Our health department declared that my cheese isn’t staying cold enough in my salad bar… so now we have to throw it away every 4 hours and put new product out. It’s a drop in well that I have set to 28 degrees and use metal pans to hold everything. Anyone have any experience with this situation? How can we keep these things colder? We need a 2 degree drop to satisfy them. (The items aren’t 28 degrees, the metal cold well is and the pans suspend into the well.)
Metal lids during off hours?
Can you post a picture and a make/model?
Agree on the lids. Keep lids down whenever you are not making pizza.
Try lowering the temperatures setting as low as you can without freezing the items in the understock.
Make sure every compartment in your make line is filled with something. No empty spots.
Vacuum or blow out your compressor. It may be working too hard and can’t keep up.
Check your refrigerant. Over time, these units develop small holes in the lines, oftentimes invisible. If your refrigerant is low, this is an indicator of failing lines.
Just refilling the refrigerant may be enough to get you back to standards. While the technician is there, he can test your lines and let you know if you have holes in your compressor coil (which is repairable) or throughout the unit (which is not).
If the holes are throughout the unit, you should be able to regularly refill your refrigerant, but you will face diminishing returns each time, usually by a factor of half. For example, you might get six months out of the first refill, three from the next, 6 weeks from the next, until your unit is just a brick. This gives you sometime to shop for a new unit, but is expensive. So, my advice is that if your refill last six months or less, start shopping for a new unit immediately.
Insulated inserts with lids. Have back up ready. Over regulated?