When someone on staff says they cleaned the ice machine, ask which cleaning they mean. Descaling uses an acid-based ice machine cleaner to dissolve mineral buildup on the evaporator plate, the water trough and the distribution tube. Sanitizing kills the slime and mold growing in the dark, wet parts of the machine.
A machine needs both.
The two products shouldn’t be mixed, so it’s done in two passes with a rinse in between. Use the cleaner and sanitizer your manufacturer lists for your model, because some general purpose cleaners will damage the plating on the evaporator.
Six months, or sooner
Most manufacturers call for a full cleaning and sanitizing at least every six months. Check the manual for your machine, since some ask for more, and treat that number as a minimum.
Plenty of machines need it sooner. One in a bakery or a brewery taproom pulls yeast out of the air and can slime up much faster, and one beside the dish area sits in warm, steamy air all shift. Hard water builds scale faster wherever the machine is. If you’re finding slime or scale well before the six-month mark, shorten the schedule. Bars and breweries often end up closer to every three months.
Filters are cheap and they slow scale down. A clogged one also starves the machine of water, so change it on the schedule printed on the housing.
Signs your machine is overdue
You’ll usually notice it in the ice first. The cubes come out cloudy or soft or frozen together in clumps, production drops off, and sometimes drinks pick up a musty taste. Shine a flashlight behind the water curtain and you may find pink or black slime, or a chalky white crust on the plate. An inspector who opens the bin will see the same thing you do.
Some machines shut themselves off with a fault once scale gets heavy enough to throw off the harvest cycle. People call that a breakdown, and sometimes a cleaning is all it needed.
Between cleanings
Having someone on staff run the machine’s clean cycle is fine as long as they follow the manual. Day to day, keep the scoop in a holder outside the bin, wipe down the bin door and the lip around it, and don’t let anyone chill bottles in the ice.
A full cleaning goes further. The removable parts come out and get scrubbed by hand, and while the machine is apart the tech checks the condenser and clears the drain. That’s part of our ice machine service, and it can go on a maintenance schedule so nobody has to remember the date. If you’ve already got slime, the post on ice machine slime gets into why it keeps coming back.
