Friga-Bohn 🇫🇷

Friga-Bohn is the French name that Spanish technicians pronounced “friga-bon” and that appears, along with Frimetal, in the memory of air‑conditioning conversions of the 1970s. The brand, now part of the LFB group, manufactures air condensers, evaporators, air coolers, CO₂ gas coolers, monoblocks and split systems for commercial and industrial refrigeration, and has a catalogue and distributors in Spain (Refrigeración Zelsio, Suministros Climafrío, Climastock). Its surname Bohn refers to Bohn Aluminum & Brass of Detroit, whose aluminum coils were licensed in Europe in the post‑war period.

In the history of Spanish air conditioning its role was that of a supplier of remote condensers: when a Balearic installer imported Hitachi “water‑condensed” cabinets in the ’70s, a technician recounted in 2009, “some of them we had to convert to air‑condensation (remote condenser), brands Frimetal, Friga‑Bohn.” Those were the years when water condensation—cheap in design, expensive in consumption—began to be replaced by rooftop air units, and the heat‑exchanger brands, not the appliance brands, handled the transition.

For Frostalgia, Friga‑Bohn is the example of a European auxiliary brand that lived on rooftops and machine rooms without ever appearing in a magazine advertisement, and whose data plates, when found in an old hotel condenser, document a technical intervention from half a century ago.

The historical mention is that of the user “guiem mallorca” on elaireacondicionado.com (September 22, 2009), who writes “friga-bon” when citing the remote condenser brands used in the ’70s to convert water‑condensed Hitachi units. The identification with Friga‑Bohn (LFB group) and its current range comes from the official website frigabohn.com and from the catalogs of its Spanish distributors (Refrigeración Zelsio, Climastock). We have not found contemporary Spanish documentation (catalogs or advertisements) of the brand.

The value of the testimony lies in the context it provides: it describes the moment when 1970s hotel installations, designed with water‑cooled condensation, were converted to air‑cooled condensation by adding a remote condenser on the roof, and it names the two suppliers of those units, one Spanish (Frimetal) and one French (Friga‑Bohn). That an installer from Mallorca turned to a French brand of heat exchangers indicates that in the 1970s there was already an import network for European refrigeration components, parallel to that for complete American and Japanese units. The spelling “friga-bon” in the testimony is also a small document of how the name was pronounced in the workshops. As in the case of Frimetal, the only possible physical proof is a specification plate on an old condenser, and that is why we encourage readers to photograph any they find.

History machine-translated from Spanish. Can you improve it? Write to us.