Getting an ice bath to 10°C is easy. Getting it to 5°C and keeping it there is infinitely more difficult
To understand why, think of removing heat from water like emptying a ball pit.
When the water is warm, the pit is full.
It’s easy to scoop out armfuls of 'heat' balls.
But as the water gets colder, the pit empties.
The machine is no longer scooping; it's hunting for individual balls, one at a time.
This is the point where most chillers hit a wall.
A standard imported chiller taps out around 10°C because it wasn't designed to hunt for those last few units of heat under a real commercial load.
When people are constantly jumping in, dumping buckets of new balls back into the pit, the machine just spins its wheels.
This is why so many "5-degree capable" chillers can hit the target overnight, but climb to 11°C or 12°C the moment your facility gets busy.
They aren't broken.
They simply aren't built for the hard work of grabbing the last few balls from an almost-empty pit.
A purpose-built low-temperature chiller, however, is designed specifically for that hunt.
Its components are optimised to find and remove those last units of heat efficiently, even when your facility is at its busiest.
If you want to understand the engineering required to hold true single-digit temperatures, hit reply. We'll send the details over.