True Appliance Repair in Philadelphia

Based in O'Fallon, Missouri, and still family-controlled, True Manufacturing builds foodservice refrigeration such as reach-ins, prep tables and glass-door merchandisers. Under the True Residential name it offers homes under-counter, column and wine storage units made to the same standard. The Trulaske family founded True Manufacturing and continues to run the company today. Restaurants and convenience stores everywhere rely on its glass-door merchandisers.

A handful of design choices drive most of the repair work: forced-air reach-in refrigeration, GDM glass-door merchandisers, hydrocarbon (R290) refrigeration on current models, and True Residential under-counter and column units. Since True equipment is designed to run nonstop, failures usually come from a dirty condenser, a worn gasket or a dead fan rather than from the sealed system.

True reach-ins and merchandisers in Philadelphia restaurants and corner stores run around the clock, and muggy summer weeks and storm outages are when dirty condensers and stressed controls finally fail. Heat waves are when marginal parts on a True give out, because a start relay or fan motor that coped in May is pushed past its limit by a kitchen sitting in the 90s.

On narrow one-way blocks with permit parking, a technician may be carrying tools from down the street, so clearing a path to the True before the visit helps everyone. We work on True all over the city, from Eastwick to Roxborough.

The bulk of our True work comes down to door gaskets, condenser and evaporator fan motors, defrost timers and heaters on freezers, temperature controls, or door hinges and closers.

When True refrigerators fail, we tend to find condenser fan motor, evaporator fan, temperature control, and door gasket. Freezers from True usually arrive with defrost heater or timer, evaporator fan, door frame heater, and worn gasket. Among True wine coolers, the common faults are fan motor, temperature control, door gasket, and dirty condenser.

Replacing a board or a sealed-system part on a hunch is the costly mistake on True equipment, so we load-test the circuit and clear the inexpensive causes first.

Commercial distribution keeps True parts easy to find, and a lot of the common ones fit several models. Most True breakdowns we see trace back to coil cleaning, gasket condition or water treatment that slipped behind schedule.

True cabinets last for years and parts are easy to get, so the equipment is almost always worth repairing. You see the price in writing before work begins, and the repair is backed for 90 days on parts and 30 on labor.

In a busy kitchen, clean the condenser coil monthly and inspect the door gaskets at every cleaning. On heat-wave days in a kitchen with no AC, avoid running the oven for hours right next to the refrigerator if you can. Pulling a unit out of a tight alcove once a year to clean behind it prevents a lot of airflow and hose problems.

Same-day visits are possible when the schedule allows, and either way the estimate is in writing before work starts.