An ice making machine is pretty much a requirement for any pub, bar or restaurant in the UK these days. With the advent of drink manufactures advertising products served with large volumes of ice, this puts a requirement on the bar owner to have a ice making machine that can deliver that quantity.
How does an ice making machine make ice?
Most of the ice makers we supply work by spraying water
30Kg Ice Maker
up into cups which are refrigerated. This water hitting the cold cups gradually builds up as ice, when the ice reaches a certain size, a thermostat switches off the refrigeration cycle. This then brings in hot gas which melts the ice out of the cups and the drops it into the storage bin.
The cycle is then repeated and the machine will fill up the storage bin until it reaches a level when the bin thermostat switches the machine off. Once ice is taken out of the storage bin and the level drops below the bin thermostat, the machine will start making ice again.
There are many other methods used in ice production, but this spray cup system is reliable and is a similar method that Scotsman have used in there range of ice makers for many years.
What size of ice making machine do you need?
This will largely depend on the size of your bar, pub or club. Ice machines are available in a wide range of sizes to suit any size of business.
100Kg Ice Machine
There are some factors you will need to consider when choosing your next ice maker.
Space to site a machine, particularly in older bars, can be the main criteria of which ice maker you choose to buy. The basic issues that need to be remembered for the installation of an ice machine are a power supply, water supply and drainage, bear in mind that most machines are supplied with a gravity drain. Another important factor is how much ice is needed to keep the bar supplied with ice on a busy night.
Ice making machines come in a wide range of outputs.
Ice machine models are sold by ice produced by weight per day, so this will give you some idea what you should buy. But this is not the whole story, what you should also look at is the storage size of the bin. That is the amount of ice you have that is ready to use in the ice storage bin. So a 20kg machine will produce that amount of ice in 24 hours but will only store maybe 4 kg of ice.
Once the bin is full up, the machine will stop making ice until you use some of it. If you only have space for a small ice maker and you need more ice for busy nights, you will have to bag up the ice through the quiet days and store it in the freezer.
For more information about all the ice making machines we supply please click on the link below or at the side of the page.
