Marinated meat gives off more moisture than you’d think. Put trays of it in a walk-in whose door opens every couple of minutes during prep, and that water, plus the humid air coming in from the kitchen, ends up as frost on the evaporator coil. Centreville has a lot of Korean and other international restaurants and grocers handling exactly that kind of product, so when one of their boxes runs warm, ice on the coil is the first thing we’d look for.
Ice on the evaporator coil
The coil is supposed to clear itself. A defrost cycle runs a few times a day to melt the frost off, then the system goes back to cooling. If a defrost heater, the timer or the termination switch quits, the frost never fully melts and each cycle leaves a little more behind until air can’t get through. Stand in the doorway and look up at the unit. Solid white where you’d normally see metal fins means it’s iced.
Don’t go at it with a knife or a screwdriver. One slip through a tube and you’ll have a refrigerant leak on top of the ice. Shut the door and call. (Our write-up on freezers icing up is mostly about freezers, but coolers ice up for the same reasons.)
Prep tables during a long dinner
The cabinet under a prep table is basically a small reach-in. The pans on top are harder to keep cold because they rely on air blowing across them, and with the lid up all night and every pan full, the rail can run several degrees warmer than the cabinet below. Some of that is just how the unit gets used. A weak fan, a dirty condenser or a split lid gasket makes it worse, and a tech can usually tell which one fairly quickly. More on the prep table repair page.
We cover both Centreville ZIP codes, 20120 and 20121. If you’re over toward Chantilly or Manassas, it’s the same phone number.
