life.