Bar Maintenance Mastery: Preventive Equipment Care for Bar Owners

What's the real cost of waiting until your bar equipment breaks down during a busy Friday night?

Every bar owner knows the panic of unexpected equipment failures that can derail service and drain profits, but with proper preventative maintenance, you can avoid these costly disruptions.

In today’s episode:

• Learn essential daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance schedules for critical bar equipment
• Discover cost-effective ways to extend the life of your expensive bar assets
• Master the art of training staff to identify early warning signs of equipment issues

Listen now to protect your investment and ensure smooth operations during your busiest nights.

Learn More:
Email Chris
Schedule a Strategy Session
Bar Business Nation Facebook Group
The Bar Business Podcast Website
Chris' Book 'How to Make Top-Shelf Profits in the Bar Business'

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Transcript

Chris Schneider (00:01.108)
In today's episode, learn techniques to prevent expensive equipment failures before they happen. Create foolproof maintenance schedules that your staff will actually follow and discover how to save thousands on repair costs while extending equipment life.

Today we're diving into the critical world of preventative maintenance for your bar equipment. A topic that can save you thousands in repairs and prevent devastating service interruptions. I think all of us have been in the bar industry for any length of time. We've had a cooler go down mid shift. We've had a stove go down mid shift. We've had a lot of problems happen. But running a successful bar requires reliable equipment functioning at its peak performance. We cannot allow these things to happen.

on a regular basis and still be successful.

So rather than waiting until our equipment fails before addressing an issue where we end up with expensive emergency repairs, lost revenue, mad employees, a worse environment, we should have structured preventative maintenance programs that can drastically reduce unexpected breakdowns and extend the life over all of our equipment.

So let's talk about routine maintenance essentials. What are the things that you should be doing all the time?

Chris Schneider (01:23.598)
Well, the first thing you should be doing with all your equipment, and I would recommend doing this on a daily basis, both because it's good for your equipment, monitoring how well your equipment's working, but also because it's good for the health department. You should be monitoring the temperature inside every refrigeration unit and also inside all your hot units, your stove, your oven, checking the temperatures on that on a daily basis. You need to make sure your stuff works and that it's working properly.

You know, a lot of times with the refrigeration before it goes bad, before a refrigerator just stops working, we'll see it work less efficiently. Temperature. Every day you check your refrigerator and it's at thirty four degrees and you check it and it's at thirty six and the next day it's still thirty six and a few days later it's thirty seven. Okay, you have a problem. Not a bad problem now. We're not in the temperature danger zone. Nothing bad has happened, but now we can see that problem before we.

get our food in the temperature danger zone and we have to worry about that food being good.

You also when you're inspecting your temperature, the temperature of your refrigeration units, make sure on a probably a weekly basis, you're checking out your ice machines. Are they working properly? Are they thawing properly? Are they freezing properly? Is everything working properly within an ice machine? Now, if you're leasing an ice machine, you don't have to worry about this. But if you own your own ice machine, it's a pain, a complete pain if that goes out and you now have to go buy ice and replace it. So.

Don't put yourself in that position. Just check your ice machine on regular basis. Also with your refrigeration, you should be checking your gaskets and seals every week or month or so. Check all the seals on all the doors. Make sure those are tight. They're not falling apart. That you're getting good suction, a good seal when you shut the doors on your refrigeration and freezer units. If you don't have that, A, you're wasting electricity, B, you're

Chris Schneider (03:24.654)
potentially hurting your food safety.

Chris Schneider (03:32.404)
Also another thing with refrigeration units we should be doing on a regular basis is cleaning the condenser coils. Now I would recommend doing this once a month. You can get a condenser coil brush, little nylon brush, they're easy to get. Most hardware stores have them. There are different types. There are metal brushes, are poly brushes, there's all sorts of different brushes you can get to clean condenser coils. And some refrigeration

manufacturers actually have ones that they sell that are specific to that company. So you might want to see if you can get those for your exact coolers that you have or just get the generic ones. But every month you should be checking your condenser coils, brushing them out.

I like to use, you know, if I had a little thing of CO2, like you would hook up for soda or for a cake box, you can use that to blow it out.

But pretty much every month what I would do, I would blow out the condenser coils, I would take the brush and would brush it, and then I would take a shot vac and I'd vacuum up all the dust that I blew out and brushed out. And that would keep my refrigerators running colder, better, more efficient, lower energy cost. It doesn't take that much time to do.

Now, how do you get all this done? So we've talked. mean, most of this is refrigeration unit stuff, but some of the stuff needs to happen every day. Some needs to happen every week. You know, obviously clean and sanitizing your draft lines. We've talked about that. That fault is going to fall on preventative maintenance as well. Now that you probably don't need to do every week or so. You probably need to do it when your cakes blow. That's how you avoid pouring product out when you're cleaning your draft lines. But how do get your staff to actually do this? Well, the first thing you need to do.

Chris Schneider (05:20.012)
is the thing everybody hates, but you need to make checklists.

Because right with your cleaning checklist, you know, if you have a daily shift task, you can have weekly tasks, you can have monthly tasks. All those are different checklists. And you can put some of this stuff in line with that. So say every week or every other week, you pull out the vents from your hood and you clean your hood vents. Well, in the off weeks, could be check all the gaskets and seals on all the refrigeration.

So spread it out over time so that it's not falling too much on one shift. But create detailed maintenance checklist schedules of when this stuff happens so that you know your team is doing it the same way every month, every week, whatever that period of time is, it's appropriate for that piece of preventative maintenance. But you're making sure you're getting it done. And along those lines, when you have that checklist, when you have those schedules,

You need to have somebody assigned to actually do the work, right? It shouldn't just be, oh, in the kitchen I need someone to do this this week. No, who's doing it on what shift when the more you schedule this stuff, the user is told people accountable, the more likely it is to get done. You need to then document all your maintenance activities, write all that down. And part of reason we're documenting it is if something does happen, if the health department comes and says, oh, well, your refrigerator is reading at 42 degrees, you can go look, we just had it open.

Here's a log. We check it every day. It hasn't been running hot at all. Here's the data. So can help you there. And also, like I said, if you're looking at patterns in how refrigeration temperatures change over time, having that log can help you see those. And then you need to train your staff on how to do this work. If you're going to have your staff clean condenser coils and vacuum them, you need to teach them how to use the brush. You need to teach them how to take the grate off first to get to the condenser coil, how to brush it, how to vacuum it, all of that.

Chris Schneider (07:22.318)
But when you establish a proper maintenance schedule, you end up saving costs. It's all about saving costs, and you save those costs by extending the life of your equipment and having it run better.

Chris Schneider (07:39.128)
So to wrap this all up for today, I want you to remember there's three crucial elements for your equipment maintenance. Consistent daily checks, weekly checks, monthly checks, depending on what it is, will prevent major breakdowns or at least let you see them coming. Your staff being trained on how to maintain your equipment, take care of it and how to do this is your first line of defense against equipment failure. And always remember, proactive maintenance is going to save you a lot of money.

and time in the long run.