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Howdy, I'm Lester with Ice and Refrigeration Systems. In today's video series, were going to talk about ice machine cleaning an ice machine, the importance of cleaning an ice machine. You're going to see the basics of cleaning an ice machine, the do's and dont's. And you'll see what happens if you DON'T clean an ice machine.

On your ice machine, there's an on/off button. There's a make ice/ or clean button, just flip this up to clean. Take the lid off. What cleaning does, clean just shuts the compressor off. So through the entire water distribution system of the ice machine, it just continues to circulate all the water. It circulates it through all the parts. What you do is, You take the ice machine cleaner fluid, it will say ice machine cleaning fluid. This is a caustic. It's very, very corrosive. We're going to take about 23 ounces of this and we're going to pour it into the water distribution trough up here. And we're going to let it circulate around for 25 minutes. Do you have the timer on this? We're going to let it circulate around 25 minutes. You have the timer? We're going to let that circulate around the water distribution system. Any calcium, any mineral deposits, any scale, that's been here in the evaporator or water distribution system, that caustic is doing to dissolve it, and then when we triple flush the machine, it will just flush it on out. You say "2025 minutes, I really want to clean my machine. Let me run it for 3 hours." Don't do that. It'll eat the nickel plating off the evaporator, and then your ice machine will be toast. It will be worthless, and you'll just be hauling it out to the trash. 20 25 minutes DO NOT go any longer than that. It's very important.

It's a rubber diaphragm and it starts rusting out the metal and it leaks real bad in the back. It'll leak. Since it's on the back of the machine, it leaks and it rusts out. This is the calcium growing up on the condenser. It's eating and corroded the condenser away. This machine is 100% no good. If this machine had been cleaned on a regular basis and been taken care of, the owner probably would have gotten another 5 or 6 years out of it possibly. There's no guarantee. But here's what you can guarantee he didn't clean it! It died well before it could have.

How an ice machine works is the refrigerant runs through the ice plate and removes heat off the water so that it can start producing ice. The refrigerant picks up that carries it through the coils in here, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, all the way down. There's a fan back here that pushes air across here. That air being pushed down is what cools the refrigerant down so it can come back around and remove more heat from the water so that it can make ice. If these fins are clogged up with dirt, the refrigerant's not being cooled very effectively. Then it can't come back around and remove more heat from the water so it can make more ice.

Your ice production, if this is clogged, can be severely affected. I've seen these where it looks like it has a coat of dirt on the back of it. You could literally peel it off. There was no way that air could get back through there. It was shutting down the ice machine on high air pressure.

The other thing you can do when you clean your ice machine is, you need to go up underneath with some bleach, a bleach solution. You need to wipe up. This is underneath the bottom side of your ice machine, up under here is like black mold heaven. It can get extremely nasty under there. You want to take a bleach solution and a rag and wipe it down, kill any mold spores that might be there. Wipe off any black mold. That's typically what you find up under there. This is a good time to sanitize your ice bin. Take the ice bin out, take a bleach solution a cup to a gallon of water. Wipe it down. This is a wet environment. And fungal spores really thrive in this environment. It's a health issue. You don't want to make customers sick. You don't want to make yourself sick. It's a health issue.

When you get done with it, just flip it back into ice making mode, let it introduce some new water, get it to dump. Some will have a flush button.If you've got any questions please give us a call at 8178883056 or visit us on the Web at www.letsmakeice.com.
   • Commercial Ice Machine: How To Clean One