HOLLYWOOD — The heat wave ended on the twenty-fourth of July. Duane Cobb’s schedule has not yet received the news.
Mr. Cobb, who has repaired commercial refrigeration out of a shop off Cahuenga for twenty-six years, worked the wave itself the way everyone in his trade did — thirty-one emergency calls in one weekend, against a normal weekend’s six, triaged by whether the product inside was already at risk. That part is over. What is not over is everything the wave did quietly.
“A heat wave kills some machines on the spot,” he said last week, standing over a compressor the size of a mailbox that had come out of a Franklin Avenue diner that morning. “Those you hear about. What it mostly does is take a machine that had two years left and leave it with two weeks. Nobody knows that happened until August. I am now in August.”
His calendar is booked to the third week of September. The two other refrigeration contractors who principally serve the neighborhood report the same, or worse: one has stopped taking new customers entirely until the backlog clears, keeping his hours for the restaurants he already services. All three describe the same pattern — the emergency calls have fallen back to normal, and been replaced by a long queue of machines that survived July and would now like to discuss it.
The trade has a term for these, or at least Mr. Cobb does. He calls them July casualties. A walk-in cooler is rated to hold temperature at a certain ambient heat; during the four days over 100, every compressor in every service corridor in Hollywood ran flat out, around the clock, doing the work of a machine half its age. The ones that were already marginal wore through whatever margin remained.
The diner compressor on his bench belonged to the Copper Kettle, whose walk-in dates, by the owner’s best accounting, to a renovation in the nineties. It held through the wave. It failed on the second of August, on a mild Sunday, at four in the morning.
“Of course it did,” said Marlene Kessler, the Kettle’s third-generation owner. “It got through the war and died on the way home.” She spent that Sunday moving product two doors down — the Franklin Avenue operators have kept the group text they started mid-heat-wave, and a neighbor’s walk-in had room — and is now eleven days into a quoted fourteen for the part. The diner is running on two rented reach-in units in the meantime, which fit the eggs and the dairy and not much else, and the menu has been quietly shorter since.
The part is its own story. Compressors and condenser fan motors in the common commercial sizes have been on allocation from regional suppliers since late July, because every service company in the basin is ordering the same units at once. Mr. Cobb says lead times that ran three days in June are running two to three weeks, and that he has begun buying ahead on the sizes he knows his regulars run — an inventory position he has avoided for twenty-six years on principle.
“I am a repairman with a warehouse now,” he said. “A small warehouse. It’s a shelf. But I never wanted the shelf.”
What has changed on the other side of the counter is more interesting than the backlog. All three contractors report the same novelty: restaurants booking preventive maintenance. Mr. Cobb, who says he has spent two decades failing to sell anyone a $180 annual service visit, has booked forty-one of them since the first of August. The arithmetic did the selling — the operators who lost product in July have receipts to compare, and the ones who didn’t have heard about the ones who did.
The insurance conversation has gone the other way. Spoilage coverage, which almost no small operator in the neighborhood carries, got a fresh round of quotes after July, and, at the premiums offered, a fresh round of declinations. Two owners described the decision in nearly identical terms: the annual premium was more than the July loss.
Mr. Cobb has one piece of advice he is giving away free this month, to anyone who calls, whether he can fit them in or not: find out where your machine’s condenser is, and put a thermometer near it.
“Every restaurant knows the temperature of its dining room,” he said. “Not one in ten knows the temperature of the closet where the machine lives. The machine knows. The machine has always known.”