Several weeks ago, our commercial ice maker stopped making ice.
Our ice maker is one of those things that we forget how much we use it until it quits-it’s an important part of our gear and we regularly use a hundred pounds of ice at the start of every week we are remote to help keep our food and coolers cold for the work week.
Being out in the sticks means we can’t just go buy ice down on the corner, and it’s not easy to get a repair tech out here either.
Fortunately-or unfortunately-I have some experience with ice machines, so late one evening when we discover we are out of ice, I dive into the troubleshooting process.
It doesn’t take me long to figure out that none of the water is staying in the reservoir to be pumped over the cold plate, which tells me there is something wrong with the valve/solenoid that regulates that-so I pull the valve.
The problem was immediately obvious when I opened the valve up.
All that white stuff?
Yeah, that’s hard water deposits.
And I’ve got only myself to blame because I know damn well that commercial ice makers need a pretty regular de-scaling process as regular maintenance and I have totally failed to descale ours. For several years. 😬
A good cleaning of the valve fortunately, restored it to perfectly working order.
But, unfortunately, there were other items within the ice machine that needed descaling and required me to continue troubleshooting and tear the ice machine apart as needed to remove all the hard water buildup.
After several hours of cleaning the insides of the ice machine, it was time to start timing it to make sure it was making ice on a regular basis, and adjusting the water levels to bring the ice bridge to within specification.
After babysitting the icemaker till around 8 o’clock at night, I was finally satisfied that it was up and functioning properly. Not like I had anything else to do lol.🤷♂️
Deferred maintenance is always a bitch!