Cooling a shop, café or small office in Europe
Contents (7)
A small business owner shopping for air conditioning starts from the wrong reference point, and it costs money in both directions. The mental model comes from home: a wall unit, a price seen in an advertisement, a Sunday afternoon of installation. A shop, a café or a ten-desk office is a different thermal problem with a different legal wrapper. The heat does not mostly come through the walls — it comes from people, lighting, equipment and an open front door — and above a certain size the consumer rules that protect a domestic buyer simply stop applying.
The load comes from inside
In a dwelling, cooling load is dominated by fabric and solar gain, with a couple of occupants as rounding error. In commercial premises the occupants and their equipment often dominate, they are present exactly during trading hours, and they are the part that gets forgotten. Indicative figures for an initial sanity check, not a substitute for a calculation:
| Source of heat | Indicative sensible gain |
|---|---|
| Seated office worker | 70–90 W each, plus a comparable amount of latent heat as moisture |
| Customer standing or moving in a shop | around 100 W and upwards |
| Modern LED lighting | roughly 5–10 W/m² of floor area |
| Older halogen or accent retail display lighting | 20–40 W/m², occasionally far more in a jeweller or a boutique |
| Workstation with monitors | 100–200 W per desk in practice, well below nameplate ratings |
| Espresso machine, hot counter, oven | hundreds of watts to several kW, largely continuous through service |
| Self-contained refrigerated display cabinet | rejects essentially its whole electrical input into the room it stands in |
| Unshaded glazed shopfront | several hundred watts per m² of glass at peak |
Aggregated, these produce whole-space design loads that sit well above residential figures. As indicative bands: a cellular office with moderate glazing tends to land around 60–90 W/m²; a densely occupied open-plan office 90–130 W/m²; a retail unit with a glazed front 100–160 W/m²; a café with a hot drinks counter starts higher still and genuinely needs calculating rather than estimating. A communications or server cupboard is a separate problem entirely — it is sized on the equipment’s kilowatts, needs cooling in January as well as July, and should never be lumped in with the comfort system.
Two consequences follow. Commercial premises are the one setting where undersizing is the common error rather than oversizing, because the domestic rule of thumb of roughly 100 W/m² is a floor here, not a target. And the load is spiky: a café at 8 a.m. and the same café at 1 p.m. are different buildings, which puts a premium on equipment that modulates deeply instead of switching on and off.
The open door, and the rule that closed it
Retailers open the door because footfall responds to it. Thermally it is a losing position: an open shopfront on a hot afternoon means the system is cooling a share of the street, and no amount of capacity wins that argument. Air curtains help, and a well-specified one genuinely reduces the exchange, but they mitigate rather than solve.
The regulatory direction has hardened. France has, since October 2022, prohibited premises open to the public from running heating or cooling with the doors open, backed by fines, and similar municipal measures have appeared elsewhere in Europe as energy-saving packages. Practically, the sequence that works is a closed door with a clearly visible entrance, a properly sized air curtain if the door must stay open at peak times, and shading or solar-control film on the glazing — because a shopfront is usually the largest single gain in the room.
Which architecture fits which premises
The choice is genuinely different from the domestic one, and it is driven by how the space is divided and who occupies it.
- Single wall or floor-standing split — a small shop or a one-room office. Cheapest, and often the right answer under about 5 kW.
- Multi-split — several small rooms, one outdoor unit, one façade penetration. The usual answer for a professional practice or a small suite of offices; the trade-offs are in our guide to multi-split systems.
- Ceiling cassettes in a suspended ceiling — even distribution without wall space, which retail and offices value; the comparison with other formats is in our guide to choosing the indoor unit.
- Ducted units above the ceiling — invisible, quiet, and the right choice where a shopfitting scheme cannot tolerate visible equipment.
- Ceiling-suspended or high-wall industrial units — workshops, garages and volumes with no ceiling void.
- VRF systems — several tenancies or many zones with different loads, plus the ability to meter each tenant. This is where the project stops being a purchase and becomes a design.
Above 12 kW, the consumer rules stop
This is the single most useful thing for a small business to know. The familiar EU energy label with its A-to-G scale and its SEER figure applies to air conditioners with a rated capacity of 12 kW or less. Cross that line and the label does not exist. Depending on the product type, a larger system falls under the ecodesign rules for air heating and cooling products or, in some categories, under no seasonal-efficiency requirement at all — which means comparing two quotes on efficiency becomes something you have to demand rather than read off a sticker.
What to ask for in writing: the seasonal efficiency figure (SEER, or ESEER for chillers), the standard it was measured to, and the capacity at a realistic outdoor design temperature for your city rather than at the 35 °C rating point. Two systems quoted as identical in kW can differ by a third in running cost, and on commercial trading hours that difference compounds fast — the method for turning kW into a bill is in our guide to what air conditioning costs to run in Europe.
The F-gas duties nobody mentions at the quotation stage
A domestic split holds around a kilogram of refrigerant and creates no ongoing obligation for its owner. A commercial system can cross the threshold at which the operator — that is, the business, not the contractor — acquires legal duties under Regulation (EU) 2024/573. The trigger is not the size of the machine but the carbon-dioxide equivalent of its charge, which means the refrigerant choice changes the paperwork:
| Refrigerant | Charge reaching 5 t CO₂e — leak checks at least annually | Charge reaching 50 t CO₂e — at least six-monthly |
|---|---|---|
| R-410A (GWP 2 088) | about 2.4 kg | about 24 kg |
| R-32 (GWP 675) | about 7.4 kg | about 74 kg |
| R-454B (GWP around 466) | about 10.7 kg | about 107 kg |
Read that table against a real project. A five-indoor-unit R-32 system with a 12 kg charge sits at roughly 8 tonnes CO₂e: annual leak checks by certified personnel, and records for each piece of equipment kept for years. The same premises cooled by three independent small splits may stay under the threshold entirely. Hermetically sealed equipment labelled as such benefits from a higher threshold, and a permanent leak-detection system doubles the permitted interval between checks. Refrigerant handling remains restricted to certified technicians working for a certified undertaking in every case.
The practical instruction is short: ask the installer, before signing, what the total charge and CO₂ equivalent will be, who will hold the logbook, and what the annual leak-check cost is. It belongs in the comparison of quotes, alongside the questions in our guide to choosing an installer and reading the quote.
Ventilation, electricity and the employer’s duty
A split recirculates room air; it does not bring any in. Occupied commercial premises are subject to fresh-air requirements under national building and workplace rules, and in a café or a meeting room it is carbon dioxide and stuffiness — not temperature — that people actually complain about. Cooling and ventilation are two systems, and a project that buys only the first tends to get re-opened within a year.
Electrically, commercial equipment above a few kilowatts commonly wants a three-phase supply, a dedicated circuit and sometimes an increase in contracted power, which carries a standing charge of its own; the starting behaviour of larger compressors matters too. Our guide to the electrical side of an air conditioner covers what to check before the survey.
Finally, there is a reason to do this properly beyond comfort. Employers across Europe carry a general duty to protect staff from the effects of heat, and several member states have tightened those obligations after recent summers; the national picture is in our guide to workplace temperature rules across Europe. Costs vary by a factor of two between member states and scale with access difficulty, out-of-hours working and shopfitting constraints, so treat any figure you are told as indicative and compare like with like using our guide to installation costs in Europe.
Frequently asked questions
How much cooling does a small shop need?
As a starting sanity check, a glazed retail unit commonly lands in the region of 100–160 W of cooling per square metre, so a 60 m² shop points at roughly 6–10 kW. That is a range for deciding whether a quote is plausible, not a specification: the real figure depends on the shopfront area and orientation, the display lighting, the refrigerated cabinets and the footfall, all of which a proper load calculation captures and a rule of thumb cannot.
Can I use domestic units in a commercial space?
Technically often yes, commercially it needs care. Domestic ranges are designed around residential duty cycles, and manufacturers frequently reduce or exclude warranty cover when a domestic-range unit is installed in a commercial application — the exclusion is in the warranty terms rather than the brochure. Read those terms before choosing on price, particularly for premises trading twelve hours a day.
Who is legally responsible for the F-gas logbook, me or my contractor?
The operator of the equipment, which in normal circumstances means the business that controls the premises and the system. The contractor performs the checks and must be certified to do so, but the duty to have them performed and to keep the records sits with the operator. A maintenance contract is how that duty is discharged in practice, not how it is transferred.
Does an air curtain let me keep the door open legally?
That depends on the national or municipal rule, and in France the prohibition on cooling with doors open is not cured by an air curtain. Treat an air curtain as a way to reduce heat exchange where a door genuinely must stay open — a loading area, a peak trading hour — rather than as a compliance device.
Do I need permission to put units on a commercial building?
Usually two separate permissions: the planning or façade-alteration consent that applies to visible outdoor equipment in your municipality, and, if you rent, a licence to alter from the landlord. Heritage and conservation designations add a third layer and frequently dictate where the outdoor unit may sit. The permissions landscape is set out in our guide to permission to install air conditioning in Europe.
Sources
Read next
- Air conditioning and the energy performance certificate of your home in Europe
- The EU energy label for air conditioners, read properly
- The room under the roof: cooling a loft conversion in Europe
- Heat and health in Europe: how cool a home needs to be, and for whom
- Cooling a garden room or garden office in Europe