Cold Storage Cost Calculator

About 5x for the same volume, hours, and electricity rate: 2.0 kWh per cubic foot per year for frozen against 0.39 for climate-controlled. Most of that gap is the jump out of climate control into active refrigeration -- the step from a 34-40°F cooler up to frozen is much smaller, roughly 30%, because a freezer's compressors work harder per unit of heat moved but the box is also insulated harder and opened less.

Only if the space genuinely powers down refrigeration for part of the day, which is unusual for active cold storage -- most frozen and cooler spaces run continuously to hold temperature, since letting product warm up and re-cool costs more in temperature-abuse risk than this cost model reflects. The published benchmarks behind the zone intensities assume continuous operation, so entering fewer hours prorates them; for a climate-controlled space with lighter-duty cycling, that proration is more realistic.

Because cubic footage alone cannot answer that. A walk-in's actual heat load is set mainly by its insulation R-value, the ambient temperature outside it, how often the door opens, and how warm the product arrives -- two boxes of identical volume can differ several-fold. A cost benchmark averaged across many facilities is a fair way to estimate a utility bill and a badly misleading way to size a compressor, so this calculator reports the first and leaves the second to a manufacturer load calculation.

Because cost here is exactly proportional to volume, a per-cubic-foot figure is a constant that carries no information about your facility's size -- and at two-decimal currency precision it collapses to a few cents, with climate-controlled space rounding to $0.00. Per 1,000 cubic feet the same number has real resolution and does what it is for: comparing zones and operating schedules against each other, and against your own utility bill divided by your own cubic footage.