Last Wednesday was the worst prep day I've had in 10 years

I had a catering order for 60 people and my walk-in decided to die overnight. Lost a whole case of salmon and two buckets of hollandaise base I made the day before. Spent the first 2 hours of my shift hauling spoiled product to the dumpster instead of firing up the grill. Had to call three suppliers before one could get me fresh fish by noon. Anyone else had a whole shift derailed before it even started?

3 comments

3 Comments

jake7475d ago

Have you checked your walk-in's condenser coils lately?

the_oliver5d ago

My buddy runs a small diner and he was having constant temp swings in his walk-in. Kept calling the repair guy out, paid like $400 in service calls over three months. Finally the tech just took a look at the coils and they were packed solid with this greasy dust, looked like a carpet. He spent 20 minutes with a sprayer and a brush and the thing ran perfect for the next year. Jake's right, it's almost always the simple stuff first.

taylor_patel5d ago

Twenty seven times out of thirty condenser coil issues I've seen this year were from people just ignoring them for months. @jake747 you're right to bring it up because it's one of those things that gets skipped until something breaks. It reminds me of how folks treat their car air filters too, they just wait until the engine struggles instead of doing the cheap easy maintenance. The build up of dust and grease cuts airflow way down and makes the compressor work twice as hard. I've seen a couple places lose thousands in product because they didn't want to spend 20 minutes spray cleaning the coils. It's the same pattern every time, people don't think about things they can't see running until they stop running.