NYC Metro Area’s HVACR Blog

Isn’t it the most wonderful time of the year? When else is it perfectly acceptable (even encouraged!) to eat candy canes, wear ugly sweaters, and sit around watching animated holiday TV specials?

We’re offering today’s blog just in case you needed any additional justification for that last holiday activity. Did you know those holiday specials can be surprisingly educational? Here’s a case in point: if you happen to be in the food service business, Frosty the Snowman offers some important refrigeration lessons that can help you keep your commercial refrigeration equipment running reliably.

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What’s the worst thing you can imagine happening right before the grand opening of a new restaurant:

• An invasion of ants taking over your kitchen?
• A sink hole opening up right in front of your restaurant?
• A freak tornado hitting NYC in December and specifically your block?

Seriously, other than losing your chef to the competition, one of the worst things that can happen is having problems with your refrigeration equipment. After all, if your refrigeration installation goes badly, ALL your cold food storage equipment could be affected and fail to hold the correct temperature. And that could mean you can’t store all the product and ingredients that are being delivered, your staff can’t practice their prep techniques and recipes to get ready for the grand opening, and you can’t prepare any food that’s safe to consume. How are you going to open?

That’s exactly what happened to the owner of a New York City restaurant group when he hired to wrong people to do the refrigeration installation for a new restaurant.

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Have you been regularly cleaning and servicing your ice machine? If not, you’re putting your customers at risk for illness by ingesting bacteria in ice, and your putting your business in jeopardy as well.

In a 2013 study of ice cleanliness at British food service establishments, 6 out of 10 restaurants were found to be serving their customers bacteria in their ice. In 60 percent of those restaurants, researchers found higher levels of bacteria in the ice than in their toilet water. Experts attributed this finding to the likelihood that the toilets were regularly cleaned, whereas the ice machines were not.

This is not an isolated incident. There’s another 2011 study of Las Vegas food establishments that uncovered alarming results about bacteria in ice as well, including the presence of heterotrophic bacteria that exceeded EPA limits, with more than 72% testing positive for “presumptive coliform bacteria presence.”

Related article: Your Ice Machine: the Most Dangerous Item in Your Restaurant.

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So many aspects of our lives depend on refrigeration: it’s vital for food, medicine and the manufacture of many things we use every day.

Refrigeration is even more vital if you operate any type of food service business: your livelihood depends on its reliable operation.

Restaurants, bakeries, convenience stores, hotels, catering facilities, cold storage facilities, food products manufacturing, supermarkets, and even medical facilities all require a dependable industrial refrigeration system. When a piece of refrigeration equipment goes down, the clock starts ticking, and if the problem is not solved in a matter of hours, you’re going to be throwing out a great deal of valuable product.

Refrigeration downtime is a complicated problem, but there is one simple way to prevent it: regular maintenance of your industrial refrigeration system.

In your home, you’re probably accustomed to doing routine maintenance to keep things working as they should, from servicing your heating and air conditioning system to weeding your garden. Yet we don’t think about maintaining our home refrigerators and freezers beyond cleaning. An industrial refrigeration system is different. Not only because it gets more usage and endures more wear-and-tear, but because there is a lot more at stake when it fails.

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