Commercial Chiller Service & Repair
Diagnostics, teardown and overhaul on centrifugal, screw, scroll and absorption machines — including the ones nobody else will touch.
A chiller failure in a hospital or a research building is not a comfort problem — it is an operating-room schedule, a vivarium, a stability chamber or a cleanroom classification at risk. Cooper Mechanical services centrifugal, rotary screw, scroll and absorption machines across San Diego County, from 40-ton packaged units on a commercial rooftop to 1,500-ton water-cooled centrifugals in a central utility plant.
Our technicians work on the equipment they were trained on: York, Trane, Carrier, Daikin/McQuay and Multistack, plus the older machines that manufacturers have quietly stopped supporting. That means real diagnostics — oil analysis, refrigerant analysis, vibration readings, approach temperatures, motor megger and winding resistance, VFD logs and control board history — before anyone quotes a compressor.
When a repair is warranted we do it properly: eddy current tube testing, tube cleaning or retubing, compressor and gear teardown, motor replacement, purge unit rebuilds, refrigerant recovery and recharge to EPA 608, and a documented run test at load with logged data you can hand to your engineer. When a machine is genuinely at the end of its life, we tell you that too, with a replacement budget rather than another year of parts.
Scope & capabilities
- Emergency diagnostics and repair, 24/7, on centrifugal, screw, scroll and absorption chillers
- Eddy current tube testing, mechanical tube cleaning, tube plugging and full retubing
- Purge unit, oil pump, oil cooler and lube system rebuilds
- Annual and quarterly plant inspections with logged performance and efficiency trending
- Compressor, gear set, motor and starter replacement including hermetic and open-drive machines
- Refrigerant management: recovery, reclaim, leak repair, low-pressure conversions, EPA 608 records
- Control panel repair, sensor calibration, VFD troubleshooting and unit controller replacement
- Rental chiller coordination, temporary piping and load-shed planning during a repair outage
The technical envelope
- Capacity range
- 20 – 2,000+ tons
- Machine types
- Centrifugal, screw, scroll, absorption, magnetic bearing
- Refrigerants
- R-123, R-134a, R-513A, R-410A, R-514A, R-717 support
- Response
- 24/7 live dispatch — priority window for PM customers
- Documentation
- Logged startup data, EPA 608 records, O&M turnover
Facility types
Chiller Service & Repair — straight answers
- How fast can you respond to a chiller down in a hospital?
- Emergency calls reach a live CMI dispatcher, not an answering service. Customers under a preventive maintenance agreement get a guaranteed priority response window; for critical healthcare loads we also help stand up temporary cooling while the permanent repair is engineered.
- Do you work on chillers other contractors say are obsolete?
- Frequently. Older York and Carrier centrifugals, absorption machines and discontinued control platforms are a large share of our work. We source rebuilt and aftermarket components, rebuild oil and purge systems, and can retrofit modern controls onto a sound machine instead of forcing a replacement.
- Can you do eddy current testing and retubing on site?
- Yes. We coordinate eddy current inspection, evaluate the report with you, and perform tube cleaning, plugging or a full retube in place — including the rigging and refrigerant handling that goes with it.
Get a number you can budget against
We walk the plant before we price it. You get equipment condition, options, phasing and a schedule — not a guess with a contingency wrapped around it.