Last reviewed: September 2026 · Written by: Alex Craven · 01792 732702
“Fully Fitted” Isn’t Free: Taking Over a Unit With Someone Else’s Kitchen In It
“Fully fitted” on a commercial property listing means equipment is present — not that it works, is safe, or is even yours to keep. Three inheritances arrive with the keys: the kit, usually with no service history; the paperwork gap between what the listing implied and what legally transfers; and a deemed energy contract you are on automatically, at rates well above a negotiated deal.
- “Fully fitted” is listing shorthand, not a warranty — it describes what is in the room, not its condition or ownership.
- The deemed contract is automatic: Ofgem confirms moving in without arranging supply puts you on deemed rates, usually higher than negotiated ones.
- The 2026 gap is large: MoneySuperMarket’s June 2026 example puts deemed electricity around 43p/kWh against roughly 26p/kWh fixed — about £2,550 a year apart on 15,000 kWh.
- The rating plate is a money signal: an inherited R404A cabinet is a future bill, not a freebie.
- Not everything transfers: kit can belong to the landlord or a finance company. Get an itemised list, in writing.
The keys are in your hand. Behind you is someone else’s kitchen: a bank of stainless steel, a tall fridge humming in the corner, somebody’s cup still in the glasswasher rack. The particulars said fully fitted; on the walk-through it looked like a head start.
Sometimes it genuinely is. But “fully fitted” describes the room, not a promise about anything in it — that is simply how listings are written, and nobody is being dishonest by using it. The trouble starts when an operator reads it as a warranty. What actually arrives is three separate inheritances, each needing its own half hour before you build a menu around any of them.
Table of Contents
Inheritance one: the kit — the 30-minute walk-round
An inherited kitchen usually arrives with no service records, no manuals and no one to ask. The previous operator may have maintained everything meticulously, or the site may have wound down with maintenance the first thing to stop. The difference shows in details you can check in half an hour with a probe thermometer, a torch and a notebook. Do it before completion if you can, and certainly before the menu hardens around the kit being there. You are not looking for perfection — you are looking for evidence.
-
Door seals. Look for splits, hardening and mould, then shut a strip of paper in the door and pull — if it slides out easily, the seal is not sealing.
-
Actual temperatures. Do not trust the display — probe the cabinet. Chilled storage should hold food at 5°C or below, frozen at -18°C.
-
Noise and run pattern. Rattles, grinding, or a compressor that never cycles off point to low refrigerant, blocked airflow, or a dying unit.
-
Ice where it shouldn’t be. Ice on the evaporator, frost inside a chiller, or water pooling underneath mean defrost or seal problems ignored for a while.
-
Condensers and filters. A thick felt of dust and grease on the coil is a clue about how the whole kitchen was maintained.
-
Rating plates and service stickers. Photograph every plate — model, serial, refrigerant, year — and every engineer’s sticker for the triage below.
Anything that fails the walk-round is not automatically a skip — it goes on the list for a proper engineer’s inspection, exactly the conversation our servicing team has with new operators. But nothing that fails should be trusted with stock until someone qualified has looked at it.
Reading the rating plate: refrigerant as a money signal
The most useful sixty seconds of the walk-round is the rating plate, usually inside the cabinet or on the back panel. It tells you three things the listing never will: refrigerant, age, and the duty the unit was built for.
The refrigerant is the money signal. R290 or R600a — the modern hydrocarbon gases — means current-generation kit. R404A means an older design running a high-global-warming-potential gas the F-gas regime has been squeezing out for years: rising gas prices, fewer engineers willing to touch it, and a real question over whether a major repair will ever make sense. It may run for years yet — but treat it as borrowed time, not a free asset. Age matters too — refrigeration a decade old is near the end of its working life — and so does duty: a cabinet rated for a cool back room will struggle behind a cooking line in July. Our seals, servicing and F-gas guide covers what the regime means for maintenance.
Inheritance two: the paperwork — what actually transfers
“Fixtures and fittings included” sounds comprehensive, but it hides a legal distinction that matters in a kitchen. Fixtures are attached to the building — extraction canopies, walk-in cold rooms, plumbed-in ware washing — and generally pass with the property. Fittings are the loose equipment: tall fridges, prep counters, countertop kit. Whether those transfer depends on what is written down and who owned them in the first place.
Three ownership traps catch new operators. Some equipment may belong to the landlord, listed in the lease — usable, but not yours to sell. Some may be on finance or lease-purchase from a funder that still owns it, and can collect its asset from your kitchen if the previous agreement was never settled. And branded items — drinks fridge, coffee machine, ice cream freezer — are often on loan from the supplier whose logo they carry.
The fix is unglamorous. Before completion, ask for three things in writing: an itemised inventory of which equipment transfers, with serial numbers; confirmation that each item is owned outright and free of finance; and whatever service records and manuals exist. A missing paper trail is not a scandal — records genuinely get lost when sites change hands — but it means every unit gets treated as unserviced and priced accordingly. It is a negotiating point, not a reason to walk away.
Deliberately buying second-hand kit at auction is a different game with its own rules; inherited equipment is the narrower question — what you already have, who owns it, and what it will cost to trust.
Inheritance three: the deemed energy contract — the day-one trap
The third inheritance starts costing you the moment the meter turns in your name. There is no grace period — Ofgem’s business energy guidance is explicit that moving in without arranging supply automatically places you on a deemed contract with the incumbent supplier, at rates usually higher than negotiated ones.
How much higher moves with the market, but the current snapshot is not subtle. MoneySuperMarket’s guide to deemed and out-of-contract rates, updated June 2026, works an example at around 43p/kWh on deemed rates against roughly 26p/kWh on a competitive fixed deal, with out-of-contract electricity near 38p/kWh plus a £2.58 daily standing charge. On its example 15,000 kWh a year, the deemed contract comes out around £2,550 dearer — and a fitted kitchen, refrigeration running 24 hours alongside cooking, extraction and ware washing, can use that much electricity and more.
The trap is behavioural: in takeover chaos the energy contract feels like a week-three job, and every week it slips the site runs at the penalty rate. Business deemed rates are not price-capped.
The triage: keep, service first, or skip
Everything from the walk-round and the paperwork now feeds one decision per unit: keep, service first, or skip. The honest version has all three verdicts. Plenty of inherited kit is genuinely fine — a three-year-old hydrocarbon cabinet that probes cold, seals tight and runs quietly does not need replacing because somebody else chose it, and the money it saves belongs in your working capital, not in our till.
| Verdict | The unit looks like | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Keep | Probes at temperature, seals pass the paper test, modern refrigerant (R290/R600a), under ~7 years old, cycles quietly, owned outright. | Clean the condenser, log it on the maintenance schedule, keep using it — the head start the listing promised. |
| Service first | Sound but unproven: no service history, tired seals, dusty condenser, minor icing, or holding temperature with effort. | An engineer’s inspection before opening — seals, gas pressures, controls, condenser clean. Then it joins the keep list. |
| Skip | Cannot hold safe temperature, R404A with a fault, ten-plus years old and struggling, obsolete parts, wrong duty — or not actually yours. | Do not build the menu around it. Budget a replacement before it fails with a load of stock inside. |
Two rules keep the triage honest. First, “service first” must be a real category, not a polite keep — an unserviced inherited fridge holding your opening stock is a gamble, and what a fridge breakdown really costs in a busy service explains why. Second, skip does not mean replace everything at once: if the budget is tight, replace in order of risk to stock and service — the logic of the small kitchen equipment triage, applied to somebody else’s choices.
More skips than keeps is still information you have before opening, not during it. Fold the replacements into a proper plan alongside layout and menu — the commercial kitchen fit-out guide covers sequencing that spend. A takeover where a third of the kit is replaced deliberately usually ends up cheaper, and calmer, than one where everything was kept on faith and replaced in emergencies.
Want a second pair of eyes on inherited kit? Talk to us at the Swansea showroom on 01792 732702 or [email protected]. Anything new we supply carries a 2-year parts warranty — and the honest answer on a takeover is quite often “keep more of it than you feared”.
“Fully fitted” describes what is in the room, not its condition or ownership. A takeover brings three inheritances: the kit (a 30-minute walk-round, an engineer for anything unproven); the paperwork (an itemised written inventory of what transfers); and a deemed energy contract that Ofgem confirms applies automatically — around 43p/kWh against 26p/kWh fixed in MoneySuperMarket’s June 2026 example — so negotiate in week one. Then triage every unit honestly: keep, service first, or skip.
Frequently asked questions
Related posts and guides
