Case Study: An Overnight Retrofit for a Suzhou Crayfish Restaurant
Project background
Home for Dinner is a popular crayfish restaurant chain in Suzhou. As summer arrived, its kitchen faced the same double pressure every high-volume seafood kitchen faces: enormous peak-hour output, and the radiant heat rolling off a bank of woks and boiling pots.
The two constraints
- Staff health. The kitchen ran hot year-round. Cooks reported heat rash through the summer months, which affected both comfort and the mood on the line.
- No downtime allowed. As a busy chain store, the restaurant could not close for installation. Whatever we did had to happen outside trading hours.
Solution: one night, one complete system
To have the restaurant open as normal the next morning, the Cooyard installation crew worked through the night:
- Full delivery overnight. Positioning, bracket fabrication and duct installation were completed in a single night shift.
- Layout matched to the room. 20 m of insulated ducting, feeding eight adjustable stainless-steel jet nozzles, each aimed at a specific cooking station.
- Equipment. A Cooyard KQ-85A commercial kitchen air conditioner, developed and built in-house.
Commissioning and results
- First start, no adjustments needed. The system came up cleanly on the first run.
- Measured temperature difference. Supply air at the nozzle measured roughly 15 °C below ambient.
- On the line. Cooks noticed the change immediately — the first summer they had worked in a cool kitchen. Ticket times and morale both improved.
KQ-85A at a glance
| Item | Specification |
|---|---|
| Model | KQ-85A (large 3 HP) |
| Cooling capacity | 8,500 W |
| Air outlets in this project | 8 adjustable jet nozzles |
| Supply air vs ambient | approx. 15 °C lower at the outlet |
| Typical rooms | 6-9 staff kitchens, barbecue and crayfish houses, chain restaurants, factory hot-work stations |
Full specifications are on the KQ-85A product page.
Why this kind of retrofit works in older restaurants
Older and extended buildings often have nowhere to put an outdoor condenser, or the run to a remote condenser is simply too long. A ducted, nozzle-based layout sidesteps that constraint entirely, and the flexible routing means the equipment can be fitted around an existing ceiling and service run rather than requiring the kitchen to be rebuilt.
Facing the same deadline? Talk to us — night and phased installation is standard practice for us, so a working restaurant can be cooled without closing.
